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  • Save a view in Windows Media Player

    - by Charles Roper
    I like to view my library in various ways in WMP. For example, I usually search for Podcast and order the result by date added. This gives me a list of my podcasts by date order, newest to oldest. Is there a way of saving this view so that I don't have recreate it each time I open WMP? If it's not possible to do this, can anyone suggest an app that does do it, and that handles syncing as well as WMP.

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  • Copy filename to clipboard

    - by Charles Roper
    I am looking for a Windows utility that can copy the currently selected filename, including the path, to the clipboard, ideally through the right-click menu. Some degree of flexibility would be useful, like the ability to copy just the filename, path+filename, filename minus extension, etc. This isn't essential, though, as long as it can copy the path+filename. Must be compatible with XP, Vista and Win7. Free and/or open source would be ideal. Thanks!

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  • Windows 7 Administrator HomeUsers Account

    - by Charles Carrington
    I'm trying to login to my Windows 7 PC from another PC so that I can transfer files to the Windows 7 PC. I've just installed Visual Studio 2008 on my new PC, and I wan't to transfer all of my work from my old machine to my new one. When I first set up a user on the Windows 7 PC after a reformat, the account created had a Group field that read "HomeUsers; Administrators" when viewing it from the User Accounts screen. You get to this screen by typing "netplwiz" in the search field of the Start Menu. I changed the Group of this account to Administrators before I realized that it was assigned to two Groups -- "HomeUsers; Administrators" as I mentioned above. I was trying to make sure that it was an Administrator account so I didn't have to type in a password everytime I wanted to install software. I can use this computer normally without being asked for an administrator password all the time when I want to install new software, but I can't log in to this PC from another PC because I don't have an account that has a Group of "HomeUsers". I should have left the account alone; everything would've been fine. But there doesn't seem to be a way to assign it to two groups after the initial assignment that take place automatically when you are setting up your computer for the first time. If you assign "HomeUsers" to the account, the Group field on the User Accounts screen will just read "HomeUsers". If you assign "Administrators" to the account, the Group field on the User Accounts screen will just read "Administrators". There's no way to make it read "HomeUsers; Administrators" again. If you don't have at least one account that is a "HomeUsers" account, you cannot log in to the PC from another PC on the network. If you don't have an account that is an "Administrators" account, you cannot install software on your machine without being asked for an Administrator password all the time, which is very annoying. I want an account on my Windows 7 PC that I can use to install software without being asked for a password AND that I can log into from another PC on the network to transfer files. If I could make the Group field read "HomeUsers; Administrators" of my primary account on the Windows 7 PC when I go to the User Accounts screen by typing "netplwiz" in the search field of the Start Menu, my primary account would do what I want it to do. Does anybody know how to make an account in Windows 7 a "HomeUsers" account AND an "Administrators" account? As I said before, Windows 7 does this for you automatically when you first set up your computer. But if you change it inadvertently, there is no way to change it back. At least I don't know how to do it. If anybody has any ideas on how to fix this, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks, Charles Carrington

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  • How to get only one row for each distinct value in the column ?

    - by Chavdar
    Hi Everybody, I have a question about Access.If for example I have a table with the following data : NAME | ADDRESS John Taylor | 33 Dundas Ave. John Taylor | 55 Shane Ave. John Taylor | 786 Edward St. Ted Charles | 785 Bloor St. Ted Charles | 90 New York Ave. I want to get one record for each person no matter of the address.For example : NAME | ADDRESS John Taylor | 33 Dundas Ave. Ted Charles | 90 New York Ave. Can this be done with queries only ? I tried using DISTINCT, but when I am selecting both columns, the combination is allways unique so I get all the rows. Thank you !

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  • How to Add a File from my source tree to Maven Site

    - by Charles O.
    I have a Maven 2 RESTful application using Jersey/JAXB. I generate the JAXB beans from a schema file, where the schema file is in my resources directory, e.g., src/main/resources/foo.xsd. I want to include foo.xsd file in the generated Maven site for my project, so that clients can see the XML schema when writing RESTful calls. How can I include foo.xsd in the site? I could have a copy of the file in src/main/site/..., and then update my site.xml to point to it (or have a .apt whose contents point to it), but I don't like that because I'm still tweaking foo.xsd, and don't want to have to remember to copy it each time I update it. And that's just bad practice. I also tried having a .apt file that has a link to the foo.xsd which gets copied to the target/classes directory. That works until I do a site:deploy, because that only copies the target/site directory. Thanks, Charles

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  • How Social Is Your Contact Center?

    - by Charles Knapp
    More than 75% of consumers have complained on a social site after a poor customer experience. Yet, 70% of companies have little understanding of the social media conversations about their brand. To deliver upon your brand promise, retain customers, and increase their lifetime value, you must deliver great customer experiences across social, mobile, phone, and chat channels. Siloed channels produce poor customer experiences. Social channels must integrate with the people, processes, technology, and traditional channels used to satisfy customers. The more effective a company’s social marketing, the greater the demand for effective social service. However, service is not a job for social marketers. It is a job for service specialists, focused on KPIs such as response time, first contact resolution, satisfaction, churn, retention, and customer lifetime value. Most social-enabled contact centers are at the early adopter stage, attempting to “bolt on” social media as a side process. Many are experiencing inconsistent customer experiences, higher costs, and negligible return on investments. Service leaders should consider carefully how to integrate social channels with their current customer service and support people, processes, technology, and channels. Here is one company realizing success: the pre-integrated Oracle RightNow Social Experience “empowers our contact center operations by enabling our agents to join customer conversations that are happening on social sites like Twitter and Facebook and integrate those conversations into our overall multichannel customer engagement processes.” — Lisa Larson, Drugstore.com

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  • Form, function and complexity in rule processing

    - by Charles Young
    Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function.   It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions.   Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken.   In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently.  As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous.   Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing.   On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms.   Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP.   On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham).   Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic.   Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form?   Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.)   However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function.   It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity.   There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion.   Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not.   No serious commentator suggests it does.   Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult?   Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed.   The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form.  It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different.   Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good.   Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

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  • Itautec Accelerates Profitable High Tech Customer Service

    - by charles.knapp
    Itautec is a Brazilian-based global high technology products and services firm with strong performance in the global market of banking and commercial automation, with more than 2,300 global clients. It recently deployed Siebel CRM for sales, customer support, and field service. In the first year of use, Siebel CRM enabled a 30% growth in services revenue. Siebel CRM also reduced support costs. "Oracle's Siebel CRM has minimized costs and made our customer service more agile," said Adriano Rodrigues da Silva, IT Manager. "Before deployment, 95% of our customer service contacts were made by phone. Siebel CRM made it possible to expand' choices, so that now 55% of our customers contact our helpdesk through the newer communications channels." Read more here about Itautec's success, and learn more here about how Siebel CRM can help your firm to grow customer service revenues, improve service levels, and reduce costs.

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  • Anthony Lye Shows New Pharmaceutical Sales Solution: Turn the Screen Around

    - by charles.knapp
    Tomorrow, March 31, watch as senior vice president of CRM, Anthony Lye, and director of life sciences product strategy, Piers Evans, provide the first public look at Oracle's new Pharmaceutical Sales solution, powered by Oracle CRM On Demand 17 - Life Sciences Edition. You will see a next generation approach to sell more and report less. Register now for this informative global webcast on March 31, 9 AM PDT/4 PM GMT.

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  • Oracle CRM On Demand R17 and Pharma's Future

    - by charles.knapp
    By Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research, March 30 "Oracle announced Release 17 of CRM On-Demand today along with an updated vertical market version for the pharmaceutical industry. Seventeen is a lot of releases even for a SaaS company and Oracle should be proud of the milestone. The same is true of the emphasis on the pharmaceutical industry vertical. Oracle comes to the pharma CRM market with an assist from Siebel, the one time independent leader in CRM that Oracle bought a few years back. Before the acquisition Siebel and its pharma package had managed to corner about nineteen of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies. For a time in the last decade you could go from job to job as a pharma rep taking your Siebel skills with you and feel right at home. The writing on the wall now though is that pharmaceutical sales is transitioning to a SaaS model and Oracle is managing the transition for its customers. Oracle's done a good job of keeping up with changes in the industry and you have to admit that pharma sales is a different kettle of fish than almost anything else in CRM." For additional insights, read here.

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  • Anthony Lye: How Pharmaceutical Reps Can Sell More & Report Less

    - by charles.knapp
    On March 31, watch as senior vice president of CRM, Anthony Lye, and director of life sciences product strategy, Piers Evans, provide the first public look at Oracle's new Pharmaceutical Sales solution, powered by Oracle CRM On Demand - Life Sciences Edition. You will see a next generation approach to: • Increase sales effectiveness • Equip reps worldwide • Get the best value Register now for this informative GLOBAL webcast on March 31, 9 AM PDT/4 PM GMT.

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  • IDC: Oracle Doubles Down on Life Sciences Sales & Marketing

    - by charles.knapp
    "This past week Oracle held its 5th annual Life Sciences Forum in Princeton, NJ. The conference provided a wide range of content focused on their products and partnerships across the life science spectrum. But this year's conference placed strong emphasis on Oracle's new CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition R17, and deservedly so. R17 is the largest, and most impressive, CRM On Demand release that Oracle has had to date, and it provides many significant upgrades over earlier versions." Read more here.

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  • Unlock the Full Value of Oracle CRM On Demand

    - by charles.knapp
    Register for this live Oracle CRM On Demand Virtual Community Session! Oracle CRM On Demand delivers the most complete On Demand CRM available anywhere. But how can you ensure you are getting maximum value from the many powerful features that Oracle CRM On Demand offers? Join our interactive Oracle CRM On Demand Virtual Community Session on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 from 10.00-11 a.m. PT / 1 p.m.-2 p.m. ET to get expert advice and discuss the best ways to unlock the full potential of Oracle CRM Demand with Mike Lairson, author of 'Oracle CRM On Demand Reporting'. Book OfferSend your Oracle CRM On Demand configuration ideas before the Webcast to [email protected] and you could win a free copy of 'Oracle CRM On Demand Reporting' by Mike Lairson. Learn more and register now!

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  • Dell Dell E2009W monitor not detected

    - by Charles
    I have an issue with my monitor. I just installed Ubuntu 11.10, but the monitor that is plugged in doesn't appear anywhere. And by doesn't appear, I mean that in the "Displays" menu, it doesn't even appear as "Unknown", I just have my screen that appears and nothing else. It is connected through VGA, and the monitor is recognized with no problem on Windows 7. It is a Dell monitor. I'm not a pro with Ubuntu, so any help to diagnose the issue would be really helpful (and help me learn how to fix this kind of monitor issue in the future) Thanks !

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  • Oracle Extends Life Sciences Edition in New Release

    - by charles.knapp
    By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service Oracle (ORCL) announced the 17th version of its on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) application Wednesday and made a fresh push into pharmaceutical sales with a Life Sciences edition of the software. New features in CRM on Demand Release 17 include tools for managing sales pipelines and performing forecasts of future business; a redesigned user interface; and added language support. But one CRM industry observer flagged the Life Sciences product as a particular point of interest. Read the full article here.

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  • Global Webcast: Increase Pharmaceutical Sales Effectiveness

    - by charles.knapp
    See a next-generation approach to Pharmaceutical sales challenges! • Increase the quality of sales interactions with enhanced call planning and eDetailing • Improve sample management with electronic signature storage and inventory tracking on the go • Increase marketing effectiveness with closed loop marketing and personalized content delivery Watch as senior vice president of CRM, Anthony Lye, and director of life sciences product strategy, Piers Evans, provide the first public look at Oracle's new Pharmaceutical Sales On The Go solution, powered by Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17 -- Life Sciences Edition. Register now for this informative GLOBAL webcast on March 31, 9 AM PDT/4 PM GMT.

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  • Using the BAM Interceptor with Continuation

    - by Charles Young
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2014/06/02/using-the-bam-interceptor-with-continuation.aspxI’ve recently been resurrecting some code written several years ago that makes extensive use of the BAM Interceptor provided as part of BizTalk Server’s BAM event observation library.  In doing this, I noticed an issue with continuations.  Essentially, whenever I tried to configure one or more continuations for an activity, the BAM Interceptor failed to complete the activity correctly.   Careful inspection of my code confirmed that I was initializing and invoking the BAM interceptor correctly, so I was mystified.  However, I eventually found the problem.  It is a logical error in the BAM Interceptor code itself. The BAM Interceptor provides a useful mechanism for implementing dynamic tracking.  It supports configurable ‘track points’.  These are grouped into named ‘locations’.  BAM uses the term ‘step’ as a synonym for ‘location’.   Each track point defines a BAM action such as starting an activity, extracting a data item, enabling a continuation, etc.  Each step defines a collection of track points. Understanding Steps The BAM Interceptor provides an abstract model for handling configuration of steps.  It doesn’t, however, define any specific configuration mechanism (e.g., config files, SSO, etc.)  It is up to the developer to decide how to store, manage and retrieve configuration data.  At run time, this configuration is used to register track points which then drive the BAM Interceptor. The full semantics of a step are not immediately clear from Microsoft’s documentation.  They represent a point in a business activity where BAM tracking occurs.  They are named locations in the code.  What is less obvious is that they always represent either the full tracking work for a given activity or a discrete fragment of that work which commences with the start of a new activity or the continuation of an existing activity.  The BAM Interceptor enforces this by throwing an error if no ‘start new’ or ‘continue’ track point is registered for a named location. This constraint implies that each step must marked with an ‘end activity’ track point.  One of the peculiarities of BAM semantics is that when an activity is continued under a correlated ID, you must first mark the current activity as ‘ended’ in order to ensure the right housekeeping is done in the database.  If you re-start an ended activity under the same ID, you will leave the BAM import tables in an inconsistent state.  A step, therefore, always represents an entire unit of work for a given activity or continuation ID.  For activities with continuation, each unit of work is termed a ‘fragment’. Instance and Fragment State Internally, the BAM Interceptor maintains state data at two levels.  First, it represents the overall state of the activity using a ‘trace instance’ token.  This token contains the name and ID of the activity together with a couple of state flags.  The second level of state represents a ‘trace fragment’.   As we have seen, a fragment of an activity corresponds directly to the notion of a ‘step’.  It is the unit of work done at a named location, and it must be bounded by start and end, or continue and end, actions. When handling continuations, the BAM Interceptor differentiates between ‘root’ fragments and other fragments.  Very simply, a root fragment represents the start of an activity.  Other fragments represent continuations.  This is where the logic breaks down.  The BAM Interceptor loses state integrity for root fragments when continuations are defined. Initialization Microsoft’s BAM Interceptor code supports the initialization of BAM Interceptors from track point configuration data.  The process starts by populating an Activity Interceptor Configuration object with an array of track points.  These can belong to different steps (aka ‘locations’) and can be registered in any order.  Once it is populated with track points, the Activity Interceptor Configuration is used to initialise the BAM Interceptor.  The BAM Interceptor sets up a hash table of array lists.  Each step is represented by an array list, and each array list contains an ordered set of track points.  The BAM Interceptor represents track points as ‘executable’ components.  When the OnStep method of the BAM Interceptor is called for a given step, the corresponding list of track points is retrieved and each track point is executed in turn.  Each track point retrieves any required data using a call back mechanism and then serializes a BAM trace fragment object representing a specific action (e.g., start, update, enable continuation, stop, etc.).  The serialised trace fragment is then handed off to a BAM event stream (buffered or direct) which takes the appropriate action. The Root of the Problem The logic breaks down in the Activity Interceptor Configuration.  Each Activity Interceptor Configuration is initialised with an instance of a ‘trace instance’ token.  This provides the basic metadata for the activity as a whole.  It contains the activity name and ID together with state flags indicating if the activity ID is a root (i.e., not a continuation fragment) and if it is completed.  This single token is then shared by all trace actions for all steps registered with the Activity Interceptor Configuration. Each trace instance token is automatically initialised to represent a root fragment.  However, if you subsequently register a ‘continuation’ step with the Activity Interceptor Configuration, the ‘root’ flag is set to false at the point the ‘continue’ track point is registered for that step.   If you use a ‘reflector’ tool to inspect the code for the ActivityInterceptorConfiguration class, you can see the flag being set in one of the overloads of the RegisterContinue method.    This makes no sense.  The trace instance token is shared across all the track points registered with the Activity Interceptor Configuration.  The Activity Interceptor Configuration is designed to hold track points for multiple steps.  The ‘root’ flag is clearly meant to be initialised to ‘true’ for the preliminary root fragment and then subsequently set to false at the point that a continuation step is processed.  Instead, if the Activity Interceptor Configuration contains a continuation step, it is changed to ‘false’ before the root fragment is processed.  This is clearly an error in logic. The problem causes havoc when the BAM Interceptor is used with continuation.  Effectively the root step is no longer processed correctly, and the ultimate effect is that the continued activity never completes!   This has nothing to do with the root and the continuation being in the same process.  It is due to a fundamental mistake of setting the ‘root’ flag to false for a continuation before the root fragment is processed. The Workaround Fortunately, it is easy to work around the bug.  The trick is to ensure that you create a new Activity Interceptor Configuration object for each individual step.  This may mean filtering your configuration data to extract the track points for a single step or grouping the configured track points into individual steps and the creating a separate Activity Interceptor Configuration for each group.  In my case, the first approach was required.  Here is what the amended code looks like: // Because of a logic error in Microsoft's code, a separate ActivityInterceptorConfiguration must be used // for each location. The following code extracts only those track points for a given step name (location). var trackPointGroup = from ResolutionService.TrackPoint tp in bamActivity.TrackPoints                       where (string)tp.Location == bamStepName                       select tp; var bamActivityInterceptorConfig =     new Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservation.ActivityInterceptorConfiguration(activityName); foreach (var trackPoint in trackPointGroup) {     switch (trackPoint.Type)     {         case TrackPointType.Start:             bamActivityInterceptorConfig.RegisterStartNew(trackPoint.Location, trackPoint.ExtractionInfo);             break; etc… I’m using LINQ to filter a list of track points for those entries that correspond to a given step and then registering only those track points on a new instance of the ActivityInterceptorConfiguration class.   As soon as I re-wrote the code to do this, activities with continuations started to complete correctly.

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  • SaaS Customer Service Matters

    - by charles.knapp
    You probably know that Oracle CRM On Demand goes beyond contact and transaction tracking by providing valuable real-time insights. Do you know that Oracle CRM On Demand also delivers valuable service to our customers? Don't take my word for it. "Prior to Oracle CRM On Demand, we were too busy looking in the rear view mirror on our sales activities and needed a forward-looking tool to maximize sales and coaching opportunities," said Christian Doelle, Vice President Sales & Marketing, MonierLifetile. "After evaluating other organization's solutions, we found Oracle as the most proven with the real-time reporting and detailed reviews of sales opportunities that helped us to address our blind spots. Additionally, we have found throughout our implementation phase that Oracle's commitment to customer attention and service is incomparable." Learn more here about MonierLifetile's experience with Oracle CRM On Demand.

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  • CRM Magazine: Customer-Facing Life Sciences CRM

    - by charles.knapp
    "The Life Sciences Edition, Lye says, is unique in that to-date pharma software has been inward facing. The Oracle pharma solution, however, is a tool that can be used internally for salespeople to assess their effectiveness, but it can also be used in interacting with a physician or whoever the "customer" might be. The solution captures signatures digitally and provides tools for rapid presentation creation. "That's something I have never heard of before in terms of having the CRM product for the customer view as well as the employee view," Leary says. "When it comes to the area of pharma sales, [sales people] don't have a lot of time in front of doctors .... so this is a way to spend less time in front of the doctor and still be able to get the information and the sentiment and the story across." Read more here about Oracle CRM On Demand, Life Sciences Edition.

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  • Integrating Social, Marketing, and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer Experiences

    - by Charles Knapp
    Eighty nine percent of consumers quit a brand after one bad experience. With the high cost of acquiring new customers, what can brand leaders do? At the Loyalty World Conference this week in London, global business leaders such as the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s shared the latest in how to retain customers and boost advocacy. Melissa Boxer and Sundar Swaminathan of Oracle shared that by taking an outside-in approach, you can deliver a differentiated, loyalty-building experience throughout the customer lifecycle, from researching and selecting through to using and recommending. To transform customer experiences, you need to integrate your brand’s social, marketing, and loyalty functions from the commonplace silos. Three key strategies: Know more and understand, unifying and capturing insights across touch points to better understand who to serve, how to serve, and when to serve.  Connect and engage across social and traditional channels, empowering a relationship ecosystem between social communities, customers, and employees. Make the personalized experience easy and rewarding. Visit us on twitter.com/oraclecrm to learn more useful highlights from the #lwconf conference.

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  • Microsoft and the open source community

    - by Charles Young
    For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing.  In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible.  Many people interpreted this as all-out corporate opposition to open source licensing.  I never read it that way. It is true that I've met individual employees of Microsoft who are antagonistic towards FOSS (free and open source software), but I've met more who are supportive or at least neutral on the subject.  In any case, individual attitudes of employees don't necessarily reflect a corporate stance.  The strongest opposition I've encountered has actually come from outside the company.  It's not a charitable thought, but I sometimes wonder if there are people in the .NET community who are opposed to FOSS simply because they believe, erroneously, that Microsoft is opposed. Here, for what it is worth, are the points I've repeated endlessly over the years and which have often been received with quizzical scepticism. a)  A decade ago, Microsoft's big problem was not FOSS per se, or even with copyleft.  The thing which really kept them awake at night was the fear that one day, someone might find, deep in the heart of the Windows code base, some code that should not be there and which was published under GPL.  The likelihood of this ever happening has long since faded away, but there was a time when MS was running scared.  I suspect this is why they held out for a while from making Windows source code open to inspection.  Nowadays, as an MVP, I am positively encouraged to ask to see Windows source. b)  Microsoft has never opposed the open source community.  They have had problems with specific people and organisations in the FOSS community.  Back in the 1990s, Richard Stallman gave time and energy to a successful campaign to launch antitrust proceedings against Microsoft.  In more recent times, the negative attitude of certain people to Microsoft's submission of two FOSS licences to the OSI (both of which have long since been accepted), and the mad scramble to try to find any argument, however tenuous, to block their submission was not, let us say, edifying. c) Microsoft has never, to my knowledge, written off the FOSS model.  They certainly don't agree that more traditional forms of licensing are inappropriate or immoral, and they've always been prepared to say so.  One reason why it was so hard to convince people that Microsoft is not rabidly antagonistic towards FOSS licensing is that so many people think they have no involvement in open source.  A decade ago, there was virtually no evidence of any such involvement.  However, that was a long time ago.  Quietly over the years, Microsoft has got on with the job of working out how to make use of FOSS licensing and how to support the FOSS community.  For example, as well as making increasingly extensive use of Github, they run an important FOSS forge (CodePlex) on which they, themselves, host many hundreds of distinct projects.  The total count may even be in the thousands now.  I suspect there is a limit of about 500 records on CodePlex searches because, for the past few years, whenever I search for Microsoft-specific projects on CodePlex, I always get approx. 500 hits.  Admittedly, a large volume of the stuff they publish under FOSS licences amounts to code samples, but many of those 'samples' have grown into useful and fully featured frameworks, libraries and tools. All this is leading up to the observation that yesterday's announcement by Scott Guthrie marks a significant milestone and should not go unnoticed.  If you missed it, let me summarise.   From the first release of .NET, Microsoft has offered a web development framework called ASP.NET.  The core libraries are included in the .NET framework which is released free of charge, but which is not open source.   However, in recent years, the number of libraries that constitute ASP.NET have grown considerably.  Today, most professional ASP.NET web development exploits the ASP.NET MVC framework.  This, together with several other important parts of the ASP.NET technology stack, is released on CodePlex under the Apache 2.0 licence.   Hence, today, a huge swathe of web development on the .NET/Azure platform relies four-square on the use of FOSS frameworks and libraries. Yesterday, Scott Guthrie announced the next stage of ASP.NET's journey towards FOSS nirvana.  This involves extending ASP.NET's FOSS stack to include Web API and the MVC Razor view engine which is rapidly becoming the de facto 'standard' for building web pages in ASP.NET.  However, perhaps the more important announcement is that the ASP.NET team will now accept and review contributions from the community.  Scott points out that this model is already in place elsewhere in Microsoft, and specifically draws attention to development of the Windows Azure SDKs.  These SDKs are central to Azure development.   The .NET and Java SDKs are published under Apache 2.0 on Github and Microsoft is open to community contributions.  Accepting contributions is a more profound move than simply releasing code under FOSS licensing.  It means that Microsoft is wholeheartedly moving towards a full-blooded open source approach for future evolution of some of their central and most widely used .NET and Azure frameworks and libraries.  In conjunction with Scott's announcement, Microsoft has also released Git support for CodePlex (at long last!) and, perhaps more importantly, announced significant new investment in their own FOSS forge. Here at Solidsoft we have several reasons to be very interested in Scott's announcement. I'll draw attention to one of them.  Earlier this year we wrote the initial version of a new UK Government web application called CloudStore.  CloudStore provides a way for local and central government to discover and purchase applications and services. We wrote the web site using ASP.NET MVC which is FOSS.  However, this point has been lost on the ladies and gentlemen of the press and, I suspect, on some of the decision makers on the government side.  They announced a few weeks ago that future versions of CloudStore will move to a FOSS framework, clearly oblivious of the fact that it is already built on a FOSS framework.  We are, it is fair to say, mildly irked by the uninformed and badly out-of-date assumption that “if it is Microsoft, it can't be FOSS”.  Old prejudices live on.

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