In February 2010, CROZ has achieved the IBM Excellence Award in the category of highest revenue growth in Croatia for 2009. This is another confirmation of CROZ’s status as an IBM Premier Business Partner.

January 29, 2010 - CROZ has renewed its ISO 9001 certificate that was, at the beginning of 2008, granted to it by the Croatian office of the Swiss certification company SGS Adriatica d.o.o. In 2008, SGS has executed certification assessment of the established quality system in CROZ for the field of IT Professional Training and has confirmed that the quality management system is in conformity with the requirements. In 2009, CROZ has reaffirmed its certificate, and has extended it to its entire business operation which, apart from education, also includes Enterprise Information Systems Integration and Development, and Consulting. This year has renewed ISO 9001 certificate for all the mentioned fields.

By constant renewal of this certificate, we have proven once again that we systematically accomplish agreed service requirements in accordance with our policy and organizational goals.

IBM has recently started a new Software Value Plus initiative that requires considerable, rigorous conditions in order to attain partnership status in software portfolio. It is necessary to prove a competence for each field, and CROZ is certified in nine out of eleven groups. Thereby CROZ has proven its high quality competence in the field of IBM software technology and became one of the rare European partners that has achieved such high certification status.

CROZ has re-certified as an IBM software partner for the following IBM Reseller Authorization Groups: IBM Information Management Data Management, Lotus Portal, Tivoli Automation, Tivoli Enterprise Asset Management, Tivoli Security and Compliance Management, Tivoli Storage Management, WebSphere Business Process Management, WebSphere Core and Rational software.

IBM envisaged this initiative with the aim of spreading a network of skilled and competent Business Partners that promote IBM technologies and provides quality support in the fields of implementation, consultation and education while giving customers real solutions, lowering business risk, and enabling faster profit gain. CROZ has proven itself as a partner that by its smart solutions adds value which usage of IBM products brings to customers.

Over the years, CROZ has gained significant experience and knowledge, and by using IBM technologies successfully completed numerous difficult and demanding projects. CROZ has asserted itself as a reliable partner that by its expertise and dedication responds to customers’ requirements by developing quality solutions which contribute to achieving set business goals.

More information about Software Value Plus initiative on www.ibm.com/partnerworld/softwarevalueplus.

CROZ has added to its palette another partnership - VMware Professional partnership. We have achieved partnership status with VMware at the end of last year and therewith entered into a sphere of suppliers for virtual solutions based on x86 and x64 processor platforms. With this partnership, we have expanded our offer of products and services, and we have provided to our customers the opportunity of virtualization on distributed platform with assistance of VMware business solutions.

CROZ has now become a IBM Software ValueNet Business Partner for Cognos. As a Value-Added Reseller, CROZ meets the prerequisites for selling Cognos software according to the conditions of IBM Controlled Distribution. Cognos, recently acquired by IBM, is a recognized leader and service provider for high-quality Business Intelligence and Performance Management products and solutions. This partnership is another step for CROZ to provide quality assistance and support to its customers in the future.

You wish to attend specialist courses concerning: Java, JSP, Build Release Management, Spring, RUP, Use Cases, Object Analysis and Design, WebSphere Business Modeler, Business Modeling...?

Check out the calendar dates for the first quarter of 2010 and register at learn@croz.net.

See you there!

Zagreb, October 22, 2009 – Company CROZ was placed, a second year in a row, on Deloitte’s list of 50 fastest growing technological companies in Central Europe, holding a 17th place with achieved growth of 691 percent, as best placed Croatian company.

This recognition is another indicator of CROZ’s stability and continuity of business activity quality, especially if we take into account an economic crisis and considerable pessimistic evnir9onment for business activity in general. Last year, CROZ has taken a high third place on the same competition, and 21st place on Deloitte’s list of 500 technological companies with fastest growth in the EMEA region, which includes Europe, Middle East and Africa thanks to achieved five-year growth of 4391 percent.

Consulting & Audit Company Deloitte, already ten years in a row, organizes "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition, which sets out a ranking order of the fastest growing technological companies in Central Europe. The rank list is composed on the basis of continuous revenue growth in the last five years, and what’s specific about it is the fact that the companies voluntarily sign up for participation in the competition.

More information about "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition on:

http://www.deloitte.com/view/hr_HR/hr/presscentar/priopenjazajavnost/press-release/aed53adac7b74210VgnVCM100000ba42f00aRCRD.htm

In Rovinj on Red Island from 4 to 6 October, the second annual PPM CROZ 2009 conference was held. This conference, dedicated to Project Portfolio Management, was organized by CROZ with support of PMI Croatia.

Interesting themes concerning projects, portfolios, plans and resources, were covered by presenters from our domestic project offices from leading financial institutions RBA, PBZ, HYPO and FINA.

The presentation from Vladimir Vuk, Managing Consultant Organizational Change and Strategy at IBM Global Services and the star of CROZ PPM conferences, opened the official part of the conference. Vladimir presented a Better Change Method - a method that assists in transformation of organizations, by providing answers to questions on how to prepare organizations and their people to changes that projects bring, and what organizational culture is and if it can be changed at all.

As usual, of special interest were round tables with themes ‘’Initiative Management’’ and ‘’People – the Most Valuable ‘’Asset“. An additional attraction of the round tables was special guest Stjepan Car, Chairman of the Board, KONČAR-Electrical Industries Inc., that with his unique way of specifying problems and their solutions delighted all conference participants.

The first evening Borna Šercar and Tomislav Vasilj, who jointly perform under the name of Amarosi and who create music in a truly interesting way, ensured the participant’s relaxation with sounds of pleasant music. The second evening was marked by somewhat harder musical expression by rock bank Cranck with whom conference participants partied throughout the night.

All in all, another CROZ conference has shown, under the light of reflection, and also after the lights were off, that expertise, professionalism and human relaxation dosed in a proper manner, are key to success of every project, and that people (light motive of the conference) are really the most valuable ‘’asset“.

CROZ, as the first IT company in Croatia, has achieved three very valuable certifications in the field of asset management.

By gaining IBM Tivoli Deployment Accreditation AA-Level for IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT and IBM Tivoli Maximo Asset Manager products, and A-level for Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager, CROZ has confirmed its focus in achieving highest standards in technical certification and implementation of IBM Tivoli tools and solutions.

The topic of the new FYI, a magazine in which we present projects, interesting speakers and technologies, is Project Portfolio Management. PPM is concerned with the internal question how to estimate which initiatives are worth turning into projects and how to optimize costs, in order for the right things to be done at the right time.

Project Portfolio Management and other related topics constitute a framework of our 2nd PPM Conference which will be held in Rovinj, on 4-6 October.

The seventh issue of FYI brings you an interview with Vladimir Vuk, Managing Consultant for Organizational Change and Strategy at IBM Global Services and the star of CROZ PPM Conferences, who will present the Better Change method – a method that assists in systematic and successful management of transformational changes of organizations.

The column Technologies and trends presents Rational Focal Point for Project Managers and IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules v 7.0. A series of articles about mainframe computers are also continued.

Project stories from the MoD and Dukat talk about interesting IT solutions.

The new FYI can also be found on our web site.

We are very proud of Knjigalica – online exchange market for second-hand school textbooks, and especially, we are proud of the Facebook version. We wanted to assist in school textbooks exchange, and in few simple steps provide quality search for necessary textbooks. Using Knjigalica is totally free, and does not require user’s registration and login. This year, because of the economic crisis, free textbooks for pupils of elementary and secondary school have been abolished. Consequently, many parents will be challenged with financing their children’s school textbooks. The solution is CROZ’s Knjigalica.

Pupils and their parents may advertize their old textbooks and search through already published advertisements. Knjigalica does not intermediate in negotiation between parties, but recommends donation and exchange of textbooks without charge. Knjigalica is maximally simple for use; all textbooks approved by Ministry are already entered in the base and it is enough to enter 2-3 letters in order for the system to recognize them. Knjigalica has also a flexible search engine that enables fast and simple advertisement browsing. For members of a new generation, there is also Facebook version of the application.

Register for the conference: PPM CROZ 2009

You can probably remember that we have organized our first conference on the subject of Project & Portfolio Management two years ago. Last year was reserved for Quality in Enterprise Development (QED) conference and now in 2009 we are going back to the themes concerning projects, portfolios, plans and resources although this time with fresh experiences and different speakers who will primarily be talking about how to ably successfully balance management of several different concurrent projects.

In the afternoon of the conference opening day, October 4, we will be presenting an unusual music project realized by collaboration between Ante Gele and Borna Šercar who jointly perform under the name of Amarosi, and who will undoubtedly create a truly interesting musical expression.

On the second day, in a series of introductory presentations, we will among others welcome Renata Glojnarić, executive director of Zagreb Soloists and Samobor Autumn Music Festival. Renata will share with us her experiences in organizing big cultural events consisting of several connected projects and will explain how to let creativity loose without jeopardizing set financial and time frames.

Central part of the conference is reserved for presentations which we are sure many of you are awaiting with great anticipation. Our old acquaintance, Vladimir Vuk, is coming to us with a brand new but notably current subject – How to prepare one’s organization and people in it for the changes projects bring? What really is organizational culture and can it even be changed in the first place? These are the questions to which Vladimir will try to answer, and since this same speaker sparked a lot of interest two years ago with his presentation about project portfolio management we have no doubt whatsoever how our guest from Amsterdam will be the star of the conference once again.

When it comes to our domestic project offices, we again have guests from the leading financial institutions RBA, PBZ, HYPO and FINA.

The conference is supported by the PMI branch, so we will also be hearing presentations by their experts coming from the Croatia branch. All PMI members will receive admission fee discount.

More information about the conference.

See you in Rovinj!

P.S. Don’t forget to use the advantages of an early registration (until August 20, 2009)!

There is some good news from IBM coming in this time of crisis - WebSphere Application Server v7 is from now on free for development. In addition to already free version of WebSphere Application Server that comes with Rational Software Architect and is used for internal application activation, it is now possible to use the full version of WAS for functionality and performance testing, as well as integration testing of developed applications, at absolutely no charge.

See more details on IBM web pages

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ws/wasdevelopers/index.html

During the next couple of months, CROZ will take part in the Rational’s family new tool beta program. Focal Point for Project Management is a project management solution which, as most of Rational’s new tools are theses days, is Jazz platform based. The idea behind the tool is to enable agile approach of software development project management and in time replace Rational Portfolio Manager, the tool currently in use. This beta program will enable CROZ to gain earlier insight into the features of the tool, allowing us to have a say in the look and functionalities of the final product which is set to see the light of day in the last quarter of the year.

SOA Competency Centre is a title given by IBM to its prominent business partners who have dedicated themselves to implementation of SOA solutions using IBM technologies. With strong commitment, professional expertise and successful projects CROZ managed to prove itself as a reliable partner capable of answering all of the technological challenges imposed by the dynamics of modern business.

So, what does SOA Competency Centre mean for our customers? Well, first and foremost, it is a guarantee of quality for the solutions delivered, at the same time serving as a staunch supporter of our customers who have recognized the necessity for improvement of their own IT system, by providing services of education and consulting concerning the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) field.

SOA Competency Center@CROZ is the only such centre in the region.

SOA CC@CROZ presentation

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CROZ became the exclusive Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS®) partner for Croatia, company which is the leading solution provider for print management on the international market. Their several times awarded solution for critical print business process management has over 5000 installations worldwide.

By the way, LRS has been providing services of centralized print management for more than 25 years now, to customers who need print management solutions of great features, simple install and maintenance, solutions which influence open standards and protect investments in current infrastructure as well as security interfaces and transfer options including document encryption and compression.

If you happen to be a user of distributed environment, mainframe computer, SAP system or any other enterprise system, then this is the print solution for you.

CROZ d.o.o. and a renowned American-Austrian company Altova sealed a distribution agreement for Altova tools in Croatia, making them available for you to acquire directly from us.

Altova is most famous for its top quality tool XMLSpy, indispensable when working with XML, SOAP and similar technologies, but Altova offering of quality software does not stop there for it also includes: StyleVision, DiffDog and SchemaAgent which considerably facilitate production of XSLT styles, XSL:FO transformation files as well as file management concerning projects intensely using any form of XML.

Other Altova fraction deals with data management and modelling in the broadest possible sense. In the preceding role here we have MapForce, a tool for data mapping between different sources and formats, such as XML, relational databases, EDI, Excel, Web services and so forth. UModel is an UML language modelling tool which supports direct code generation from a diagram, while DatabaseSpy serves as a central place for managing relational databases.

See more details on http://www.altova.com

Ever since recently, CROZ can commend itself with yet another interesting partnership. More specifically, just a few days ago CROZ became TIBCO’s partner for Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia. TIBCO is a worldwide leading company, firmly anchored in the Gartner’s magic quadrant relating to more than one area (SOA Governance, Master Data Management, B2B, ...), and is particularly prominent in the telecommunications sector, retail and banking.

This partnership anchors CROZ’s position of a regional leader in the field of SOA architecture and implementation.

Learn more about TIBCO on www.tibco.com

Along with the sun and warmer days, new and more cheerful issue of FYI comes to you too. In line with cover’s brighter tone, we bring you a couple of sea stories from CROZ conferences and an Estonia itinerary as well.

Current issue’s topic deals with Complex Event Processing – a paradigm which enables detection of elementary event samples and complex event creation in real-time.

Further, what we would like to extract from the table of contents is the interview with Ms Dunja Jurica, chairwoman of APIS IT board, where you can find out more about exciting projects such as OIB (Personal Identification Number) and projects related to the EU accession.

FYI’s sixth issue, as is customary, introduces new technologies and trends. This time we bring you IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and IBM SOMA, as well as the first of the series of articles about mainframe computers.

You can also read about interesting IT solutions in our project stories from Volksbank, Zagreb Land-Registry and Večernji list.

Your copy of our new FYI is also accessible on our website.

On 9-10 March, Adriatic Conference of Serious Computer Users was held in Dubrovnik. CROZ served as the conference host in collaboration with companies Alcad, Slovenska Bistrica; SBS, Beograd; SRC.SI and S&T Slovenija, Ljubljana.

The conference gathered mainframe users from Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia and was oriented on real user experiences concerning more recent projects (SOA, Java, WebSphere, Linux, SAP, Oracle….) on the mainframe platform as well as on the position of the mainframe in a modern IT system.

Series of interesting presentations on the subject of real, living projects on the mainframe platform owned by regional leader companies (APIS-IT, FINA, Impol, Naftna industrija Srbije, Železnica Srbije) have proven how mainframe computers today the same as the last forty-five years successfully perform even the most demanding IT tasks.

Adriatic conference was an excellent opportunity to exchange user experiences and to talk about the problems users deal with in their daily work. Speaking of problems, one in particular - Making work on mainframe inviting for the “Facebook” generation – was in fact the theme of the roundtable, held among the representatives of APIS-IT and HZMO, Croatia; ZPIZ, Slovenia and NSZ, Serbia, who talked about their own experiences concerning employment and education of young mainframe experts.

This being the first regional conference of serious computer users so far, it should serve as an incentive to grow the idea of regional cooperation, experience exchange and mainframe user collaboration.

You own electronic documents or information on secrecy of which Your reputation, workplace or the future of Your company is depending?

Are You in finance, sales, marketing or management and Your portable computer is loaded with confidential agreements, tables with financial data while the information You store on network resources or send over the Internet is extremely sensitive?

Confidential data you keep on Your potable computers, mobile phones, USB disks or similar devices, and the data you send via the Internet or intranet are exposed to a variety of threats.

Get to know what the threats are and lean in the easy way how You, Yourself, can protect Your data and therewith your company and your job as well.

Course duration: 1 day

Date: April 2, 2009

Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO for WebSphere, outlines its Top 10 WebSphere trends and directions for 2009.

Speaking of our market, probably the most interesting ones are Business Rules (ILOG!), DataPower-lution and Extreme Scale.

Top 10 trends include:

1. Business Mash-ups
2. Business Rules
3. Middleware-as-a-Service
4. Rainmaker
5. Extreme Scale
6. WAS.NEXT
7. Restful - Agile
8. DataPower-lution
9. POWERful Middleware
10. Industry-savvy Middleware

See more details on Jerry’s blog and InfoQ pages.

CROZ has further expanded its competency spectrum in the IBM technology field, gaining the Tier1 partnership for System P Server series.

System P Server series is intended for more demanding users and applications, having characteristics such as top performance, high availability, exceptional efficiency when it comes to energy consumption and excellent virtualization features based on PowerVM virtualization technology.

Gaining the competence of System P, CROZ has, alongside its already well tuned team of experienced and certified experts in the filed of Power, AIX and Linux technologies, significantly empowered its abilities in providing enterprise solutions in the system and application integration field.

January 29th 2009 CROZ has renewed and expanded its range of ISO 9001 certificates, initially granted at the beginning of 2008 by the Croatian office of the Swiss certification company SGS Adriatica d.o.o. Last year, SGS performed a certification assessment of CROZ’s instituted quality system in the filed of IT Professional Training and confirmed the management system to be in accordance with the Standard requirements. This year, CROZ has reaffirmed its last year’s certificate, extending it to its entire business operation which apart from education also includes Enterprise Information Systems Integration and Development, and Consulting.

With this certificate we have strengthen our competitiveness in the present and the targeted markets alike, proving yet again our ability to systematically meet the agreed requirements for services in accordance with the scope of organization’s policy and goals.

You whish to attend specialist courses concerning: Java, JSP, Build Release Management, Spring, RUP, Use Cases, Object Analysis and Design, WebSphere Business Modeler, Business Modeling...?

Check out the calendar dates for the first half of 2009 and register at learn@croz.net.

See you there!

On 9-10 March, Adriatic Conference of Serious Computer Users will be held in Dubrovnik. Behind the phrase “Serious computer” you will naturally find IBM mainframe computers which today the same as the last forty-five years successfully perform even the most demanding IT tasks and offer the unbeatable combination of reliability, performance and technical abilities.

This is a user-oriented conference, therefore the focus of the conference are the users; actual user experiences (good and bad), so rest assured no technological novelties or announcements of new hardware and software versions are in store.

Conference will be dealing with more recent projects (SOA, Java, WebSphere, Linux, SAP, Oracle….) using the mainframe platform, presented personally by the users and will also be discussing the current position of the mainframe in the modern IT system. The conference is an excellent opportunity for user experiences exchange and, consequently, gives you a chance to talk about the problems users deal with in their daily work. Speaking of problems, one in particular (Make working on mainframe inviting for the “Facebook” generation) is the theme of the roundtable which will be held on the second day of the conference.

CROZ, a Zagreb-based company, will be hosting the conference in collaboration with Alcad, Slovenska Bistrica; SBS, Beograd; SRC.SI and S&T Slovenia, Ljubljana. The conference gathers mainframe users from Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia.

Registrations for the conference are officially open, so hurry and don’t miss early spring in Dubrovnik!

IBM has reinforced its position in the field of Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Its recent acquisition of ILOG, a company that has JRules in its portfolio – leading BRMS implementation in Java, demonstrates IBM’s determination in making business and technological sides of IT work closer together.

ILOG’s portfolio covers four areas:

• Business Rule Management Systems, BRMS
• Business data visualization
• Supply chain planning, design and management tools

With this acquisition, IBM’s initiative "BPM Powered by Smart SOA" has gained new strength in dealing with business processes and business rule management.

For more information go to:

Acquisition details - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/bpm/ilog_acquisition.html

ILOG - www.ilog.com

Zagreb, 01 December 2008 – Company CROZ holds spot 21 on this year’s Deloitte’s list of 500 technological companies with fastest growth in the EMEA region, which includes Europe, Middle East and Africa. CROZ has achieved a five-year growth of 4391 percent.
Each year, Consulting & Audit Company Deloitte organizes a "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition, which sets out a ranking order of the fastest growing technological companies in the EMEA region. The rank list is composed on the basis of continuous revenue growth in the last five years, comparing the results for the period from 2003 to 2007, and what’s specific about it is the fact that the companies voluntarily sign up for participation in the competition. This is the first time the competition has been conducted in Croatia, in partnership with the Croatian Employers’ Association, where CROZ, thanks to the revenue growth of the fantastic 4391 percent in the last five years, has taken 21st place among 500 technological companies from 23 countries in the respective region.
Earlier this year, within the scope of the same competition, CROZ has also taken a high third place on "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition; the rank list of the 50 fastest growing technological companies in Central Europe.
More information about "Deloitte Technology Fast 500" competition on:

http://www.deloitte.org/dtt/press_release/0,1014,sid%253D102801%2526cid%253D237246,00.html

Zagreb, November 18th 2008 – CROZ held a breakfast on the subject of Enterprise Asset Management at our education centre "Learn@CROZ" as a part of which concrete possibilities of applying enterprise asset management solutions were introduced using IBM Maximo technologies.

In these times of global recession and saving, controlling and efficiently managing one’s own assets can not only be a great way of saving money and increasing profit but moreover a key competitive advantage of the organization. Therefore, the concept of enterprise asset management has attracted many who along with a delicious breakfast and relaxed atmosphere could find out more about the problems arising from enterprise asset (non)-management and possible solutions thereof.

Aleksandra Bogdan, CROZ’s business analyst, opened the breakfast with a presentation of how to implement the process of enterprise asset management as well as what are the business advantages of the solution.

Particularly interesting was the presentation of Bartosz Soroczynski, director of IFMA (International Facility Management Association), who talked about the studies concerning the usage of IBM’s tool for enterprise asset management in banking and public sector.

Damir Bacalja (IBM) and Tomislav Majdančić (CROZ) offered concrete solutions by introducing IBM Maximo products, demonstrating at the same time how lacking the appropriate tool makes it impossible to provide answers to the requirements in mention in a quality manner.

Zagreb, 14 October 2008 – Company CROZ has occupied high third place on this year’s Deloitte list of 50 fastest growing technological companies in Central Europe thanks to realised five-year growth of 4391 percent.

Consulting/audit company Deloitte has, for the ninth consecutive year, organized "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition, which determines a ranking order of the fastest growing technological companies in Central Europe. The ranking list is composed on the basis of continuous revenue growth in the last five years, comparing the results for the period from 2003 to 2007, and what’s specific is the fact that the companies voluntarily sign up for participation in this competition. This is the first time the competition has been conducted in Croatia, in partnership with the Croatian Employers’ Association, where CROZ has, thanks to the revenue growth of the fantastic 4391 percent in the last five years, taken high third place.

This great success is by the way CROZ’s third acknowledgement this year. First, in April CROZ has been nominated as a finalist for the prestigious IBM award "IBM Beacon Award " awarded once a year to IBM business partners worldwide for innovation and quality in applying IBM technologies and services, in the category Rational® Excellence in Software Delivery – applying Rational software development support tools. Then in June, CROZ have received the "IBM Rational Award" which is awarded to the best Rational partners for innovation in supplying software solutions and services to customers in 2007. CROZ won in the category Outstanding Rational® Requirements & Portfolio Management Solution – for its knowledge and contribution in creating specific development processes using Rational Method Composer tools.

More information about "Deloitte Technology Fast 50" competition on:

http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/2008%20CE%20Technology%20Fast%2050_Final%20Version(2).pdf

On 6 & 7, October the QED conference „Quality in Enterprise Development“ took place in Rovinj. The theme of the conference was quality in software development.

Quality software is a clear-cut goal of any serious software development; however there are a lot of questions, whose answers are not as clear. So, how do we achieve quality? Which dimensions of quality need to be satisfied? The goal of the QED conference was to demonstrate the quality of software development as attainable.

A presentation by Juergen Hoeller, co-founder and leading development engineer of the company SpringSource opened the conference. Spring Framework has in the last five years become indispensable part of any serious Java development, while the framework quality, of architecture the same as of the software code itself, has become legendary. QED’s audience had a chance to hear first hand how does Spring achieve its quality.

As always, the roundtables were particularly interesting as well as the presentations about practical experiences given by Croatia’s leading companies such as APIS-IT, FINA, PBZ Card, Raiffeisen Bank and T-HT. IBM experts in a rather strong American team came to Rovinj directly from „Rational Software Development“ conference where they introduced Jazz– new technological platform intended for collaborative software development - to the audience.

A hundred or so conference participants had a chance to test CROZ’s formula for conference organization – less marketing and more expertise. This formula’s efficiency was proven by exceedingly big turnout during the presentations which neither the pleasant autumn sun nor the cafés of Rovinj could dilute. Surprise of the evening was when a CROZ-men bend took over the stage proving the well-known formula: „You can't beat two guitars, bass and drums“.

Company CROZ gained the status of Entrust VAR (Value Added Reseller) partner. This is the first such partnership Entrust ever made with a Croatian company.

Company Entrust is one of the leading manufacturers of security software, most renowned for its PKI infrastructure development. Entrust solutions include encryption of information, protection of digital identity and multi-layer protection of IT environment.CROZ will, combining Entrust products and its own knowledge and experience, provide its clients with a wide spectrum of security solutions.

IBM Rational Software Development Conference will be part of the CROZ QED conference that will take place on October 6 and 7 in Rovinj, Croatia. The conceptual RSDC roadshow unleashes business partners to give their user's top presenters tools which will introduce them to the newest Rational solutions.

Part of the QED conference will present the best content from this year's IBM Rational Software Development Conference (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/events/rsdc2008/ ), with a special review of IBM Rational Team Concert platform and it's role in software quality assurance. RSDC will at QED host Rolf Nelson and Brian Bryson, presenting respectively on the themes of Jazz/RTC and Governing Software Quality.

Juergen Hoeller, co-founder and development manager of Spring Framework is to hold the central presentation of Q.E.D. concerning the quality of software development.

Spring Framework has the reputation of being among the highest quality open source projects, with a successful company SpringSource (http://www.springsource.com/) standing behind it and Juergen as the “main contractor”.

Manner in which Spring Framework progresses, has encouraged many commercial companies, CROZ included, to elevate the level of their own progress and project approach. Juergen shall, as the keynote speaker on Q.E.D., show what were the things crucial for Spring’s success.

If you have been reading our “factory’s newspaper” or following our news column on the Web, you can probably remember that we organized our first conference last year on the theme of project portfolio management. Pleasant atmosphere of Rovinj, excellent lecturers, knowledge exchange and of course lots of sun and salt in the air formed the main characteristics of the PPM conference. This year all of the above remains the same, the only thing changing is the theme. Therefore, it is our pleasure to invite you to the conference Quality in Enterprise Development (QED).

Software development abides in an extremely dynamic environment, under constant globalisation attacks, facing increasingly demanding business needs. So, with all these conditions lined up, the question how to incorporate quality with complex software solution development does come to mind?

The premise of the QED conference lays in the quality of software development being attainable. Whole range of interesting presentations and roundtables will ultimately result with an actual Q.E.D. [quod erat demonstrandum].

You can register for the QED conference as of now, but keep in mind that the advantages of an early registration shall apply until 20/08/2008 (catchy date, hah ;))

And yes, important announcement for all of you involved in the PPM subject matter: uneven years are still reserved for projects, portfolio, planning and resources as well as other related themes :)

See you in Rovinj !!

June 4, 2008 – Company CROZ has won the "IBM Rational Award" intended for business partners worldwide. CROZ is the winner in the category Outstanding Rational® Requirements & Portfolio Management Solution and the only company outside the U.S. to have received this year’s award.

The "IBM Rational Award" goes to the best Rational partners for innovation in supplying software solutions and services to customers in 2007. The award is given in 4 categories, and CROZ won in the category Outstanding Rational® Requirements & Portfolio Management Solution – for its knowledge and contribution in creating specific development processes using Rational Method Composer tools.

The criteria for choosing awarded partner solutions were a list of references, number of partner certificates and usage of several IBM Rational solutions when implementing customer applications. The winners have been officially announced at the conference „Rational Software Development“, held today in Orlando, USA.

After it has, a couple of months ago, made it to the finals of the prestigious IBM Beacon Award, this time round CROZ did win the first prize between the competition of 400 entries from around the world. The award winners in other categories are companies operating in the American market, thus adding to the importance of this award for CROZ.

More information about the "IBM Rational Award" on:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/partners/rationalawards08/

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24361.wss

CROZ’s new issue of FYI is wrapped into shades of purple, exactly as the catwalk dictates for the Spring/Summer 2008. This may be a coincidence or it may be our editors have a thing for fashion. Either way, one thing is certain! The just mentioned editors gave their best to fashionably handle the hottest IT issues in vogue this year. This issue’s topic is Requirements Management and as always we introduce the latest technological trends such as IBM Tivoli Unified Process Composer and IBM Maximo Asset Manager. Let us also mention the interview with Mr. Zoran Hrustić, IBM’s software sales director for Central Europe, Middle East, Austria and Switzerland.

This time FYI comes in the mail, so while impatiently awaiting surf our website.

Zagreb, May 19, 2008 – Company CROZ became IBM Authorized Training Provider (ATP) regarding the IT field in Croatia. In line with the mentioned partnership, IBM Croatia shall implement both public and private education services and courses concerning IBM’s software and hardware products in collaboration with CROZ.

CROZ will be responsible for classroom and equipment organization and setup as well as for engagement of trainers specialized in certain fields of IT industry according to the global IBM education programs, whereas the company IBM will develop the courses, define the subjects and strategies of the courses in order to provide users with the possibility of acquiring advanced knowledge and skills about software and hardware solutions and products.

CROZ has fulfilled all necessary conditions in compliance with IBM’s standards and education rules (adequate space and equipment, governing infrastructure, qualified trainers, administration support) thus becoming the first authorized IBM education services provider in Croatia.

The courses will be held at the CROZ education centre, opened in March this year, called „Learn@CROZ“ (Zagreb, Lastovska 23), consisting of two spacious classrooms equipped according to high technical standards, a conference hall and a comfortable lounge-room.

Look at the pictures of Learn@CROZ education centre.

The aim of collaboration between IBM Croatia and CROZ is directed at providing expert IBM knowledge in the field of IT with a technical support of the company CROZ. This way the users will have the opportunity to improve their IT knowledge, optimize IT abilities, increase the work efficiency and ultimately boost their business as a result.

IBM Education is the world’s leading service provider, renowned by its quality offer in the filed of IT education but also expanding to the field of business knowledge and skills regarding IT projects. They have been present in Croatia for many years now and have become an equivalent of first-rate level in professional education.

For more information about the IBM education services offer go to: www.ibm.com/services/learning/hr/

Zagreb, April 4, 2008 – Company CROZ has been nominated as a finalist for the prestigious IBM award "IBM Beacon Award" intended for business partners worldwide. CROZ is the finalist in the category Rational® Excellence in Software Delivery and the first Croatian company to have received such recognition.

"IBM Beacon Award" is awarded once a year to IBM partners from around the world for innovation and quality in applying IBM technologies and services. The award is given in several categories and CROZ has been chosen as a finalist for the category Rational® Excellence in Software Delivery – applying Rational software development support tools.

To have received such a global recognition is a huge success and honour for a Croatian company, competition being 725 entries from all over the world; particularly considering how most of the award winners are companies operating on much more developed markets. This award serves as a crown to CROZ’s years-long and quality efforts in the field of Rational tools. Beforehand, CROZ has already gained a status of VAP (Value Added Partner) and AITP (Authorized Independent Training Provider) in the field of Rational tools.

For more information about the "IBM Beacon Award" please visit:

http://www-1.ibm.com/partnerworld/pwhome.nsf/weblook/2008_awards_winners.html

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/23819.wss

Zagreb, March 31, 2008 – Today, company CROZ has introduced its new education centre „Learn@CROZ“. As a part of the opening there was a half-day conference, where we introduced novelties in IBM’s software offer.

Education centre „Learn@CROZ“ (Lastovska 23) includes two spacious and highly equipped classrooms, a conference hall and a comfortable lounge-room. However, much more importantly than the premises is the specialist IT education offer we provide through our own courses in the fields of advanced Java architecture, project management, requirements management, business analysis as well as the courses in the field of IBM Rational tools which CROZ offers as an IBM authorised education centre (IBM Authorized Independent Training Partner). For several years now, CROZ has managed to achieve a considerable growth of its educational services; whereas at the beginning of this year we received an ISO certificate for our services regarding education. Opening of our own education centre is yet another step in increasing the quality of our educational services.

Half-day morning conference brought about three interesting presentations. And so, for the first time in Croatia, IBM Rational Jazz platform for collaborative development was shown live. Although the platform is still in the announcement phase, it managed to intrigue the entire developer’s community. Additionally, IBM DataPower devices –intended for acceleration and protection of XML message exchange, were also introduced. In line with that, CROZ used this opportunity to announce its becoming an exclusive IBM DataPower Partner for Croatia.

Look at the photographs of Learn@CROZ education centre.

Legal act “Decision about Appropriate IT System Management” issued by the Croatian National Bank ( the Official Gazette of the Republic of Croatia 80/07) entered into force on January 1, 2008.

With this Decision the banks are bind to establish business continuity planning process in order to ensure the consistency of critical and/or vital business processes.

The Croatian National Bank’s guidelines originated from European Union’s guidelines by which approximation of regulations, standards and code of practice applies to all the banks in the countries which are in the Stabilization and Accession Process. Even if we ignore the EU instruction, there still remains the fact how the business continuity planning process is an accurate way of developing and protecting one’s entire business.

It is our pleasure to announce the course syllabus which is to be taught at the new CROZ education centre!!!
For April and May we have prepared the following:

Object J2EE, SERVLET and JSP Programming (use of RAD)

This course will get you closer to Java servlet and Java Server Pages technologies. It will introduce you to the servlet work model as well as to the structure and development of secure web applications. As a part of Java Server Pages technologies you will hear about the concepts of JSP model, use of JavaBeans technology and learn how to make your own tags and develop your own tag library accordingly. The course will elaborate on the theme of getting to know and use program schemes and filters as well as on the topic of installing Apache Tomcat v4.x servlet containers.
Course duration: 10 days.
The course will take place from 14 to 25 April 2008.

Essentials of the Rational Unified Process V7.0

The course talks about the Rational Unified Process (RUP), a knowledge base which contains software engineering best practices well-tried on many successful development projects.
The course includes best practices, iterative development, organization and the content of the knowledge base. The students will hear about all the disciplines and roles which can appear in a development process. The course will emphasise key principles of iterative development, phases, iterations and their objectives. Special emphasis, as in the RUP itself, will be on risk and change management. Group work will be based on real life examples and commonly agreed textbook examples in accordance with the daily concerns of the students. The students will gain sufficient knowledge about the RUP development process to adequately understand the development phases and coordinate development activities.
Course duration: 2 days.
The course will take place on 28 and 29 April 2008.

Introduction to Business Modeling

The course serves as an introduction to the process of business modeling. The course will get you closer to business processes and organizational structure and will instruct you about the methods and tools used to implement the change. In the course you will also learn about process modeling.
Course duration: 2 days.
The course will take place on 05 and 06 May 2008.

Mastering Requirements Management with Use Cases

The course deals with the issue of requirements management with use case modeling. It focuses on defining customer requirements and requirements change management in a project; followed by problem analysis, defining the Vision and finally defining requirements with use cases. The course will also cover the sections of establishing requirements attributes, traceability links between requirements and managing the project scope. The students will practice various methods of problem analysis as well as different styles of requirements specification.
Course duration: 3 days.
The course will take place from 12 to 14 May 2008.

The new Croz educational centre will run its courses will between 09.00 – 14.00h at the old address Lastovska 23.

For all additional information and registration please contact Ana Vujnović. (email:avujnovic@croz.net, phone: 01 6390-634)

This year’s biggest novelty coming from IBM Rational is IBM Rational Jazz. Jazz is a platform of the new generation intended for collaborative development and software delivery.

IBM Rational Team Concert Express is the first product to be developed on the Jazz platform enabling high collaborative development environment, optimal for small and medium sized development teams.

Picture yourself as part of a development team which is spatially dislocated, has members who work on several projects at the same time, have different working schedules and may possibly be in different time zones. Regardless of all circumstances, they still have to collaborate among themselves. Fortunately, Jazz development platform rises to such set of challenges…

• Enables collaboration in the background of software development. Jazz technology controls the artifacts and development processes and automatically creates a unique project whole. It implements its own systems:
  • work item ( change management: a system for tracking bugs and tasks)
  • source control (software version repository)
  • build management

• Optimizes development process management and adaptation of those development processes in a reasonable timeframe. Step by step process automation, aligning work activities with notification.

• Enables the choice of one’s own development environment. Jazz is an open and extensible architecture designed to offer flexibility upon selecting a development environment. It supports open source products such as Tomcat, Derby, Jabbar as well as the commercial products like WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, and Oracle.

IBM Rational Team Concert comes with the out-of-the-box integrations for ClearQuest, ClearCase and Subversion change-management product.

On 22 January 2008, CROZ d.o.o became a proud owner of ISO 9001 certificate granted by the Croatian office of the Swiss certification company SGS Adriatica d.o.o. SGS performed a certification assessment of the instituted quality system at CROZ for the filed of “IT Professional Education” and confirmed how the management system is in accordance with the Standard requirements. CROZ has proved to systematically meet the agreed requirements for services in accordance with the policy scope and goals of the organization.

With this certificate we have strengthen our competitiveness in the present and the targeted markets alike.

Subsequent to successfully completing autumn’s educational workshops, our experts are now ready for new lessons.

For this winter we have prepared the following courses:

Managing Requirements with Use Case Modelling Method: 14 – 17 January 2008
The course covers the subject of managing requirements using the Use Case modelling. The course focuses on defining customer’s requirements and project’s requirement change management, as well as on problem analysis, vision definition and defining requirements using use cases. In the course the question of establishing attributes over requirements will be discussed along with managing the links between requirements and project scope management. During the course the attendees will try out, using examples, various methods of problem analysis as well as different styles of defining requirements.

Basics of Iterative Development: 28 - 30 January 2008
The course focuses on the necessity of shifting from the traditional to an iterative approach of project management. During the course they will discuss the most common situations with which development teams and project leaders meet when developing iteratively. Moreover, in the course they will examine the actions which a project leader can take in order to improve the iterative development process.

Integral Approach to Software Development: 21 - 24 January 2008
The process of software development is a much wider term than just programming. Different seemingly unconnected disciplines and activities arranged and used in a proper way, ease the development process, help planning and ultimately affect the success of the project itself.

The workshop will explain the terms such as source code repository, issue tracker, snapshot and integration build, development, staging, test and production environment, build and test automation, as well as the links and interactions between them.

Beginner’s Java Education Set: February 2008
Object Programming and Java Programming Language– Part 1
Introduction to the basic principles of object oriented programming; writing, transformation and execution of a simple Java program; basic building elements of the Java programming language; operators and assignment; access modifiers and other modifiers; type convergences; program flow control; exceptions; classes and objects; implementation concealment; polymorphism, interfaces and abstract classes; internal classes; simultaneous execution of multiple program threads; java.lang.* package

Object Programming and Java Programming Language– Part 2 Basics of GUI application development in Java, GUI components: Layout Managers, events, Java I/O subsystem, object collections.

Object J2EE, SERVLET and JSP Programming (using RAD): Introduction to Java servlet technology, introduction to Java Server Pages technology, basic web application and HTTP protocol terminology,

Java servlet technology, Java Server Pages technology, program schemes and filters, additional topics (installation of Apache Tomcat v4.x servlet container, very brief introduction to xml)

Advanced Java Education Set: March 2008
Advanced Concepts of Java Programming

• Dependency injection (DI)
• Inversion of control (IoC)
• Aspect oriented programming (AOP)

Advanced concepts of Web Java

• Spring MVC
• Spring portlet MVC

Advanced Java Programming

• Advanced JDBC
• Declarative transaction management
• JMS
• O/R mapping
• Scheduling
• Unit testing
• Security
• Logging and Auditing

You can find more details about our courses in our catalogue.
For all additional information and registration please contact Ana Vujnović (e-mail: avujnovic/croz.net, phone: 01 6184-831)

Christmas is coming and with it the third edition of our magazine FYI by CROZ.

This issue’s topic is project management; we bring you a short overview of the trends in project and portfolio management. You can find a very interesting story about the first PPM conference in Rovinj. It was a great privilege to be able to enrich our topic by an interview with a golden project manager, well reputed Croatian water-polo coach Ratko Rudić.

PBZ has launched an innovative and quality Internet service „PBZInvestor“! You can read how did this service of Privredna banka Zagreb came about, in the interview with Vladimir Ilić, development manager of the application in mention.

And did you know how CROZ regularly holds courses and workshops as well as provides education services and knowledge transfer? You can find more on education in the IT industry and our experience with the same in this issue of our magazine.

As usual, we bring you interesting tools and technologies; Rational Data Architect, Filenet, DataPower and Tivoli tools for monitoring composite applications.

Hold your horses! New FYI is coming!

Zagreb, 29 November 2007 - "Breakfast with IT Service Integrations" was held at the "Regent Esplanade" hotel in the organization of the company CROZ. Issues discussed included managing IT services, news from the world of Lotus and IT system security.

Although managing IT services and especially ITIL has been the subject of many lectures lately, CROZ team managed to attract the audience’s attention by its pragmatic approach, with particularly convincing and interesting lecture of Marin Tice from Zagreb Airport who talked about his experience of implementing a service desk.

IBM Lotus Notes is the world’s leading groupware technology and is just coming of age these days. The novelties of version 8 and ways to achieve a mobile office by using this new technology were revealed to us in the second part of the breakfast.

The last topic was at the same time the most impressive one. Security and vulnerability of IT systems have been very distinctly demonstrated on a couple of examples which left the audience speechless. The lecturer had illustrated, by his actions and person, just how a malicious hacker can rather effortlessly and with no sophisticated equipment gravely endanger an IT system. How to protect oneself? – Only by a serious and elaborate security policy which needs to be enforced day after day.

Interface21, the company behind the omnipresent Spring Framework, is to be renamed into SpringSource! Web page www.interface21.com has already been redirected to www.springsource.com. The reasons behind the change are quite logical: connect the global success of Spring Framework with the company’s name. With Spring 2.5 in the works along with a whole range of supplementary products, a rather aggressive marketing campaign can be expected. You never know, there may be a wealthy buyer in store. With this kind of knowledge and reputation in hand, SpringSource is undoubtedly a desirable bachelorette company. For more details and reasons behind the change go to the blog of Rod Johnson, Spring’s original creator.

In the last six months, we have intensely evaluated the Adobe Flex technology on actual projects and we can say our experts are more than pleased. Deployment of Adobe Flex technology accelerates software development and by doing so significantly lowers the costs of developing a software application’s presentation layer. But what’s much more important is that customers are getting a much richer interface. As of this time on, CROZ is, now “publicly” as well, offering the services of software development based on Adobe Flex technology. Our high-quality services and CROZ’s position as a leader in the customised software solution development in Croatia both made it easier for Adobe to recognize his Services Solution Partner in us.

We continue to prove to our customers how technically complex systems processing huge amounts of data and transactions each day, can be implemented through elegant and intuitive solutions using modern technologies.

According to Gartner’s study, IBM WebSphere portal is the leading portal implementation on the market. As its strengths they stress a large customer base, integration with Lotus and Lotus Expeditor and as particularly interesting the accelerator principle. Details needed to be touched up are, amongst others, the simplicity of installation – as if we didn’t know this already.

More details plus comparison with the competition!

IBM has launched a new accelerator for its portal platform. IBM Content Accelerator brings simplified but none the less powerful features of on-line creation and web content management to business users. It helps improve the productivity and enables organizations to keep huge amounts of web content fresh (up-to-date) and easy to find and search through.

WebSphere PortalAccelerators facilitate growth of the portal’s business value and provide a faster time-to-value while focusing on the project’s specific needs. Those are integrated packages of functionalities that can easily be added to WebSphere Portal Server and can help to significantly reduce the time needed for implementation. " IBM Content Accelerator" includes the following functionalities:

• Workplace Web Content Management - enables web content management and content distribution on several different websites and also include WYSIWYG, a rich text editor.

• Portal Document Manager – enables users to create and edit various types of documents (presentations, text and table calculations) directly through the web browser as well as manage documents through a shared user-defined hierarchy of maps.

• OmniFind Enterprise Edition – enables quality and scalable search of web content as well as advanced features of security settings configuration, thus contributing to the increase of the corporate information value.

The first CROZ PPM Conference has barely finished, and more than successfully we may add, <link to the previous news/> and already we received an announcement about Croatia’s branch of the leading membership association for project management profession - Project Management Institute (PMI), Project Management Association, PMI chapter Zagreb, Croatia organizing The First PMI Conference on 6 November 2007 in Zagreb metaphorically entitled “Let’s Set Sail”. We are looking forward to hearing the lectures of some of the most eminent international and national project managers such as Peter de Jager, Jim De Piante, Ratko Rudić, Dino Butorac and Berislav Crkvenac as well as to exchange the experience with numerous (more than 300 is expected) colleagues from other countries and companies. Judging by the organizers it is safe to expect a conference of the highest calibre. More about the conference and registration on PMI Hrvatska .

The first two October days, apart by beautiful and sunny weather, were marked by CROZ’s first conference on the theme of portfolio project management. It is difficult to single out the most interesting events or to describe the atmosphere in just a couple of sentences.

But let us start with the most important – people. First of all, interesting and experienced lecturers coming from organizations with profuse project portfolios, then roundtable participants and finally the audience which never once hesitated to have their say in the interesting and vigorous discussions. Sure enough there was ample of fun at hand. The Red Island, looking like something out of a fairytale, was the host of a most pleasant dinner with the salty tang of the sea and the sound of klapa singing in the background.

Besides socializing and having fun, we have, hopefully, provided those present with a training ground for learning and experience exchange.
And in conclusion, what’s there to say except… looking forward to our next get-together!

Download presentations from the 1st PPM Adriatic Conference.

On the day of 14th September 2007, CROZ has continued with the tradition of holding business breakfasts in collaboration with IBM. Themes of this September’s breakfast were IBM WebSphere and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), within IBM’s global initiative “Impact Comes to You”.

This event, in the opinion of the majority present, gave an excellent overview of best practices in establishing SOA infrastructure and relevant WebSphere technologies. What the audience found particularly interesting was the practical experience from SOA projects which are growing in number in our country as well, while CROZ and IBM, we dare say; pave the way in the implementation of the same.

Opening presentations were made by Mr Hrvoje Živko, Coverage Software Sales Representative, IBM Croatia, and Mr Krešimir Mudrovčić, executive director of CROZ. Probably the longest breakfast to date began with the opening presentation of CROZ member Davor Čengija about SOA implementation and possible traps in the process thereof, and was followed up by, another CROZ member, Tomislav Jukić concerning the subject of service development management.

These two rather abstract topics were followed by three presentations about IBM products, which could help in realization of a business process vision in the SOA world. First there was the presentation about using IBM WebSphere Monitor, which instead of the said Mr Michal Duseka, was held by Mr Vjenceslav Nadinić (IBM). Presentations of our colleagues from CROZ ensued: Ivica Lončar about WebSphere MQ Broker and the demonstration of managing SOA services throughout the entire lifecycle by Krešimir Musa. The breakfast prolonged into the afternoon due to Dejan Novak’s workshop during which a demo of car registration business process was shown as was the functionality of the tools IBM WebSphere Integration Developer and IBM WebSphere Process Server.

Alongside the presentations and comments of CROZ and IBM experts about their experience in projects based on the SOA principles, the breakfast was also featured by an overview of IBM tools:

• IBM WebSphere Business Monitor
• IBM WebSphere Message Broker
• IBM WebSphere Business Modeler
• IBM WebSphere Integration Developer
• IBM WebSphere Process Server

Due to the lack of safety web applications can become an easy target for stealing of personal or corporation data. Early performance of safety tests is the best way of achieving the desired application safety as well as its defence against unwanted intrusions into the system. Watchfire is one in the series of companies taken over by IBM. Its particularity lies precisely in its dealings with safety tests.

We bring you a short overview of ex-Watchfire products.

IBM Rational AppScan is a tool intended for automation of safety tests on web applications and it increases the safety as well as the resilience of web applications. AppScan enables nearly all necessary safety tests on web applications. It is equally intended, through various product versions, for individual users as for the larger organizations which demand a larger number of simultaneously initiated safety tests. AppScan is designed for various types of users from developers, test teams to project managers.

During individual user deployment it provides the desktop version of the tool as well as the plug-ins for all major development environments such as JBuilder, WebSphere, Microsoft® Visual Studio.Net and Eclipse.

IBM Rational AppScan Enterprise is a web-based system for an effective and distributed implementation of safety tests, intended for implementation of a larger number of tests initiated by a number of different users. With a possibility of a more advanced analysis web application brings a system for the creation of reports about test results, references for the solution of the problems detected and the simple integration with the AppScan desktop version.

AppScan Enterprise — IBM Rational ClearQuest Integration
AppScan provides a number of extensions for improvement and facilitation of the work in the process of Quality Assurance. AppScan gives user the freedom in choosing which analysed problems he/she wants to report to ClearQuest. AppScan Enterprise and IBM Rational ClearQuest integration enables automated log-in, entering and tracking of requests through ClearQuest.

AppScan QA—IBM Rational TestManager Integration
Integration enables a straightforward interface for initiating and analysis of safety tests based on the integration of AppScan Enterprise and ClearQuest. This provides for the abstract environment in which the users through IBM Rational TestManager can initiate and analyse safety tests on web applications without the knowledge and experience about the safety tests themselves.

Reuse is a term that had been wriggling through the IT industry for many years now. In various ways, organizations tend to catalogue and store all the artefacts liable to reuse. Methods of catalogue production go from artefact lists in Excel all the way to the custom development solutions made particularly for that purpose.

Rational Asset Manager (RAM) is the youngest member of the Rational products family. The product is intended for identification, creation, management, search and reuse of all development assets of the organization. Through this tool it is possible to organize applications, models, components, patterns, services, frameworks, templates, documents and all other assets the organization could profit from, should they be reused.

All assets are organized and catalogued according to the Reusable Asset Specification , an OMG standard for describing reusable software assets.

A large part of Rational Asset Manager is dedicated and intended for working with services and SOA. All services identified as suitable for reuse can be governed inside the RAM repository. Rational Asset Manager is closely integrated with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository tool. It is possible to search already published services from WSSR through RAM and, vice versa, the services catalogued in RAM by means of a wizard publish in WSSR, as well as to see in any given time their interrelations.

With enormous possibilities of organization and safety assurance of all assets in the repository, great care was given to the integration with other products of the IBM Rational family as well. The tool itself can be used as a web client or as a plug-in for Eclipse platform used by all of the IBM Rational development tools. In addition, there is the integration with ClearQuest and ClearCase by means of which it is possible to version every asset as well as to set arbitrary lifecycle of the same, from its infiltration into the repository through approval and all the way to its deployment and creation of new versions.

IBM has recently launched a full version of a new tool coming from the IBM Lotus family, IBM Lotus Notes 8.0. With this version IBM has made great progress in the development of its office tools.

Novelties can immediately be spotted on the main interface which is intuitive and user-friendly enough for users who meet up with this tool for the first time, while on the other hand provides the users who have been working with previous versions with a smooth cross over to the new interface.

The novelty regarding the application, itself, being in that it is no longer based on C/C++, but on the Eclipse platform instead.

With an updated build-in Sidebar, the user can access all the add-ins contained in the program package, plus all other possible add-ins as well.

IBM Productivity Tools are editorial tools based on the Open Office tools used for word processing, drafting presentations and spreadsheet calculator. This enables the user to take care of most of his/hers business inside the IBM Lotus Notes environment and all at one place.

Client’s email interface has been refreshed as well, with a modern appearance and hover-over display of toolbar functions for an easier use. Changes have been made on the Calendar and the Contact list, which provide the users with an easier use and input of new data as well as better coordination of certain tasks and contacts entered.

Therefore, with a facilitated possibility of developing, upgrading and adjusting of this tool, IBM has validated Lotus Notes to be an ideal tool for coordination, planning and interrelation inside a business environment, which with its advanced abilities of customization stands for one of the top products in the field.

IBM has published a new version of Lotus Expeditor (6.1.1) platform on 14th August. Expeditor is a platform for application development with a rich (“fat”) client based on the platform Eclipse RCP, and currently on its version 3.2. Crucial addition Expeditor brings to the basic RCP is the support to the client development which can work even if its offline. It is achieved via local database which cashes in the data from the main database.

"The Big Blue" has significantly increased its revenues for this year with its software sales and the most impressive of all being the sales growth of WebSphere line of products. In the second quarter of this year IBM has increased its revenues by 13% with software sales and mostly thanks to the growth of WebSphere of as much as 28%. Additionally, other IBM products have recorded an increase as well: Lotus software of 12 %, Rational software of 11 %, Tivoli software of 33% and Information Management software of 21%.

Growth is the result of a strategy based on the open source products with the open source in mention progressively becoming a part of the IBM business software foundation. In less demanding situations the companies use WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, but in more demanding ones they can reach they goals more quickly and with less effort by using “tougher” WebSphere Application Server products which go beyond the abilities of open source software. It is precisely this strategy of IBM inline with maximal adaptation to customer needs that proved to work extremely well for WebSphere, as well as for IBM software in general all of which was substantiated during the last four years with numerous reports made by IBM, IDC and Gartner.

The same as any other “school” CROZ is also preparing its educational activities for the upcoming fall. We use this opportunity to single out couple of workshops prepared by our experts which will take place after summer at our location.

11-13 September: Integral Approach to Software Development

Software development process is by far a wider concept than just programming. Diverse and apparently unconnected disciplines and activities arranged and used in the right way, facilitate the development process, assist in planning and in the end affect the successful outcome of the project itself.

The workshop will provide the explanations for the concepts such as source code repository, issue tracker, snapshot and integration build, developmental, staging, test and production environment, build and test automation, as well as for the connections and interactions between them.

18-21 September: Project management basics

Course is created for Project managers. Objective is to enable project managers to efficiently handle communication, schedule, budget and many other important matters. Besides theoretical knowledge about structure of project, project documents and project management process, course covers many issues like conflict or meeting management.

26-27 September: IBM WebSphere Application Server Administration

IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 administrator course is designed for administrators who will upon completion of the course be able to install, configure and service the IBM application server by themselves. At the beginning of the course the attendants will be acquainted with the application server architecture as to the WebSphere artefacts. During the course the users will install WebSphere Application Server and IBM HTTP Server themselves. With the administration console the attendants will learn how to define a data source, configure and install applications by using a graphical interface or a command line (wasadmin), as well as learn how to solve problems in WAS environment.

2-3 October: Introduction to Business modeling

• business process definition
• business processes and organization structure
• methodologies and tools for change implementation
• BPM: project approach
• process modeling

9-11 October: Advanced concepts of Java programming

• dependency injection
• dependency injection (DI)
• inversion of control (IoC)
• aspect oriented programming (AOP)

16-18 October: Advanced concepts of web Java

• spring MVC
• spring portlet MVC

22-26 October: Advanced Java programming

• Advanced JDBC
• Declarative transaction management
• JMS
• O/R mapping
• Scheduling
• Unit testing
• Security
• Logging and Auditing

5-7 November: Spring Web Flow

Spring Web Flow is application framework for developing complex interactive web pages.

Please send your applications at kbrnic@croz.net . Contact number: +385 1 6184-831.

Topics related to portfolio project management are in vogue all across the globe, however the approach to high quality level of information and know how of the related filed is not always simple. Therefore we organized 1st Project & Portfolio Management Adriatic Conference. The aim of the conference is to analyse all portfolio project management segments. By gathering the experts in Project & Portfolio Management as well as those who deal with resource availability on a daily basis we wish to create a unique environment in which people can exchange their ideas and experiences.

More Information about individual lectures and conference schedule.

See you in Rovinj!

P.S. Keep in mind to take the advantages of an early registration!

On 20 July 2007, IBM has published the results of an IDC study concerning the position of advanced portal products which are to make their mark on the market in the next couple of years. The results of the study place IBM WebSphere Portal at the top with a market of 31.5%, whereas the rival BEA Systems took 19.6% and Oracle 10.5% of the world’s portal market “weighting” $901 million in the year 2006.

IBM WebSphere Portal product allows users to themselves create the dynamic content as well as to personally version it onto the company’s portal. Thanks to the possibility of connection to other products, IBM is successfully selling the portal in which the emphasis is put on collaboration, social networking technologies and semantic tagging. IBM is quite aggressively adding new functionalities in WebSphere Portal so as to improve the software usability. With Web 2.0 and SOA technologies IBM continues to create a flexible, employable, collaborative and above all reliable software.
IDC predicts how enterprise portal market will grow for more than 50% until 2011 and will reach the worth of more than $1.4 billion.

According to the study of Privredni Vjesnik, published on 16 July 2007, CROZ found its rightful place on the list of leading educational IT centres. This achievement is particularly interesting due to the fact of CROZ dealing exclusively with a specialized form of education mostly connected with software development.

Courses and workshops held on regular basis can be found in our course catalog. Courses are primarily divided in two categories: courses we made ourselves and IBM courses which we only can hold as the sole authorised Rational AITP centre in Croatia.

Eclipse Foundation has recently published a new version of its development platform, by the name of Eclipse Europe, and is a shared edition of as many as 21 projects. Alongside its standard projects such as development environment, of which Eclipse is the most famous for, there are also tools for report generation (BIRT), web application production (WTP), support for SOA development (STP) and 17 other.
Since IBM with Version 7 of its Rational tools is quite apt in tracking the Eclipse development process, we can expect an upgrade of Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer any time soon.

Yet another example of SOA being successfully implemented in the development of information infrastructure comes from Denmark. Their national IT and telecommunication agency is leading a project which will enable a straightforward and effective exchange of electronic documents.

They decided on a small set of services required by a large number of users. With the necessary political support, collaboration of economy subjects and the support of big IT companies they embarked on the development of an exchange system for an extremely large number of electronic documents. The system was built according to the rules of service oriented architecture, while the number of services will continue to grow in time.
At the present time the safe delivery of e-invoices is ensured, because the economy (big and small alike) demonstrated highest amount of interest for the service. We are talking about some 15 million e-invoices per year which can in turn annually save the economy more than € 450 million with regards to traditional invoicing.
Besides the means by which the country can, in a brilliant way, invest the tax payers’ money, this project is also an example of how to benefit from the positive SOA characteristics such as flexibility, scalability and manifold usability.
You can read more on the subject of SOA here or in the electronic issues of the magazine FYI by CROZ.

For more on SOA in Denmark go to InfoQ portal.

We have good news for you who are on a daily basis juggling with a resource overload or are evaluating the project schemes with an ungrateful task of determining the ones that will live to see production day. With the beginning of October, more precisely on 1st and 2nd of October, we are organizing a conference of a regional character near Rovinj, named:

1st Project and Portfolio Management Adriatic Conference featuring Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1

Long standing tradition of CROZ in early technology breakthrough and studying of new concepts and tools continues. We have already participated in IBM beta programs on several occasions, aspiring to aptly welcome new solutions. At the moment, we are actively evaluating and assessing IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2 and IBM Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1.

Rational Portfolio Manager portrays an entirely new face in this version. RPM users will most certainly be glad to learn about the new web client, followed with an option of in-line editing and especially about the upgrade of integration with ClearQuest and RequisitePro. More information on Rational Portfolio Manager can be found in the first issue of FYI by CROZ.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2 set of products presents a step further in relation to the display of events and advanced possibilities of correlation and integration of events from different sources with regard to the current IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.1. The enhancements brought about in this version facilitate the migration from earlier versions of IBM Tivoli Monitoring to the new ITM 6.2 version.

For more information about Tivoli Technologies go to our website’s specially designated place of the same.

If you liked the first issue of our " ForYourInformation by CROZ", you'll be probably happy to learn how the new edition is already on half its way to you. In this new, blue edition of FYI we bring you lots of interesting articles, all of which can be seen in a pdf format on our download zone. And yes, a small but important note: feel free to inform us about whether you too would like to receive the FYI at your work address.

This year’s already habitual IBM Software days will be held on 5 and 6 of June in Zagreb. As a part of the second day on the Solution Track, you can watch a presentation by Krešimir Musa (CROZ) and Vedrana Miholić (CROZ) by the name A Road to SOA.

If a manager or a team member of the development company could catch a gold fish, he/she would probably wish for… a quicker and cheaper development, easier integration and better adaptability to market needs. So it is of little wonder how from one year to the next new concepts and technologies are striving to solve afore mentioned issues. Topical interest today is the Holy Grail – SOA, but in order to achieve the implementation of this contemporary concept, some important conditions have to be met as well: solid foundations in both the technology and the development process, high-quality technology which can support SOA concepts, high level of expert knowledge and naturally an abundance of good will in the team itself. In this lecture they will try to show which are the Rational concepts and solutions that can achieve the preconditions of a swift SOA implementation and how to cope in the world of ''R** abbreviation'' (RUP, RMC, RPM ...). In the second part of this lecture they will show how IBM WebSphere artefacts do indeed meet the conditions of ''Ready for SOA'' platform.

For more details about the conference and registration go to the IBM pages.

For quite a while now, we have openly demonstrated how we whish to expand our knowledge and experience across the whole region. In the past few moths our wishes started to come true. Although we made our first steps outside Croatia with our consulting and educational undertakings, our development projects assured quite an impressive continuation. Thanks to an excellent collaboration with our two key customers, our solutions have been positioned across the region.

By gaining the status of AITP for IBM Rational courses, we have secured us the position of a sole such centre in our region. On such solid foundations, this year we have continued our work in Serbia and Romania, and we have established partnership relations in Bulgaria and Poland. Our expertise and experience in implementation of Rational Portfolio Manager gave us the opportunity to show our abilities on conferences in the EU (London and Vienna), and to take part in a tendering in Norway.

However, the essence of our business operation still lays in the software development, and we are exceptionally pleased that we are expanding our services to Europe in this field in collaboration with our customers.

Our retail loan workflow solution found its way to EU banks via Volksbank Croatia. Volksbank International AG together with its daughter banks operating in Croatia and 6 other mid and eastern European countries as well (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia) embraced this solution as a choice for the Group. The project also includes the integration with existing systems in each of the banks so in that respect CROZ is collaborating with the world’s as well as the local manufacturers of the banking software such as MISYS (UK), S1 (USA), ApPello (Hungary).

Company PBZ Card d.o.o. is a part of the PBZ Group and is the sole credit card company in Croatia responsible for issuing and receipt of American Express cards, and at the same time provides the service of receipt as well as the sales network architecture for MasterCard and Visa cards. CROZ has build an online system for PBZ Card enabling the supervision of expenses made by credit cards and the functionality of an electronic bill for the users of American Express cards, as well as the insight into the business account and financial reports of the companies receiving American Express credit cards. The quality of the system was recognized by the banks in Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina so they purchased that system from PBZ Card and the company CROZ was recognized as a lasting and valuable partner, performing all actions related to customization and maintenance of this multi-institutional credit card online system.

IBM has introduced the first public beta version of its Lotus Notes and Domino 8 (Hanover) software for e-mail management and inner-team collaboration.

Built on an IBM variant of Eclipse Rich Client platform, the new Lotus Notes offer more flexibility and substantially facilitate administration business. Basic functions of the package such as e-mail, calendar and contacts, have gained many enhancements: re-designed user interface, advanced search and sort options, more intuitive calendar usage and so on.

Another novelty is the support for the so-called composite applications: new “Notes” offer the possibility of connecting the old Lotus Notes applications with the components based on the Eclipse platform. Supplementary office tools have also been included into the package under a common name of Productivity Tools: Lotus Documents (text processing), Lotus Spreadsheets (spreadsheet calculator) and Lotus Presentations (presentation production).

For more information about the product go to the IBM pages.

Maybe you thought how CROZ only employs puny looking computer guys; but one look at our Dejan Cepetić will definitely change your mind. Long term exposure to the green monitor radiation (3270, author’s remark) made Cep strong to the extent of him bravely tearing of his opponents – using his skills acquired during his boxing career, and all that in the first division of at the moment the only American football team in Croatia - Zagreb Thunders!

But now at a serious note, we kindly suggest that you visit the web site of that unique team and the first chance you get watch some of the games which will be held on the home field.

Dear customers and partners, it our pleasure to announce that from 1 April 2007 (not an April’s fool joke!) we will be conducting our business at the new address in Lastovska 23, on the floors 3, 4 and 5. To some of you we will be physically more far-off, to others nearer, but we remain equally devoted to all our customers. We will be working in a renovated and contemporary equipped premises, solving the non-equation of people vs. square meters figures, while amending the work conditions to our future plans. All other contact information (telephone numbers, fax and e-mail), besides the address, remain the same.

We are hoping how you managed to at least skim through the first issue of our newsletter during December. For all of you who did not receive the FYI’s paper release, we arranged for the possibility of pdf-version download.

The new FYI is in the “polishing” phase, and will be on your desk sometime during May.