Major ERP/MRP vendors, such as Oracle. SAP, Microsoft Business Solutions are present on Brazilian market, in this small article we would like to highlight MBS Navision, especially in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, plus the economy situation in Rio and its ERP/MRP market

• Economy. Rio’s harbor is deep enough for the largest vessels to come alongside the wharves, which lie near the city center. Through the port flows the major portion of Brazil’s imports and exports (iron ore, manganese, coffee, cotton, meat, and hides). Rio is also a distribution center for the coastal trade. The city’s manufactures include textiles, foodstuffs, household appliances, cigarettes, chemicals, leather goods, metal products, and printed material. There are two major airports.

• Manufacturing. Navision traditionally is considered as strong MRP & production automation platform. Considering high number of manufacturing facilities in Rio de Janeiro – manufacturing module implementation is critical.

• Distribution. Microsoft Navision, together with Microsoft Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon are currently under evolution – so-called Project Green should result in these ERPs interconnection and probably interface unification. Recently Microsoft renamed its products and Navision is now Microsoft Dynamics NAV (more likely NAV will be dropped when Project Green is realized). From the Distribution needs perspective – Microsoft Navision is now and will be even more exposed through web portal, plus it will be integrated with Microsoft CRM (please be aware that Navision also has its own CRM module), where Microsoft Sharepoint should play the role of workflows, approval cycles, etc. All these facts make cargo tracking and delivery control automation naturally implemented on the Navision and CRM platforms

• Brazilian Localization. Navision is translated into Portuguese and adjusted for the compliance to Brazilian tax code. From the localization standpoint, if you represent multinational corporation and set up manufacturing facility in Brazil, you should know that other vendors have localized solutions: SAP – SAP Business One and Oracle: Oracle E-Business Suite

• Customization. Navision has its own proprietary language C/Side and currently Microsoft recommends MS SQL Server as the database platform. Plus the future customization directions will be focused on XML web services and developers will be deploying Microsoft Visual Studio.Net

• Integration. Considering MS SQL Server platform – software programmers have all the spectrum of integration technologies: ODBC, JDBC, Microsoft will be moving more functionality to business portal – where Navision logic will be called through the sets of stored procedures and be exposed through SDK. Open MS SQL Server technologies gives you SQL based reporting, you can deploy such industry standard tools as Crystal Reports, MS SQL Server Reporting services, etc.

Please give as a call São Paulo 55-11-3826-3449, USA 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Axapta, Microsoft CRM Partner, serving clients in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Manaus, Lisboa, Coimbra, Porto, Cascais and having locations in multiple states and internationally: Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, USA, Europe, Australia, New Zealand.

So let’s begin crunching down these 300 images using Adobe Photoshop from start to finish. When I say ‘crunching’, to some 300 images may seem like allot, but it’s not. I have done jobs for clients that have 100,000 plus images. When you have that many images to produce there are other programs I use that are designed for this. We’ll cover that another day.

To this point we have ensured that our images are web ready, cropping, retouching, watermarking, etc. So let’s get at it. I will assume that we are all using Adobe Photoshop version 6 or greater.

First we will go to the ‘file’ menu and select ‘Automate" shown here http://weprintcolors.com/screens/screen_dw_create_photo_menu.htm. Now you are ready to create the theme of your photo album by filling in the required textfields. Remember to be as brief and descriptive as possible, as this information gets published on all html pages generated by Photoshop. This is where Photoshop is seems to offer more that Dreamweaver. You will notice the first pull down menu ‘styles’. There are many different horizontal and vertical styles available. The second menu allows you to enter an email address that you may want to be available to your visitors. However, I advise against it. Remember that thing called SPAM. Then next pull down menu allows you to specify .htm or .html extensions. Now we’ll click the ‘browse’ button and locate your image source folder. Click the ‘destination’ folder. This folder should be located somewhere in you website folder. If you don’t have one, make one. ‘Options’ is, again an area that Adobe seems far more thorough that Dreamweaver. The ‘options’ menu let’s you specify every aspect of your photo album…size of small thumbnails, size of large thumbnails, add custom colors to better tie into your corporate scheme. Remember to complete the ‘site name’, ‘photographer’, textfields tactfully; this is what tells the search engine what your subject matter deals with.

Are you ready now? Go ahead click OK. Like magic your photo album manufacturing itself. This is a great tool that can be used commercially or just for fun. Create commercial product pages for your clients or create an online photo album for family and friends in minutes.

Robert is the marketing director of an online print and design firm http://www.weprintcolor.com. Robert covers all aspects of graphic development and digital media designs.