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• Oracle Announces Leading ISV Integration With Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  More Than 100 ISVs, including Big Machines, Marketo and Xactly, now Provide Integrated Offerings to Help Maximize Sales and Single Customer Viewpoint Demonstrating its continued commitment to business value via open standards and the cloud, Oracle today announced that more than 100 leading ISVs are integrating in the cloud with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, a service available through Oracle Cloud. For the first time Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service users can choose from a wide array of directly integrated third-party solutions, providing a new level of choice, seamless deployment and single view of customers with preferred implementations. Top partners, including ActivePrime, Avaya, BigMachines, Box, Brainshark, Callidus Software, CirrusPath, Clicktools, CRMIT, DBSync, EchoSign from Adobe, Eloqua, Fliptop, FPX, HarQen, HubSpot, iHance, InsideSales.com, InsideView, Interactive Intelligence, Lingotek, LinkPoint360, Marketo, Nuance, PerspecSys, Postcode Anywhere, Revegy, salesElement, StrikeIron, upsourceIT, White Springs, X+1 and Xactly, have announced their availability and integration today. By integrating with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, ISV solutions can easily be leveraged by customersBy choosing Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service as a sales platform, customers will continue to have complete choice of their own quoting, lead management and sales methodology solutions and it will all be pre-integrated with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service. With demonstrable integration fusing standards-based technologies, such as SOAP web services, Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service customers choosing ISV integrations will also benefit from familiar ease-of-use and the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud ervice user interface, including buttons, links and custom objects for a rich user experience. ISV integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service also enables on-demand contextual data exchange capabilities, linking Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service business data with third-party application data for a complete CRM view. ISVs building robust, repeatable integrations with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service can begin the process of achieving Oracle Validated Integration, an Oracle PartnerNetwork program that recognizes Oracle partner solutions with proven integration to Oracle Applications. ISVs can learn more about Oracle Validated Integration    here. For customers, Oracle Validated Integration means that a partner’s integration has been tested and validated as functionally and technically sound, that the partner solution is integrated with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service in a reliable, standardized way, and that the integration operates and performs as documented. Oracle Cloud provides a broad portfolio of Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all on a subscription basis. Oracle Cloud delivers instant value and productivity for end users, administrators, and developers through functionally rich, integrated, secure, enterprise cloud services. Supporting Quotes “BigMachines is a leader in Configure, Price, and Quote solutions in the Cloud. Our solution delivers accurate quotes directly from an opportunity, integrated with the leading Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud application from Oracle,” says John Pulling, Senior Vice President of Products at Big Machines. “Together, Big Machines and Oracle efficiently automate changes, enabling a faster, more efficient sales process for our joint customers.”   ”Modern marketing and sales must engage customers and prospects in real time across the web, email, social media, online and offline channels to understand where and how to allocate their budgets for maximum return,” said Srini Venkatesan, Senior VP, Products and Engineering at Marketo. “Alignment and integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service allows Marketo’s solutions to deliver innovative capabilities for sales and marketing to adapt and grow their business on the core Oracle platform for CRM.”   “Sales incentives are the best way to drive better performance. Well managed incentives improve the bottom line, particularly when combined with effective sales systems,” said Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly Corporation. “With Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service and Xactly working together, customers gain insight and efficiencies. The combination can create more effective compensation programs, while motivating sales to work to its full potential."   “The tremendous integration of leading ISVs with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service is a testament to the undeniable business value and demand from customers,” said Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM. “Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service continues to define the industry, and we are proud to work with these leading ISVs to help users simultaneously maximize sales and revenue and extend their current deployments for a deeper and single customer viewpoint.” Supporting Resources Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service Learn More About Oracle Cloud

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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• Why All The Hype Around Live Help?

  - by ruth.donohue

  I am pleased to introduce guest blogger, Damien Acheson today. Based in Cambridge, MA, Damien is the Product Marketing Manager for ATG’s Live Help products. Welcome, Damien!! BY DAMIEN ACHESON Why all the hype around live help? An eCommerce professional recently asked me: “Why all the hype around live chat and click to call?” I already have a customer service phone number that’s available to my online visitors. Why would I want to add live help? If anything, I want my website to reduce the number of calls to my contact center, not increase it!” The effect of adding live help to a website is counter-intuitive. Done right, live help doesn’t increase your call volume; it optimizes it by replacing traditional telephone calls with smarter, more productive, live voice and live chat interactions. This generates instant cost savings, and a measurable lift in sales and customer retention. A live help interaction differs from a traditional telephone call in six radical ways: Targeting. With live help you can target specific visitors at just the exact right time with a live call or live chat invitation based on hundreds of different parameters. For example, visitors who appear to hesitate before making a large purchase may receive a live help invitation, while others may not. Productivity. By reserving live voice to visitors with complex questions, and offering self-service and live chat for more simple interactions, agents with the right domain expertise can handle simultaneous queries and achieve substantial productivity gains. Routing. Live help interactions take into account visitors’ web context to intelligently route queries to the best available agent, thereby lifting first contact resolution. Context. Traditional telephone numbers force online customers to “change channels” and “start over” with a phone agent. With Live help, agents get the context of the web session and can instantly access the customer’s transaction details and account information, substantially reducing handle times. Interaction. Agents can solve a customer’s problem more effectively co-browsing and collaborating with the visitor in real-time to complete online forms and transactions. Analytics. Unlike traditional telephone numbers, live help allows you to tie Web analytics to customer satisfaction and agent performance indicators. To better understand these differences and advantages over traditional customer service, watch this demo on optimizing customer interactions with Live Help. Technorati Tags: ATG,Live Help,Commerce

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• Stuck due to "knowing too much"

  - by Ran Biron

  Note more discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4037794 Welcome Hacker News Visitors! While HN is a fine forum for discussion and debate, Programmers - Stack Exchange is not. From the FAQ: If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ____”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ____ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.) Currently, this question is viewed by the membership of Programmers.SE as more likely to provoke unproductive discussion than constructive answers; while debates on its form and future are conducted, it will be locked to prevent arguments and vandalism. -- Shog9 I have a relatively simple development task, but every time I try to attack it, I end up spiraling in deep thoughts - how could it extending the future, what are the 2nd generation clients going to need, how does it affect "non functional" aspects (e.g. Performance, authorization...), how would it best be architectured to allow change... I remember myself a while ago, younger and, perhaps, more eager. The "me" I was then wouldn't have given a thought about all that - he would've gone ahead and wrote something, then rewrote it, then rewrote it again (and again...). The "me" today is more hesitant, more careful. I find it much easier today to sit and plan and instruct other people on how to do things than to actually go ahead and do them myself - not because I don't like to code - the opposite, I love to! - but because every time I sit at the keyboard, I end up in that same annoying place. Is this wrong? Is this a natural evolution, or did I drive myself into a rut? Fair disclosure - in the past I was a developer, today my job title is a "system architect". Good luck figuring what it means - but that's the title. Wow. I honestly didn't expect this question to generate that many responses. I'll try to sum it up. Reasons: Analysis paralysis / Over engineering / gold plating / (any other "too much thinking up-front can hurt you"). Too much experience for the given task. Not focusing on what's important. Not enough experience (and realizing that). Solutions (not matched to reasons): Testing first. Start coding (+ for fun) One to throw away (+ one API to throw away). Set time constraints. Strip away the fluff, stay with the stuff. Make flexible code (kinda opposite to "one to throw away", no?). Thanks to everyone - I think the major benefit here was to realize that I'm not alone in this experience. I have, actually, already started coding and some of the too-big things have fallen off, naturally. Since this question is closed, I'll accept the answer with most votes as of today. When/if it changes - I'll try to follow.

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• Detecting if someone is in a room in your house and sending you an email.

  - by mbcrump

  Let me setup this scenario: You are selling your house. You have small children. (Possibly 2 rug rats or more) The real estate company calls and says they have a showing for your house between the hours of 3pm-6pm. You have to keep the children occupied. You realize this is the 5th time you have shown your house this week. What is a programmer to do?……Setup a webcam, find a motion detection software that has support to launch a program and of course, Visual Studio 2010. First, comes the tools Some sort of webcam, I chose the WinBook because a friend of mine loaned it to me. It is a basic USB2.0 camera that supports 640x480 without software.  Next up was find webcam software that supports launching a program. WebcamXP support this. VS 2010 Console Application. A cell phone that you can check your email. You may be asking, why write code to send the email when a lot of commercial software motion detection packages include that as base functionality. Well, first it cost money and second I don’t want the picture of the person as that probably invades privacy and as a future buyer, I don’t want someone recording me in their house. Now onto the show... First, the code part. We are going to create a VS2010 or whatever version you have installed and use the following code snippet. Code Snippet using System; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Net;     namespace MotionDetectionEmailer {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             try             {                 MailMessage m = new MailMessage                    ("[email protected]",                     "[email protected]",                     "Motion Detected at " + DateTime.Now,                     "Someone is in the downstairs basement.");                 SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.charter.net");                 client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("mbcrump", "NOTTELLINGYOU");                 client.Send(m);             }               catch (SmtpException ex)             {                 Console.WriteLine("Who cares?? " + ex.ToString());             }         }       } } Second, Download and install wecamxp and select the option to launch an external program and you are finished. Now, when you are at MCDonalds and can check your email on your phone, you will see when they entered the house and you can go back home without waiting the full 3 hours. --- NICE!

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• links for 2010-04-22

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Barry N. Perkins: Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT "Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution." -- Barry N. Perkins, VP Oracle Modernization & Oracle Integrated Solutions (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture modernization) Paul Homchick: The Information Driven Value Chain - Part 2 Paul Homchick continues his series with a look "at the way investments have been made in enterprise software in an effort to create and manage value, and how systems are moving from a controlled-process approach design towards gathering and using dynamically using information." (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture) @vambenepe: The battle of the Cloud Frameworks: Application Servers redux? "The battle of the Cloud Frameworks has started," says William Vambenepe, "and it will look a lot like the battle of the Application Servers which played out over the last decade and a half." (tags: oracle otn cloud frameworks appserver) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: Day 4 Wrap Up Oraclenerd feesses up: "The day started out with the realization that I pulled off the best (COLLABORATE - self annointed) prank ever. Twitter was...all atwitter about the fact that Mark Rittman was Oracle's Person of the Year. Of course it wasn't true. If you look at the picture, you'll realize that he's wearing exactly the same clothes in the magazine cover as he is in real life." (tags: collaborate2010 oracleace) Oracle's Hal Stern at Cloud Expo: "We've Moved from 'What' to 'How'" | Cloud Computing Journal "Hal also spoke a bit about building 'a sustainable IT model.' By this, he said he didn't mean the various Green IT and similar efforts that 'are all about data center efficiency. I think the operational model is just as important. Many enterprises are managing a tremendous amount of complexity, and it's hard to make this sustainable.'" -- Cloud News Desk (tags: oracle cloud cloudexpo halstern) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: The Beach Party "Then tiki statues somehow were incorporated into various dances" -- Oracle ACE Chet "oraclenerd" Justice (tags: 0racle otn oracleace collaborate2010 oaug ioug lasvegas) David Andrews: Collaborate Day Two "Collaborate 2010 has focused on helping attendees understand what is already available and how to make more effective use of it. This does not sound exciting but it is extremely valuable. Most customers use only a small fraction of the capability of the products they already own. Helping them understand all the additional things they could be doing without buying anything more is very valuable." -- David Andrews (tags: oracle oaug collaborate2010 ioug)

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• Praise for Europe's Smart Metering & Conservation Efforts

  - by caroline.yu

  Recently, a writer at the Home Energy Team praised the UK for its efforts towards smart metering and energy conservation, with an article entitled UK Blazing A Trail With Smart Metering At Home? The article highlighted that the Department of Energy and Climate Change has announced that smart metering will be introduced in the next decade and that all UK households will have smart meters by the year 2020. In fact, the UK is not the only country striving to achieve carbon reduction targets, as many of its European counterparts have begun to take positive steps towards tackling the issue of energy conservation by implementing innovative new metering and billing technologies as well as promoting alternative energy solutions, such as wind and solar power. Since 1997, the states of the European Union, including France, Germany and Spain, have been working towards achieving a target of 12 percent renewable energy electricity by 2010. Germany in particular has made a significant achievement so far, having surpassed the target early in 2007. This success is largely due to the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG), which promoted the use of renewable energy. Recently, analysis from the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) found that 21 of the EU Member States are meeting or exceeding their national target to achieve 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. However, six states - Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Bulgaria and Denmark - say they will not manage to reach their target through domestic action alone. Bulgaria and Denmark believe that with fresh national initiatives they could meet or exceed their targets, but others, including Italy, may need to import renewable energy from neighboring non-EU countries. Top achievers, according to the EWEA report, are Spain, which believes its renewable energy will reach 22.7 percent by 2020, as well as Germany, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden, who will all exceed their targets. "Importantly, the way that this renewable energy is controlled and distributed must be addressed in order to ensure its success," said Bastian Fischer, vice president and general manager EMEA, Oracle Utilities. "A smart gird infrastructure can enable utilities to deal with load distribution in times of increased need and ensure power is always available from these means. A smart grid also underpins the success of metering and billing technologies, such as smart metering, and allows utilities to deal with increased usage data and provide accurate billing." Outside of Europe, Australia has made significant steps towards improving water conservation. The Australian Department of Sustainability and Environment took some of the recent advancements made in the energy sector, including new metering and billing solutions, and applied them to the water industry, enhancing customer service and reducing consumption as a result. The adoption of smart metering in Europe is mainly driven by regulation, but significant technological improvements are being made the world over to change the way we use all kinds of energy. However, the developing markets are lagging behind. One of the primary reasons for this is the lack of infrastructure in place to use as a foundation for setting up energy-saving solutions, which is slowing the adoption of technologies such as smart meters. However, these countries do benefit from fewer outdated infrastructure and legacy systems, which is often cited by others as a difficult barrier to deploying new solutions. As a result, some countries should find new technologies easier to implement and adapt to in the immediate future, without this roadblock.

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• Focus on Social Relationship Management at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Pat Ma

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 0 0 1 422 2408 involver 20 5 2825 14.0 Normal 0 false false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Greetings from Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Today, we’re going to focus on Social Relationship Management at Oracle OpenWorld.?Social networking is touching all businesses today.  Customers are speaking about your brand right now on social media sites. Your employees are speaking to one another on social media sites. In an Oracle survey, 40% of consumers factor in Facebook recommendations when making purchasing decisions. Despite the rise of social networking, 70% of marketers report having little understanding of social media conversations happening around their brand. Oracle has invested in technologies that will help companies leverage social media technologies for their enterprise. Our suite of social products is collectively known as Social Relationship Management. Customers are using Social Relationship Management to get analytics to social media conversations around their brand, manage multiple social media channels while keeping their brand consistent, optimize internal workflows and processes, and create better customer relationships and experiences. In this example, using Social Relationship Management, a high-end national grocery chain is able to see that “Coconut Water” is trending in San Francisco. They are now able to send a $2-off coconut water coupon to shoppers who have checked into their San Francisco locations. This promotion further drives sales of coconut water in San Francisco. In another example, using Social Relationship Management, a technology company creates multiple Facebook pages and runs campaigns on them. These social campaigns are now integrated and tracked as another marketing channel in Oracle Fusion CRM. The technology company can now track and respond to a particular customer as he moves across multiple channels – without having to restart the conversation each time the customer contacts the company. Furthermore, the technology company can see in one interface what marketing channels – including social – is performing best for each promotion. Besides being a Software-as-a-Service solution, social is also a Platform-as-a-Service solution. The benefit here is that customers can extend the functionality of our social applications to suit their particular needs or create their own social application from scratch. During the Social Developer track, developers are learning how to use Java and other industry-standard programming languages to plug in social functionality to enterprise applications. To see how Social Relationship Management can help your business build better relationships and experience with customers, visit us on the web at oracle.com/social. There are a lot more social-oriented sessions left at OpenWorld. To view a schedule of the upcoming social-oriented sessions, go here.

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• RightNow CX Cloud Service Combined with Oracle Fusion CRM in the Cloud

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  ·        The May 2012 release of Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service, the customer experience suite, is now integrated with Oracle Fusion CRM, helping organizations to achieve sustainable business growth through relevant, cross-channel customer interactions that can increase revenue opportunities and drive organizational efficiencies. Relevant Interactions Build Stronger Customer Relationships ·          Armed with a comprehensive view of all customer interactions across channels, the context and status of these interactions, and an awareness of the customer’s value to the organization, companies can now offer more relevant products and services to customers. ·         Using the combined Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM solutions, organizations can increase customer retention, drive higher levels of customer advocacy, and increase sales conversion rates with tools designed to: - Provide a complete, cross-channel view of the customer to sales, marketing and service. - Empower sales and service departments to easily collaborate to proactively solve customer issues, using opportunities to provide purchase advice at the right time and with the right solutions. - Allow sales to easily review service history in preparation for sales calls. - Enable agents to understand customer value based upon prior buying habits and existing opportunities. Deeper Insight Enables Targeted, Personalized Opportunities ·          The combination of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM allows sales and marketing organizations to simultaneously leverage service interactions from RightNow CX and sales prediction and segmentation capabilities from Fusion Sales. This helps companies to: - Better match products and services to specific customer needs based on customer service history.  - Deliver targeted, personalized interactions intended to help customers derive more value from purchases and to inform future buying decisions. - Identify new opportunities to increase deal size and conversion rates. Supporting Quotes ·         “Every interaction is a relationship opportunity to grow your business. When these interactions are relevant and add value for customers, customers are more likely to trust the relationship and seek purchase advice,” said David Vap, group vice president, Oracle. “This customer trust provides an opportunity to increase customer product adoption and to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, thereby increasing company profitability.” Supporting Resources ·         Oracle Fusion CRM ·         Oracle Fusion Applications ·         Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service ·         OracleCRM on Facebook ·         OracleCRM on YouTube

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• 24 Hours of PASS: Whine, Whine, Whine

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  24 Hours of Pass (or 24HOP) is a great program offered by PASS to provide free, online training for anyone who wants to learn more about SQL Server.  They routinely have the best SQL Server presenters available for these sessions, and attract hundreds, perhaps even a thousand attendees from around the world.  This is definitely one of the best things they've started doing in the past few years, and every session I've attended has been excellent. So why am I so grumpy about it? I'm not really, pretty much everything here is a minor annoyance that I can deal with.  However since they're so minor they seem to be things that can be easily corrected and would make the process much better. First off, this is my biggest gripe, the registration page: https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000181573/Registration.aspx?pageName=lj6378f4fhf5hpdm What grinds my gears about this?  I have to scroll alllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way to bottom to actually register for the sessions.  This wouldn't be so bad except all the details of the session, including the presenter, is in a separate list at the top.  Both lists contain info the other does not, and scrolling between them to determine "Should I make time to listen to this?  Who is speaking at this time anyway?" is really unnecessary. My preference would be to keep the top list and add the checkboxes and schedule info in separate columns.  This is a full-width design, so there's plenty of space for this data, which is pretty small anyway.  The other huge benefit is halving the size of the page, which improves performance and lowers bandwidth usage considerably.  And if you know HTML/ASP.Net, and you view the page source, you can find PLENTY of other things that can be reduced even further.  (not just viewstate) One nice thing that PASS does is send iCal reminders to your email address so you can accept them to your calendar.  Again, they leave off the presenter in the appointment details, while still duplicating the meeting title in the body.  Sometimes I make decisions based on speaker rather than content (Natalie Portman is reading the Yellow Pages??? I'M THERE!) and having the speaker in the iCal is helpful. Next minor annoyances are the necessity for providing a company name, and the survey questions.  I know PASS needs to market themselves effectively, and they need information to do that, and since this is a free event it's really not worth complaining about, but why ask the survey question twice? (once at registration, once again when joining the LiveMeeting)  Same thing for the company name.  All of this should be tied to email address, so that's all I should need to enter when joining the LiveMeeting. The last one is also minor, but it irks me in this day and age of multiple browsers and the decline of Internet Explorer as a dominant platform.  The registration page was originally created in Visual Studio 2003, and has a lot of IE-specific crud representative of the browser situation of 2003. (IE5 references? really? and is the aforementioned viewstate big enough?)  This causes some grief with other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and sometimes IE8 or 9.  And don't get me started on using the page on a Mac or in Safari. My main point is that PASS is an international organization, welcoming everyone from all levels of SQL Server proficiency, and in that spirit I think it would help to accommodate a wider range of browser software, especially since the registration page is extremely simple.  I recognize that this page is not hosted on the PASS website and may be maintained by some division of Microsoft, but to me that's even worse if MS can't update their own pages.  They've deprecated IE6, so they don't need to maintain support on their own websites anymore. OK, I'll shut up now. #sqlpass #24HOP

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• What Counts For a DBA: Ego

  - by Louis Davidson

  Leaving aside, for a second, Freud’s psychoanalytical definitions, the term “ego” generally refers to a person’s sense of self, and their self-esteem. In casual usage, however, it usually appears in the adjectival form, “egotistical” (most often followed by “jerk”). You don’t need to be a jerk to be a DBA; humility is important. However, ego is important too. A good DBA needs a certain degree of self-esteem…a belief and pride in what he or she can do better than anyone else can. The ideal DBA needs to be humble enough to admit when they are wrong but egotistical enough to know when they are right, and to stand up for that knowledge and make their voice heard. In most organizations, the DBA team is seriously outnumbered by headstrong developers and clock driven managers, and “great” DBAs will often be outnumbered by…well…the not so great. In order to be heard in this environment, a DBA will not only need to be very skilled, but will also need a healthy dose of ego. As Freud might have put it, the unconscious desire of the DBA (the id) is for iron-fist control over their databases, and code that runs in them. However, the ego moderates this desire, seeking to “satisfy the id in realistic ways that, in the long term, bring benefit rather than grief“. In other words, the ego understands the need to exert a measure of control and self-belief, but also to tolerate and play nicely with developers and other DBAs. The trick, naturally, is learning how to be heard when it is important, but also to make everyone around you welcome that input, even when you have to be bold to make the “I know what I am talking about, and you…well…not so much” decisions. Consider a baseball team, bottom of the ninth inning of the championship game, man on first and down one run. Almost anyone on that team will have the ability to hit a home run, but only one or two will have the iron belief that they can pull it off in this critical, end-game situation. The player you need in this situation is the one who has passionately gone the extra mile preparing for just this moment, is bursting at the seams with self-confidence, and can look the coach in the eye and state, boldly, “Put me in, I am your best bet“. Likewise, on those occasions when high customer demand coincides with copious system errors, and panic is bubbling just beneath the surface, you don’t need the minimally qualified support person, armed with the “reboot and hope” technique (though that sometimes works!). You need the DBA who steps up and says, “Put me in” and has the skill and tenacity to back up those words and to fix the pinpoint and fix the problem, whatever it takes, while keeping customers and managers happy. Of course, the egotistical DBA will happily spend hours telling you how great they are at their job, and how brilliantly they put out a previous fire, and this is no guarantee that they can deliver. However, if an otherwise-humble DBA looks you in the eye and says, “I can do it”, then hear them out. Sometimes, this burst of ego will be exactly what’s required.

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by David Atkinson

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by SQLDev

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• Language Club

  - by Ben Griswold

  We started a language club at work this week.  Thus far, we have a collective interest in a number of languages: Python, Ruby, F#, Erlang, Objective-C, Scala, Clojure, Haskell and Go. There are more but these 9 received the most votes. During the first few meetings we are going to determine which language we should tackle first. To help make our selection, each member will provide a quick overview of their favored language by answering the following set of questions: Why are you interested in learning “your” language(s). (There’s lots of work, I’m an MS shill, It’s hip and  fun, etc) What type of language is it?  (OO, dynamic, functional, procedural, declarative, etc) What types of problems is your language best suited to solve?  (Algorithms over big data, rapid application development, modeling, merely academic, etc) Can you provide examples of where/how it is being used?  If it isn’t being used, why not?  (Erlang was invented at Ericsson to provide an extremely fault tolerant, concurrent system.) Quick history – Who created/sponsored the language?  When was it created?  Is it currently active? Does the language have hardware support (an attempt was made at one point to create processor instruction sets specific to Prolog), or can it run as an interpreted language inside another language (like Ruby in the JVM)? Are there facilities for programs written in this language to communicate with other languages?  How does this affect its utility? Does the language have a IDE tool support?  (Think Eclipse or Visual Studio) How well is the language supported in terms of books, community and documentation? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) How is the language applicability to us as consultants?  What would the impact be of using the language in terms of cost, maintainability, personnel costs, etc.? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) This should provide an decent introduction into nearly a dozen languages and give us enough context to decide which single language deserves our undivided attention for the weeks to come.  Stay tuned for the winner…

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• BigData and Customer Experience: Happy Together

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  The two big buzzes of the year may lay closer than it appears. Both concepts intersect at various points: BigData and Return of Investment of Marketing Campaigns On a recent post Big Data Is The Future Of Marketing Jeff Dachis explains very clearly how “Big data analytics finally allows marketers to identify, measure, and manage what is positively impacting their Brand”. Regression analysis applied to big data volumes coming from social media will substitute the failed attempts to justify marketing investments on social media in terms of followers and likes, he continues, “the measurement models applied by marketers on TV Campaigns don´t work on social”, we need to study the data with fresh eyes and maybe then we will start understanding and measuring brand engagemet. Social CRM and BigData The real value of Social CRM start by analyzing mass of big data from social media in order of applying social intelligence techniques that allow us to classify new customer niches and communities and define appropriated strategies to contact potential customers. Gartner Says that the Market for Social CRM is on pace to surpass $1 Billion in Revenue by Year-End 2012 but in words of Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst at Forrester Research “Social customer relationship management is hard” (The Social CRM Arms Race Heats ). To succeed brands need three things: Investing in new social tools, investing in consultancy and investing in infrastructure for massive data storage and analysis. Neither CeX or BigData are easy and cheap wins. But what are the customer benefits of such investments? Big Data and Brand Engagement Time is the most valuable asset of todays consumers: tired of information overload, exhausted by the terabytes of offering, anxious because of not having the same fast multichannel experience with their services’ marketers or preferred goods providers than the one they found on their social media. Yes, I know you have read this before- me too. But is real. The motto of the Customer Experience philosophy of providing a consistent experience through multiple touchpoints that makes the relationship customer/brand easier and valuable finds it basis on understanding customer/s preferences and context for which BigData analysis is another imperative. In summary, I believe that using BigData Analysis in combination with appropriated CeX strategies and technologies is a promising direction for achieving: efficiency and marketing cost-savings; growing the customer base; and increasing customer conversion and retention. In a world: The Direction of Future Marketing.

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• How do you educate your teammates without seeming condescending or superior?

  - by Dan Tao

  I work with three other guys; I'll call them Adam, Brian, and Chris. Adam and Brian are bright guys. Give them a problem; they will figure out a way to solve it. When it comes to OOP, though, they know very little about it and aren't particularly interested in learning. Pure procedural code is their MO. Chris, on the other hand, is an OOP guy all the way -- and a cocky, condescending one at that. He is constantly criticizing the work Adam and Brian do and talking to me as if I must share his disdain for the two of them. When I say that Adam and Brian aren't interested in learning about OOP, I suspect Chris is the primary reason. This hasn't bothered me too much for the most part, but there have been times when, looking at some code Adam or Brian wrote, it has pained me to think about how a problem could have been solved so simply using inheritance or some other OOP concept instead of the unmaintainable mess of 1,000 lines of code that ended up being written instead. And now that the company is starting a rather ambitious new project, with Adam assigned to the task of getting the core functionality in place, I fear the result. Really, I just want to help these guys out. But I know that if I come across as just another holier-than-thou developer like Chris, it's going to be massively counterproductive. I've considered: Team code reviews -- everybody reviews everybody's code. This way no one person is really in a position to look down on anyone else; besides, I know I could learn plenty from the other members on the team as well. But this would be time-consuming, and with such a small team, I have trouble picturing it gaining much traction as a team practice. Periodic e-mails to the team -- this would entail me sending out an e-mail every now and then discussing some concept that, based on my observation, at least one team member would benefit from learning about. The downside to this approach is I do think it could easily make me come across as a self-appointed expert. Keeping a blog -- I already do this, actually; but so far my blog has been more about esoteric little programming tidbits than straightforward practical advice. And anyway, I suspect it would get old pretty fast if I were constantly telling my coworkers, "Hey guys, remember to check out my new blog post!" This question doesn't need to be specifically about OOP or any particular programming paradigm or technology. I just want to know: how have you found success in teaching new concepts to your coworkers without seeming like a condescending know-it-all? It's pretty clear to me there isn't going to be a sure-fire answer, but any helpful advice (including methods that have worked as well as those that have proved ineffective or even backfired) would be greatly appreciated. UPDATE: I am not the Team Lead on this team. Chris is. UPDATE 2: Made community wiki to accord with the general sentiment of the community (fancy that).

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryInstituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI) is a decentralized  federal agency with the goals of protecting and ensuring awareness of industrial property rights in Mexico. IMPI  business objectives were to increase efficiency, improve client service, accelerate services to the public and reduce paper use by digitizing management of necessary documentation for patent and trademark submissions and approvals. IMPI  implemented  Oracle WebCenter Content to develop electronic inquiry service by digitizing and managing documents and a public Web site making patent-related information easily available online. With the implemented solution IMPI increased the number of monthly inquires from 200 in person consultations to 80,000 electronic consultations and the number of trademark record inquiries from 30,000 to 300,000. Company OverviewInstituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial (IMPI) is a decentralized federal agency with the goals of protecting and ensuring awareness of industrial property rights in Mexico. IMPI is responsible for registering and publicizing inventions, distinctive signs, trademarks, and patents. In addition to its Mexico City headquarters, IMPI has five regional offices.  Business Challenges IMPI  business objectives were to increase efficiency by automating internal operations and patent and trademark-related procedures and services, improve client service by simplifying patent and trademark procedures, accelerate services to the public and reduce paper use by digitizing management of necessary documentation for patent and trademark submissions and approvals. Solution DeployedIMPI worked with Oracle Consulting to implement Oracle WebCenter Content to develop electronic inquiry service - services that were previously provided in person only - by digitizing and managing documents. They use Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Edition to manage data for all mission-critical systems, automating patent and trademark transactions, providing consistent, readily available, and accurate data. IMPI developed a Web site to support newly digitized information with simple and flexible interfaces, making patent-related information easily available online to the public. Business ResultsWith the implemented solution IMPI increased the number of monthly inquires  from 200 in person consultations to 80,000 electronic consultations and the number of trademark record inquiries from 30,000 to 300,000. “Oracle WebCenter Content structure is unique. It lets us separately manage communication with other applications and databases, and performs content management itself. It’s a stable tool, at an appropriate cost, that lets us develop and provide reliable electronic services.” Eugenio Ponce de León, Divisional Director of Systems and Technology, Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial Additional Information Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content

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• A Case for Oracle Fusion Middleware by Lucas Jellema

  - by JuergenKress

  An in-depth look at the interaction of people, processes, and technologies in the transition to a service-oriented architecture. Author's Note This article presents a profile of a fictitious organization, NOPERU. The story of NOPERU as told in this article is actually a collage of the events at some dozen organizations that I have been involved with over the past few years. None of these organizations sport all the characteristics of NOPERU - but all of them have gone through or are going through a similar transition as described here and all aspects of this article were taken from real life at one or usually many of these organizations. Background NOPERU (National Organization for Permits for Emissions and Resource Usage) is a public organization that continues to transform in terms of its business, organization and technology. Changing business requirements; new interaction channels; and increasing demands for more flexibility, faster throughput and lower costs drive these transformations, while technological evolution and new architecture patterns enable the change. NOPERU chose Oracle Fusion Middleware as the technology platform to implement the new architecture and required applications. This article takes a close look at NOPERU's journey from its origins in the early 1990s as a largely paper-based entity with regional databases and client-server Oracle Forms applications. Its upcoming business objectives are introduced: what is required of the organization and what the higher goals behind these requirements are. The architecture roadmap is described at a high level as well as drilled down to a service oriented design. Based on the architecture roadmap and the business requirements and NOPERU went through a technology selection to determine the technology stack with which the future would be realized in terms of IT. The article discusses that selection and details the projects subsequently planned (and executed to date). The new architecture and technology as well as the introduction of an Agile development method have had substantial consequences for the IT organization, the processes and individual staff members. The approach NOPERU has adopted with regard to the people and the organization is portrayed. Finally, the article discusses many conclusions that NOPERU has drawn that may benefit itself and other organizations. Introducing NOPERU NOPERU is a national organization charged with issuing permits for excessive emissions (i.e., carbon dioxide) and disproportionate usage of such resources as energy or water. Anyone-whether a commercial enterprise, government agency or private person--who emits or consumes more than what is considered "fair usage" requires such a permit. When someone builds an outdoor heated swimming pool, for example, or open-air terrace heating, such a permit needs to be obtained. When a company installs new, energy-intensive equipment, such as water boilers or deep freezers, it too needs to get a NOPERU permit. Government-sponsored projects at every level that involve consumption of large quantities of fresh water or production of high volumes of emissions must turn to NOPERU for a permit. Without the required license, any interested party can get a court to immediately put a stop to the disputed activity. Read the full article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Lucas Jellema,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Tech Ed/BI Conference 2010: A Recovering Industry in a Recovering City

  - by andrewbrust

  I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year’s Microsoft Tech Ed and Business Intelligence conferences, in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it.  That’s probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it. Why the writer’s block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why.  Now that I’m on the flight home, I’m starting to piece it together. One reason, for sure, was that I’ve spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me.  Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate.  This year’s Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups.  That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new self-service BI offering) which was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros.  The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft’s key BI champion, Amir Netz.  And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location. Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show.  Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.  Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry’s economic health. The news here is good.  First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to.  The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard.  This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it’s a huge relief.  Add to that the fact that this year’s Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year’s (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent.  But there’s more to it than that. Here’s the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry.  Whether it’s the Internet’s impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft’s performance in the market, partner companies aren’t just rolling with the punches; they’re welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage.  No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued.  Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning.  Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it.  And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it’s already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently. The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy.  The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may,  true renaissance is underlying this industry’s success. That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we’re past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy.  The fundamentals are good.

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• Role based access control in Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Ronen Kofman

  Enterprise Managers let’s you control any element in the environment and define which users can do what on each element. We will show here an example on how to set up RBAC (Role Base Access Control) for Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager, this will be a very simplified explanation  to help you get going. For more comprehensive explanations please refer to the Enterprise Manager User Guide. OK, first some basic Enterprise Manager terminology: Target – any element in the environment is a target – server, pool, zone, VM etc. Administrators – these are the Enterprise Manager users who can login to the platform. Roles – roles are privilege profiles which could be applied to Administrators. The first step will be to discover the virtual environment and bring it in to Enterprise Manager, this process is simple and can be done in two ways: Work on your Oracle VM manager, set it up until you feel comfortable and then register it in Enterprise Manager Use Enterprise Manager and build it all from there. In both cases we will be able to see the same picture from Oracle VM and from Enterprise Manager, any change made in one will be reflected in the other. Oracle VM Manager: Enterprise Manager: Once you have your virtual environment set up in Enterprise Manager it is time to start associating VMs with users (or Administrators as they are called in Enterprise Manager). Enterprise Manager allows us to connect to multiple different identity services and import users from them but the simplest way to add Administrators is just go to setup->security->Administrators and create new Administrator. The creation wizard will walk you through several stages and allow you to assign role(s) to your newly created Administrator, using roles can really shorten the process if done multiple times. When you get to “Target Privileges” stage, scroll down to the bottom to the “Target Privileges” section. In this section you can add targets (virtual machine in our case) and define the type of privileges you would like to assign to the Administrator which you are creating. In this example I chose one of the VMs and granted full privileges to the newly created Administrator. Administrator creation wizard "Target Privileges": Now when you login as the newly created administrator, you will only see the VM that was assign to you and will be able to have full control over it. That’s it, simple and straight forward, Enterprise Manager offers many more things which I skipped here but the point is that if you need role based access control Enterprise Manager can give it to you in a very easy way. Oh and one more thing, virtualization management in Enterprise Manager has no license cost, sweet.

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• The Value of SOA Specialization - Fujitsu

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Thanks for the nice ink The Value of Specialization In my last post  I talked about Fujitsu's achievement in obtaining SOA and other specializations, but I have heard murmurings from other partners about what just is the value? I think Oracle have to do more to advertise the benefits to customers, we need to see customers asking for specialization for it to really work, but Oracle have made great promises about only recommending those partners who are specialized. For us there was another benefit. Oracle was sponsoring the 3rd Annual SOA Symposium in Berlin and invited us as their first specialized partner to take part. There is a great blog about the symposium on the SOA community blog site. This is real commitment from Oracle and we have other marketing opportunities being worked on with Jürgen. This does generate leads so my message to other Oracle Partners is, you need to do this, it is worthwhile.   Fujitsu - First SOA Specialized Partner Globally Just before Oracle Open World I found out that Fujitsu had achieved the first SOA Specialization globally. I think most partners know what the requirements are for Specialization and that in itself is challenging but the bureaucracy around the actual submission is an exercise in tenacity. I won’t go into that now; I have had my dig at Oracle this month, but enough to say the process could be improved. As a platinum partner we needed 5 specializations and we decided to go for SOA first. The reasoning behind this is that our Oracle Practice is known for being applications centric. We have always had an excellent technical capability but no one ever talked about that, it was just part and parcel of an implementation. However today we have just as many bids that are technology lead as there is applications lead, so it seemed a good plan to work on the areas we were not known for. We appointed a capability lead to be responsible for putting the team through the training and testing and Rosemary (Kell) was excellent, she ensured that everyone was on track and that it wasn’t just getting put into the ‘to do list’. In Fujitsu everyone in the Oracle Practice has an objective to achieve the competency tests in their area, so achieving the 2 pre sales, 2 sales and 1 support was no problem at all. We actually had 22 with the support capability proficiency.  The implementation specialist exams are much harder, more like OCP in the database area. We had help from the Oracle SOA Community; Jürgen Kress who runs this in EMEA is really motivational. At the time we started SOA was a beta exam which means you do not get the results immediately but again we put forward more than we needed. Manjit Chopra, Sukhraj Sahota, Emely Patra, Ian Scorrer and Sunny Sidhu all took the exam and eventually got the results they wanted they had passed. Congratulations. Here is Jurgen expalining why specialization is important. After the tests came the submissions where you need to include deals and experience, this was my bit, and persuading Oracle we really deserved the specialization. Finally we got the news we had been awarded the specialization, and a few days later that we were first globally. I am very proud. However there is no rest for the wicked and we plodded on to make the 5 specializations needed for Platinum and now we are working on the new Diamond status and I think SOA will be one of our 5 ‘super specializations’. This is a global Fujitsu initiative and I work closely with my colleague in Germany Jessika Weiss. It was nice to be able to have a press release about this and a comment from Judson Althoff  head of Oracle Alliances. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA,SOA Community,OPN,Oracle,Fujitsu,Debra Lilley,Jürgen Kress,Specialization,SOA Specialization

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• Industry perspectives on managing content

  - by aahluwalia

  Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management.  At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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• Tap Into Tier 1 ERP

  - by Christine Randle

  By: Larry Simcox, Senior Director, Accelerate Corporate Programs     Your customers aren’t satisfied with so-so customer service. Your employees aren’t happy with below average salaries.   So why would you settle for second-rate or tier 2 ERP?   A recent report from Nucleus Research found that usability improvements and rapid implementation tools are simplifying deployments, putting tier 1 enterprise applications well within reach for midsize companies. So how can your business tap into the power of tier 1 ERP? And what are the best ways to manage a deployment?   The Reputation of ERP Implementations Overhauling internal operations and implementing ERP can be a challenging endeavor for organizations of all sizes. Midsize companies often shy away from enterprise-class ERP, fearing complexity, limited resources and perceived challenging deployments. Many forward thinking executives experienced ERP implementations in the late 90s and early 2000s and embrace a strategy to grow their business by investing in a foundation for innovation and growth via ERP modernization projects.   In recent years there has been a strong consumerization of IT with enterprise applications and their delivery methods evolving to become more user-friendly.  Today, usability improvements and modern implementation tools have made top-tier ERP solutions more accessible for growing companies. Nucleus found that because enterprise-class software can now be rapidly deployed, the payback is quicker, the risks are lower, the software is less disruptive and overall, companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors and achieve more success with the advantages these types of systems deliver.   Tapping into the power of tier 1 ERP can be made much easier with Oracle Accelerate solutions. Created by Oracle's expert partners and reviewed by Oracle, Oracle Accelerate solutions are simple to deploy, industry-specific, packaged solutions that provide a fast time to benefit, which means getting the right solution in place quickly, inexpensively with a controlled scope and predictable returns.   How are growing midsize companies successfully deploying tier 1 ERP? According to Nucleus Research, companies can increase success in their tier 1 ERP deployments by limiting customization, planning a rapid go-live, bettering communication across departments, and considering different delivery options. Oracle Accelerate solutions incorporate industry best practices and encourage rapid deployments. And even more, Nucleus found customers deploying tier 1 ERP with Oracle that had used Oracle Business Accelerators, Oracle’s rapid implementation tools, reduced the time to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite by at least 50 percent.   Industrial manufacturer L.H. Dottie is one company that needed ERP with enhanced capabilities to support its growth and streamline business processes. Using out-of-the-box configuration of Oracle E-Business Suite modules (provided by Oracle Business Accelerators and delivered by Oracle Partner C3 Business Solutions), L.H. Dottie was able to speed its implementation and went live in just six and a half months. With tier 1 ERP, the company was able to grow and do its business better, automating a variety of processes, accelerating product delivery and gaining powerful data analysis capabilities that helped drive its business into further regions. See more details about their ERP implementation here.   Tier 1 enterprise-class applications have proven to boost the success of Oracle’s midsize customers. As Nucleus Research iterates, companies poised for growth or seeking to compete against larger competitors absolutely can tap into the power of tier 1 ERP and position themselves as enterprise-class through leveraging Oracle Accelerate solutions.   You can learn more here about The Evolving Business Case for Tier - 1 ERP in Midsize Companies in our exclusive webcast with Nucleus.   ###  

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• Three Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.   By [email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself. How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration? Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits. Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes.  This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants.  In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture. Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue.  The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time".  Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes.  The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving. Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record.  Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread.  This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities. Excelling in the Unstructured Future We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations.  Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise. Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.   The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached.  Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business. How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration. Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise. 

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• MySQL - Powering Online Media & Entertainment

  - by bertrand.matthelie(at)oracle.com

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } If you're reading news, watching videos, or playing games online, you're probably relying on MySQL to do so.   Facebook, YouTube, BBC News, Zynga, thePlatform and many other leading Media & Entertainment organizations chose MySQL to power their online news, gaming, social networking, advertising or other applications.   During the past decade, the Media & Entertainment industry experienced a spectacular transformation.  The mobile Internet is becoming the dominant media platform, and the boundaries between the different types of media (i.e. Print, TV, Radio, Internet) have increasingly blurred as we've gradually come to perform more and more of our daily activities online.   To better understand how MySQL can help you win in the fast paced world of Media & Entertainment, check out our whitepaper "MySQL - Powering The Online Media & Entertainment Industry" in which we cover:   ·       The key trends shaping the evolution of the media & entertainment industry.   ·       Their implications, and the requirements they place on the infrastructure of information & entertainment services providers.   ·       How you can leverage Oracle's MySQL technologies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver new highly scalable and highly available online media & entertainment applications.   You're welcome to download it here.

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