E-quality operates since 1999 providing value added services for translation agencies. These services include:
Certification consultancy services for TSPs
What’s the meaning of certification?
To certify means…. to prove, make certain. An organization that wants to get certified describes and declares on specific documents how it operates. On demand, a third party – a certification body - verifies that the way the company operates is consistent with what it has declared. That’s all.Why should a company get certified?
Two main reasons: first to differ from its competitors; second to improve the way it operates.How many certifications exist?
Two types of certifications are normally considered: product and system certifications.Product certification is related to the compliance of a product to defined specifications, e.g. safety.
System certification is related to the compliance of the way a company operates to defined specifications.
We will consider only system certifications according to ISO 9001 and EN 15038 standards.
What’s the meaning of these acronyms?
ISO means International Standard Organization. 9001 is the number that identifies the most famous system certification standard. Its name is a little longer, in Italy UNI EN ISO 9001:2000. UNI is the abbreviation of the Ente Italiano di Unificazione; EN is the acronym for European Norm; 2000 is the year in which the norm was officially published – it is normally reviewed every seven years.UNI EN 15038 is the brand new certification standard for TSPs.
How can an organization achieve a certification?
The basic process is simple and the following main steps can be identified:- Study of the norm, by self-training or with the help of skilled consultants (E-quality for example….). The norms can be bought in paper or electronic (PDF) format through your national standard body – for Italy through the Ente Nazionale di Unificazione: www.uni.com
- Gap analysis, i.e. determining what the organization is lacking in order to be compliant to the norm specifications. The gap analysis can be conducted by the company on its own, by using our E-quality checklists, or with the help of a skilled consultant (… we are of course at your disposal…)
- Solving the problems evidenced through the gap analysis
- Editing of the compulsory procedures that the norm requires (… if you are short of time you could buy the ready-to-use kit prepared for you by E-quality …)
- Selecting the certification body. This selection should consider the experience acquired by the body in your specific business (TSP in our case), its prestige, domestic and international relevance and – not last – its price. According to our experience a good choice could be UNITER, who was involved in the definition of the new international standard UNI EN 15038.
- Singing the contract with your certification body
- Carrying out the certification audit.
Migration towards Open Source platforms
What’s the meaning of Open Source?
Open Source identifies a software product with a special licence, by which the source code is available to all possible developers. Thanks to this wide cooperation (normally free and spontaneous), the final product can reach a much higher degree of complexity and enhancement compared to the levels it would reach with a single development group.The Open Content movement is inspired by the Open Source philosophy, in this case though what is free and available is not a source code of a software product, but editorial contents such as texts, images, videos and music.
Open Source software is not equal to freeware software, in fact many examples exist of freeware software which is not Open Source.
Why should I be interested in Open Source?
Because with Open Source it is possible to have high-end software, which is constantly updated and is sold at nominal prices – if it is not completely free.Which are the Open Source products I could be interested in?
The first product that E-quality would like to suggest is Mozilla Firefox, which can be used as browser to substitute Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox is more powerful, light and secure than Explorer and is available for both Microsoft and Linux. Mozilla suite also includes a program to manage your e-mail: Thunderbird Email. Click on the link to change for ever your way to browse the Internet!
You could also decide to leave Microsoft Office and switch to Openoffice, which is compatible with the famous Microsoft suite and is completely free. We at E-quality are sure that you TSPs have all regularly registered Microsoft licences, but should this not be the case and should you have installed unregistered copies (terrible!), you might think of solving this problem by switching to Openoffice.
Maybe you are not interested because your website is managed by another company (what? You do not have a website? We could deal with it for you….), but we owe a lot to the wonderful Nvu, the Open Source software to create websites, which is by no means less powerful than the most famous and costly products.
At this point you are ready for the big step: give up Microsoft Windows, its viruses and web attacks and switch to Linux. Linux is now an operative system easy to install and use, very powerful, robust and … free. Linux is available in “packages” called distributions, which differ according to their installation procedure and to the additional programs they contain.
E-quality has chosen for you and for their Clients Linux Kubuntu 6.06 LTS distribution, which you can easily download from www.kubuntu.org or contact us directly for a DVD format.
What happens to my Windows programs if I switch to Linux?
There are three different possibilities.First, you can verify on the Internet the compatibility of a similar Open Source product. Each day new ones are available.
Second, you ca use Wine, an Open Source product which emulates Windows in many cases.
Third, to be considered when the previous two fail, you can use a Windows Virtual Machine inside Linux, enabling your computer to work with both operating systems but at the expense of your PC performance and speed.