Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Magazine Review: PCQuest: UNDERSTAND CHOOSE IMPLEMENT IT

If you are an IT Techie at any level and have not put your hands on this magazine, do it right now, straighaway Introduction The title given above is the theme of PCQUEST magazine marked on the cover page of this magazine just below its name. 


PCQUEST is a CYBERMEDIA publication. I am subscriber of this magazine for the last 10 years or above as I don’t remember now when did I start reading it. The magazine is purely for IT tech savvy guys handling corporate companies / big enterprise companies. It provides you enough stuff on month to month basis @Rs. 100/- apiece. Over a period of years this magazine has groomed to cater food to the brains of tech savvy guys serving corporate companies all over as IT Heads, IT Teams, Consultants, Service Providers et al or the same in the process of making/developing themselves. 


The magazine comprising of around 130-150 pages is not at all a bad bargain to get lot of information at your hands every month. The magazine is bundled with: 
1. Special Supplement: from a world class company like IBM, Compaq, Dell etc. giving a first hand information about their latest products and utilities (alongwith how and where to use them and how to manage them) from the parent manufacturing company. 
2. Hot Technologies: again a sponsored small booklet that comes alongwith the magazine from AMD, Intel etc. providing Enterprise solutions by using their latest products. 3. Each issue will either contain either a DVD (they mark it as DVD Extremes) and a CD (Tech Video, an exclusive 30 minutes video on new technologies) or 3 CDs titled as PCQExtreme, PCQEssential and PCQuestLive.


Now about the well woven contents of this magazine
1.. Cover Story: Covering a well crafted topic in detail about the new technologies or technologies in the making to assist to find out your solutions for your organization. 
2. Tech and Trends: Any one single technology in detail 
3. Shootout: An economical way to buy hardware/technology 
4. Hands-On: Somewhere around 8 to 10 different topics are covered here to enhance your skills on hands on experience with Tech setups and troubleshooting both in hardware and software. 
5. Developer: An area for developers where they can get information on enhancement of their skills in development areas. Purely for software guys buried in development platforms like java, .net, linux, Win etc. 
6. Mini Shootout: Another area where you get solution for your day to day problems related to running your show in the organization be it related to mails, virus, spam etc. 
7. Indepth: An in depth coverage of a full fledged implementation of a corporate solution like workflow, CRM, ERP, KM etc. 8. Reviews: around 10 to 15 reviews every month on new hardware and software products so as to bring you at level to choose a right product for your organization. 
9. Books: This is a subset of Reviews where they review current IT books. 
10. Special Focus: An area where you get knowledge on how to set up large solutions in your huge networked organization. Like backup solutions, storage clustering, multi-tier server settings etc. 11. Also Enterprise solutions, Tech and Trends etc.


Overall a well designed and well conceptualized magazine

No comments: