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  • Company wants to write custom project management tool, rather then use third party product.

    - by Jason Evans
    At the company I work, we are really wanting to get into the agile methodology for developing software. One thing that I'm not excited about is the fact that management wants us to build a custom project management feature inside the company's Intranet. I think this is a total waste of time. There are many great third party tools available (e.g. Axosoft OnTime) that can do everything we need, and more. For how much development time it would cost us to build our own project management module, we could buy numerous licences for a third party product. One concern is that, whilst we are writing code for a client, and using our custom Intranet project management module, we find bugs in the module that need fixing ASAP. That means having to stop work on the client code to fix the Intranet. That just puts shivers down my spine. Another worry I have is lack of functionality. This custom module is going to be so basic, that it will just feel really crap to use. That might sound a bit snooty, but for goodness sake, many third party tools are so feature rich, that the idea of having to write our own tool makes feel very uneasy. In fact, I can't be bothered. What do you guys think? I'm going to raise this issue with my boss, since I feel it's such an important topic to talk about. EDIT: Thanks for the great responses, much appreciated. To summarize some of them: Money Naturally my boss does want to save money, by not forking out a few hundred £'s for licences. However, for us to write a custom tool, it will take x number of days, multiplied by approx £500, which is our costs. I don't see the business value in this. Management have mentioned that they want to sell the Intranet as a product in the future, but it's so custom to our needs (and downright basic), that in order to give it to another client, I can see us having to fork a version of the code and rebuild the majority of it anyway. So it's not like we're gaining anything there in reuse. Features Having our own custom module means not feature bloat - only the functionality we require will be in the product. My issue is that there are plenty of free, open-source project management tools out there with minimal features already. So even if cost is an issue, we could look into open-source. Again it all boils down to the fact that I don't see the point in writing a project management tool in this day and age. It's a bit like writing your own web browser - why?, what's the point? Although management are asking for this tool, just because they are, it does not mean I'm going to please them and do it just because they asked for it. If something does not make sense, then I will raise it as a concern. At the end of the day, it's the developers who write the code, it's the developers who make money for a business. Thus, as far I'm concerned, the devs have a very big role in deciding how a company should manage projects and what tools are used. "I am Spartan, argh!" :) Hmm, I've not been able to make this question a wiki for some reason, thus I'm going to have to pick an answer to accept. Cheers. Jas.

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  • What's New in Database Lifecycle Management in Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3

    - by HariSrinivasan
    Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 includes improvements and enhancements across every area of the product. This blog provides an overview of the new and enhanced features in the Database Lifecycle Management area. I will deep dive into specific features more in depth in subsequent posts. "What's New?"  In this release, we focused on four things: 1. Lifecycle Management Support for new Database12c - Pluggable Databases 2. Management of long running processes, such as a security patch cycle (Change Activity Planner) 3. Management of large number of systems by · Leveraging new framework capabilities for lifecycle operations, such as the new advanced ‘emcli’ script option · Refining features such as configuration search and compliance 4. Minor improvements and quality fixes to existing features · Rollback support for Single instance databases · Improved "OFFLINE" Patching experience · Faster collection of ORACLE_HOME configurations Lifecycle Management Support for new Database 12c - Pluggable Databases Database 12c introduces Pluggable Databases (PDBs), the brand new addition to help you achieve your consolidation goals. Pluggable databases offer unprecedented consolidation at database level and native lifecycle verbs for creating, plugging and unplugging the databases on a container database (CDB). Enterprise Manager can supplement the capabilities of pluggable databases by offering workflows for migrating, provisioning and cloning them using the software library and the deployment procedures. For example, Enterprise Manager can migrate an existing database to a PDB or clone a PDB by storing a versioned copy in the software library. One can also manage the planned downtime related to patching by  migrating the PDBs to a new CDB. While pluggable databases offer these exciting features, it can also pose configuration management and compliance challenges if not managed properly. Enterprise Manager features like inventory management, topology associations and configuration search can mitigate the sprawl of PDBs and also lock them to predefined golden standards using configuration comparison and compliance rules. Learn More ... Management of Long Running datacenter processes - Change Activity Planner (CAP) Currently, customers resort to cumbersome methods to create, execute, track and monitor change activities within their data center. Some customers use traditional tools such as spreadsheets, project planners and in-house custom built solutions. Customers often have weekly sync up meetings across stake holders to collect status and updates. Some of the change activities, for example the quarterly patch set update (PSU) patch rollouts are not single tasks but processes with multiple tasks. Some of those tasks are performed within Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (for example Patch) and some are performed outside of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. These tasks often run for a longer period of time and involve multiple people or teams. Enterprise Manger Cloud Control supports core data center operations such as configuration management, compliance management, and automation. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control release 12.1.0.3 leverages these capabilities and introduces the Change Activity Planner (CAP). CAP provides the ability to plan, execute, and track change activities in real time. It covers the typical datacenter activities that are spread over a long period of time, across multiple people and multiple targets (even target types). Here are some examples of Change Activity Process in a datacenter: · Patching large environments (PSU/CPU Patching cycles) · Upgrading large number of database environments · Rolling out Compliance Rules · Database Consolidation to Exadata environments CAP provides user flows for Compliance Officers/Managers (incl. lead administrators) and Operators (DBAs and admins). Managers can create change activity plans for various projects, allocate resources, targets, and groups affected. Upon activation of the plan, tasks are created and automatically assigned to individual administrators based on target ownership. Administrators (DBAs) can identify their tasks and understand the context, schedules, and priorities. They can complete tasks using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control automation features such as patch plans (or in some cases outside Enterprise Manager). Upon completion, compliance is evaluated for validations and updates the status of the tasks and the plans. Learn More about CAP ...  Improved Configuration & Compliance Management of a large number of systems Improved Configuration Comparison:  Get to the configuration comparison results faster for simple ad-hoc comparisons. When performing a 1 to 1 comparison, Enterprise Manager will perform the comparison immediately and take the user directly to the results without having to wait for a job to be submitted and executed. Flattened system comparisons reduce comparison setup time and reduce complexity. In addition to the previously existing topological comparison, users now have an option to compare using a “flattened” methodology. Flattening means to remove duplicate target instances within the systems and remove the hierarchy of member targets. The result are much easier to spot differences particularly for specific use cases like comparing patch levels between complex systems like RAC and Fusion Apps. Improved Configuration Search & Advanced EMCLI Script option for Mass Automation Enterprise manager 12c introduces a new framework level capability to be able to script and stitch together multiple tasks using EMCLI. This powerful capability can be leveraged for lifecycle operations, especially when executing a task over a large number of targets. Specific usages of this include, retrieving a qualified list of targets using Configuration Search and then using the resultset for automation. Another example would be executing a patching operation and then re-executing on targets where it may have failed. This is complemented by other enhancements, such as a better usability for designing reusable configuration searches. IN EM 12c Rel 3, a simplified UI makes building adhoc searches even easier. Searching for missing patches is a common use of configuration search. This required the use of the advanced options which are now clearly defined and easy to use. Perform “Configuration Search” using the EMCLI. Users can find and execute Configuration Searches from the EMCLI which can be extremely useful for building sophisticated automation scripts. For an example, Run the Search named “Oracle Databases on Exadata” which finds all Database targets running on top of Exadata. Further filter the results by refining by options like name, host, etc.. emcli get_targets -config_search="Databases on Exadata" –target_name="exa%“ Use this in powerful mass automation operations using the new emcli script option. For example, to solve the use case of – Finding all DBs running on Exadata and housing E-Biz and Patch them. Create a Python script with emcli functions and invoke it in the new EMCLI script option shell. Invoke the script in the new EMCLI with script option directly: $<path to emcli>/emcli @myPSU_Patch.py Richer compliance content:  Now over 50 Oracle Provided Compliance Standards including new standards for Pluggable Database, Fusion Applications, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle VM and Internet Directory. 9 Oracle provided Real Time Monitoring Standards containing over 900 Compliance Rules across 500 Facets. These new Real time Compliance Standards covers both Exadata Compute nodes and Linux servers. The result is increased Oracle software coverage and faster time to compliance monitoring on Exadata. Enhancements to Patch Management: Overhauled "OFFLINE" Patching experience: Simplified Patch uploads UI to improve the offline experience of patching. There is now a single step process to get the patches into software library. Customers often maintain local repositories of patches, sometimes called software depots, where they host the patches downloaded from My Oracle Support. In the past, you had to move these patches to your desktop then upload them to the Enterprise Manager's Software library through the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control user interface. You can now use the following EMCLI command to upload multiple patches directly from a remote location within the data center: $emcli upload_patches -location <Path to Patch directory> -from_host <HOSTNAME> The upload process filters all of the new patches, automatically selects the relevant metadata files from the location, and uploads the patches to software library. Other Improvements:  Patch rollback for single instance databases, new option in the Patch Plan to rollback the patches added to the patch plans. Upon execution, the procedure would rollback the patch and the SQL applied to the single instance Databases. Improved and faster configuration collection of Oracle Home targets can enable more reliable automation at higher level functions like Provisioning, Patching or Database as a Service. Just to recap, here is a list of database lifecycle management features:  * Red highlights mark – New or Enhanced in the Release 3. • Discovery, inventory tracking and reporting • Database provisioning including o Migration to Pluggable databases o Plugging and unplugging of pluggable databases o Gold image based cloning o Scaling of RAC nodes •Schema and data change management •End-to-end patch management in online and offline modes, including o Patch advisories in online (connected with My Oracle Support) and offline mode o Patch pre-deployment analysis, deployment and rollback (currently only for single instance databases) o Reporting • Upgrade planning and execution of the upgrade process • Configuration management including • Compliance management with out-of-box content • Change Activity Planner for planning, designing and tracking long running processes For more information on Enterprise Manager’s database lifecycle management capabilities, visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/lifecycle-mgmt/index.html

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  • Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

    - by Tanu Sood
      Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations.  Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications.  Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

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  • Agent versus Agentless management

    - by Owen Allen
    I got a couple of questions about Agentless asset management: "What does agentless management do for an asset?" Agentless management is one of the two ways that you can manage an operating system. Rather than installing an Agent Controller on the OS, agentless management uses SSH to regularly check the system and gather monitoring data. Many of the actions that would be available on an agent-managed system are available on an agentless system, but actions such as running reports or updating an Oracle Solaris 10 or Linux OS are not available. A table showing the capabilities of agentless management is here. "What permissions does agentless management require?" Agentless management still requires root credentials. If you can't log into the system as root, you can provide one set of credentials for the login, and then a set of root credentials to switch to.

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  • Product News: Oracle Unveils a Waste Management Solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite

    - by Evelyn Neumayr
    Oracle recently announced a new product to help organizations reduce the cost and compliance with international hazmat (short for hazardous materials) and recycling and environmental protection laws. This new waste management solution for Oracle E-Business Suite extends the capabilities of  Oracle Depot Repair, Oracle Transportation Management and Oracle Global Trade Management. It automates and monitors waste management processes to help ensure that hazardous materials are tracked and handled in accordance with regulatory requirements. Oracle’s waste management solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite leverages Oracle Transportation Management and Oracle Global Trade Management, enabling customers to view in-transit inventory across the extended supply chain, while also providing a single repository for all legal, regulatory and compliance related information. Read here for more information.

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  • I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

    - by kmote
    I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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  • Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

    - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
    Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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  • Centralized Windows/Mac Patch Management that is easy to use

    - by BiggsTRC
    I'm looking for advice on what patch management solutions you would recommend based upon your experience. I'm also looking for which ones you would not recommend based upon your experience. We have a mixed network of Windows and Mac clients. Our central servers are all Windows servers, although I have considered putting in a Mac server to better handle our Mac clients. The issue we are facing currently is that we need to maintain the patches on all of our third-party applications. Right now we use WSUS, which handles with patching of Windows and some Microsoft products but that is about it. I need something to cover the other applications, specifically things like Adobe products (Reader, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc.) Our network isn't that big (maybe 200 clients) and I don't have a person to dedicate just to patching and maintaining a patch management solution. Thus very large and complicated solutions like System Center are most likely out. I have recently been looking at Dell's Kace K1000 solution (http://www.kace.com/products/systems-management-appliance/). It seems simple and it provides a lot of tools in one package that I would like/need as well. I like the fact that it is self-contained in an appliance and that it is designed for solutions like mine. However, I'm not sure if this is the best solution. I've also looked some at Shavlik's Netchk solution (http://www.shavlik.com/netchk-protect.aspx) but I don't need an anti-virus product. However, it looks like they might have a very good patch database. My question is this: What are your thoughts on these to products? Are there better products out there? Are there issues that I'm not considering? I want something that is very good at patching a broad range of products, that is simple to use, that takes a minimal amount of management (like WSUS), and that (hopefully) works with Mac and Windows.

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  • SQL SERVER – Another lesser known feature of SQL Server Management Studio 2012 – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

    - by Pinal Dave
    This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. In one of my previous guest blog on SQL Authority, I wrote about “Additional Connection Parameter” tab of login screen in SQL Server Management Studio (a.k.a. SSMS). On the similar lines, this blog is going to show little less known new feature of login main screen (“Connect to Server”) of SSMS 2012. You might have seen below screen countless times and you might wonder what is there is blog about in this simple screen. Well, continue reading and you would get the answer. Many times, DBA have to login to production server from non-regular machine, may be a developer’s workstation. Once you login to SQL, do your work and close the management studio. Do you know that your server name is saved in management studio? Of course, very useful feature because you may not like to type server name/IP address every time. Whatever servers you have connected, it would be stored by management studio. But sometime, it’s annoying! What you would do if you want SQL Server Management Studio to forget “all” the servers listed in drop down of Server name? To do that, you need to know how and where it’s stored. You can use one of my favorite tool from sysinternals called Process Monitor (also known as ProcMon) and easily figure out that this is stored in a file under your windows user profile. Below is the file in SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio. %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin For SQL Server 2012, here is what we can see in ProcMon So, the path is %appdata%\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Shell\SqlStudio.bin So far, you might wonder, where is the new feature? I have been asked by many users to delete entries from SSMS “Connect to Server” server name list. Well, unofficially, you can delete the file directly which we found via ProcMon. Note that delete file to get rid of server list is not officially supported by Microsoft. Better way to achieve this is provided in SSMS 2012. To delete the servers from the list, highlight the name we want to delete (via keyboard or mouse) and then press delete key via keyboard. We can’t be multi-select and has to be done one by one. We can delete as many entries we want. I have delete few from first screenshot taken and here is the modified version. This is not available in SQL 2008 R2 and its previous version. This came from feedback given to SQL Server Product group. Hope you have learned something new today! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Why can't the IT industry deliver large, faultless projects quickly as in other industries?

    - by MainMa
    After watching National Geographic's MegaStructures series, I was surprised how fast large projects are completed. Once the preliminary work (design, specifications, etc.) is done on paper, the realization itself of huge projects take just a few years or sometimes a few months. For example, Airbus A380 "formally launched on Dec. 19, 2000", and "in the Early March, 2005", the aircraft was already tested. The same goes for huge oil tankers, skyscrapers, etc. Comparing this to the delays in software industry, I can't help wondering why most IT projects are so slow, or more precisely, why they cannot be as fast and faultless, at the same scale, given enough people? Projects such as the Airbus A380 present both: Major unforeseen risks: while this is not the first aircraft built, it still pushes the limits if the technology and things which worked well for smaller airliners may not work for the larger one due to physical constraints; in the same way, new technologies are used which were not used yet, because for example they were not available in 1969 when Boeing 747 was done. Risks related to human resources and management in general: people quitting in the middle of the project, inability to reach a person because she's on vacation, ordinary human errors, etc. With those risks, people still achieve projects like those large airliners in a very short period of time, and despite the delivery delays, those projects are still hugely successful and of a high quality. When it comes to software development, the projects are hardly as large and complicated as an airliner (both technically and in terms of management), and have slightly less unforeseen risks from the real world. Still, most IT projects are slow and late, and adding more developers to the project is not a solution (going from a team of ten developer to two thousand will sometimes allow to deliver the project faster, sometimes not, and sometimes will only harm the project and increase the risk of not finishing it at all). Those which are still delivered may often contain a lot of bugs, requiring consecutive service packs and regular updates (imagine "installing updates" on every Airbus A380 twice per week to patch the bugs in the original product and prevent the aircraft from crashing). How can such differences be explained? Is it due exclusively to the fact that software development industry is too young to be able to manage thousands of people on a single project in order to deliver large scale, nearly faultless products very fast?

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  • Windows Server Configuration Management Best Practices

    - by Anton Gogolev
    Chef/Pupper/Ansible are cool and all, but they are second-class citizens on Windows at best. We have a bunch of "snowflake" (one of a kind) machines (baremetal and virtual) that nobody really know what's going on with. What I want is to start establishing basic configuration management for said servers, starting from installing Windows, installing and enabling various Roles and Features, setting up Services, Shares, Users and deploying webapps. PowerShell DSC looks promising, but it's not yet here and appears to be over-engineered, Puppet and the like are again not first-class. There's a bunch of tooks and TLAs like Windows ADK, DISM, OCSetup, etc. and it seems to me that the "Configuration Management" story on Windows is not precisely rainbows and unicorns. What I want is a Puppet/Chef-like, lightweight tool (no System Center Configuration Management, please) which would allow us to "version-control our server infrastructure" and bring all the benefits of CM. So, where do I look for the tool that does this kind of thing?

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  • Ghost Records, Backups, and Database Compression…With a Pinch of Security Considerations

    - by Argenis
      Today Jeffrey Langdon (@jlangdon) posed on #SQLHelp the following questions: So I set to answer his question, and I said to myself: “Hey, I haven’t blogged in a while, how about I blog about this particular topic?”. Thus, this post was born. (If you have never heard of Ghost Records and/or the Ghost Cleanup Task, go see this blog post by Paul Randal) 1) Do ghost records get copied over in a backup? If you guessed yes, you guessed right. The backup process in SQL Server takes all data as it is on disk – it doesn’t crack the pages open to selectively pick which slots have actual data and which ones do not. The whole page is backed up, regardless of its contents. Even if ghost cleanup has run and processed the ghost records, the slots are not overwritten immediately, but rather until another DML operation comes along and uses them. As a matter of fact, all of the allocated space for a database will be included in a full backup. So, this poses a bit of a security/compliance problem for some of you DBA folk: if you want to take a full backup of a database after you’ve purged sensitive data, you should rebuild all of your indexes (with FILLFACTOR set to 100%). But the empty space on your data file(s) might still contain sensitive data! A SHRINKFILE might help get rid of that (not so) empty space, but that might not be the end of your troubles. You might _STILL_ have (not so) empty space on your files! One approach that you can follow is to export all of the data on your database to another SQL Server instance that does NOT have Instant File Initialization enabled. This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, though. So you have to weigh in your options and see what makes sense for you. Snapshot Replication is another idea that comes to mind. 2) Does Compression get rid of ghost records (2008)? The answer to this is no. The Ghost Records/Ghost Cleanup Task mechanism is alive and well on compressed tables and indexes. You can prove this running a simple script: CREATE DATABASE GhostRecordsTest GO USE GhostRecordsTest GO CREATE TABLE myTable (myPrimaryKey int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,                       myWideColumn varchar(1000) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Default string value')                         ALTER TABLE myTable REBUILD PARTITION = ALL WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE) GO INSERT INTO myTable DEFAULT VALUES GO 10 DELETE myTable WHERE myPrimaryKey % 2 = 0 DBCC TRACEON(2514) DBCC CHECKTABLE(myTable) TraceFlag 2514 will make DBCC CHECKTABLE give you an extra tidbit of information on its output. For the above script: “Ghost Record count = 5” Until next time,   -Argenis

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  • Ghost Records, Backups, and Database Compression…With a Pinch of Security Considerations

    - by Argenis
      Today Jeffrey Langdon (@jlangdon) posed on #SQLHelp the following questions: So I set to answer his question, and I said to myself: “Hey, I haven’t blogged in a while, how about I blog about this particular topic?”. Thus, this post was born. (If you have never heard of Ghost Records and/or the Ghost Cleanup Task, go see this blog post by Paul Randal) 1) Do ghost records get copied over in a backup? If you guessed yes, you guessed right. The backup process in SQL Server takes all data as it is on disk – it doesn’t crack the pages open to selectively pick which slots have actual data and which ones do not. The whole page is backed up, regardless of its contents. Even if ghost cleanup has run and processed the ghost records, the slots are not overwritten immediately, but rather until another DML operation comes along and uses them. As a matter of fact, all of the allocated space for a database will be included in a full backup. So, this poses a bit of a security/compliance problem for some of you DBA folk: if you want to take a full backup of a database after you’ve purged sensitive data, you should rebuild all of your indexes (with FILLFACTOR set to 100%). But the empty space on your data file(s) might still contain sensitive data! A SHRINKFILE might help get rid of that (not so) empty space, but that might not be the end of your troubles. You might _STILL_ have (not so) empty space on your files! One approach that you can follow is to export all of the data on your database to another SQL Server instance that does NOT have Instant File Initialization enabled. This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, though. So you have to weigh in your options and see what makes sense for you. Snapshot Replication is another idea that comes to mind. 2) Does Compression get rid of ghost records (2008)? The answer to this is no. The Ghost Records/Ghost Cleanup Task mechanism is alive and well on compressed tables and indexes. You can prove this running a simple script: CREATE DATABASE GhostRecordsTest GO USE GhostRecordsTest GO CREATE TABLE myTable (myPrimaryKey int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,                       myWideColumn varchar(1000) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Default string value')                         ALTER TABLE myTable REBUILD PARTITION = ALL WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE) GO INSERT INTO myTable DEFAULT VALUES GO 10 DELETE myTable WHERE myPrimaryKey % 2 = 0 DBCC TRACEON(2514) DBCC CHECKTABLE(myTable) TraceFlag 2514 will make DBCC CHECKTABLE give you an extra tidbit of information on its output. For the above script: “Ghost Record count = 5” Until next time,   -Argenis

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  • What are the main differences between SRV records and TXT records?

    - by Chris Adams
    Hi there, I'm trying to consolidate domain names for the servers I look after to just use one panel instead of 3 or 4, and one thing stopping me is that the provider I originally wanted to move them to only lets me the following kinds of records: A MX NS CNAME TXT The first four I understand, but I'm not sure about the relationship (if any) between SRV records and TXT records. Can I use TXT records in the place of SRV records? They both seem to be general text records to just point at a particular server without needing to specify a particular protocol, so it doesn't sound like a totally unreasonable assumption, but I'd rather check here before I break something. If I can only set the above records, does that mean I'm essentially unable to so any SRC record redirecting? Thanks!

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  • Oracle’s Web Experience Management

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Today’s guest post on Oracle’s Web Experience Management comes from a member of our WebCenter Evangelist team, Noël Jaffré, a Principal Technologist based in France.Oracle’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution enables organizations to optimize the online channel for driving marketing and customer experience management success. It empowers business users to manage the web presence and create rich and engaging online experiences for customers and prospects. Oracle's WEM platform provides a framework to simplify the integration of Oracle, third-party and custom-built applications. This framework essentially allows the creation and integration of applications using one single business interface called the WEM interface. It includes the following: Single sign-on access control for all integrated applications using the Central Authentication Service (CAS) component. A single centralized administration window for user, role, and native applications management including site management. Community server management, gadget server management as well as management for partner integrated technologies. A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing WebCenter Sites data. REST services are supported on both Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Satellite Server to leverage the satellite server cache. All REST requests are cached for web consuming applications as well for the high performance delivery of native applications on the mobile channel. Oracle WebCenter Sites’ Web Experience Management environment enables organizations to deliver a compelling online experience to customers by simplifying the deployment and management of sophisticated and engaging websites. The WebCenter Sites platform automates the entire process of managing web content including: Authoring:  Business users can easily contribute and manage web content in real-time, with intuitive interfaces and drag-and-drop content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Contextual Content Targeting: Marketers are empowered to create and manage targeted campaigns with relevant recommendations and promotions based on the context of the session of the visitor such as his or her navigation history, user profile, language, location or other information shared during the visitor session. Content Publishing and Deployment: It offers advanced multi-site management capabilities for departmental or regional sites, as well as strong multi-lingual and multi-locale content management. The remote satellite server caching infrastructure provides high-performance, distributed caching, tuned to deliver high-volume, targeted and multi-lingual sites. Analytics and Optimization: Business users and marketers have the ability to measure the effectiveness of their online content and campaigns at a granular level. Editors and marketers can immediately determine whether a given article or promotion is relevant to a particular customer segment. User-generated Content: Marketers can enable blogs, comments, rating and reviews on the website.  All comments and reviews posted to the website can be moderated from the administrator interface either manually or automatically using filters, whitelists, blacklists or community based moderation. Personalized Gadget Dashboards:  Site managers can deploy gadgets, small applications using web content, individually or as part of dashboards containing multiple gadgets.  These gadget dashboards enable site visitors to create their own “MyPage” on a given site where they can select and customize the gadgets that the site administrator has made available.  Any gadget that conforms to the iGoogle/OpenSocial standard can be made available to site visitors, or they can be created within the WEM interface. Oracle's WEM platform also provides a unique environment for the delivery of a rich, multichannel online experience for site visitors through its advanced management modules for mobile. With Oracle’s WEM solution, it’s easy to control branding and deliver a consistent message while repurposing web content for publication to mobile devices, kiosks and much more. This distinctive approach provides: HTML5 Delivery: HTML5 delivery which includes native support for adaptive design that responds to the user’s computer screen resolution and orientation. The approach is less driven by the particular hardware and more driven by the user’s interactions with the device. In other words, this approach takes both the screen interactions (either cursor or touch) and screen sizes and orientation into consideration. A Unique Native Mobile Extension Environment for Contributors: From the WEM interface, a contributor can directly manage their mobile channel, using the tooling already in place for driving the traditional web presence. This includes the mobile presentation, as well as mobile insite editing, drag and drop page layout, and in-context recommendations and personalization. Optimized REST APIs for High Performance Content Delivery on Native Mobile Device Applications: WebCenter Sites’ REST API uses the underlying HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. Resources support two types of input and output formats -- XML and JSON. REST calls are customizable to optimize the interactions between the content repositories and the client applications. Caching is essential to decrease network loads and improve overall reliability and usability of the applications and user interactions. REST results are cached through the highly efficient Oracle WebCenter Sites caching architecture.

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  • Which Project Management Software is adequate for Software & Non-Software Projects?

    - by cusack
    PMS = (Project Management Software) I used trac for software development some time ago. Right now I'm searching for a new more powerful (scheduling, gantt charts, ...) free solution (as in free beer ;-) and free to install on my server) for my current software project. Besides the current software project, abstract project management features like issue-tracking & scheduling would be great for coordinating a group of volunteers for real-life projects as well. I would want one solution for both purposes, so that I have the hassle of installation, getting used to the system and administration only once. So I tried redmine but the problem is it seems to be designed for software projects only. I can't suggest such a solution for the volunteer-group if tickets/issues would have to be of type bug, feature, ... I shortlisted the following six PMS from the wikipedia comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_management_software Project.net Project-Open Redmine Trac Endeavour Software Project Management eGroupWare I guess they are all more or less fine for software development but would you consider any of these to be good for the non-software project as well? Cliff Notes: I would want a start page situation like in trac. The start-page is a wiki presenting the project and not the PMS. But you can log into the PMS from there. Feature-wish list: wiki, Issue tracking, revision control, scheduling & gantt charts, forums (least important) (Btw: I'm very aware that I can't expect everything to be perfect ;-) 1.)Do you know a suitable solution for software and real-life projects or a highly customizable PMS where I can easily remove sth. like "browse source"(trac) and rename things like ticket/issue-types "bug", "feature"? 2.)Any experience good/bad with the above mentioned six PMS? I would personally guess that "Redmine" and "Endeavour Software Project Management" are too focused on software projects.

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  • Adding Column to a SQL Server Table

    - by Dinesh Asanka
    Adding a column to a table is  common task for  DBAs. You can add a column to a table which is a nullable column or which has default values. But are these two operations are similar internally and which method is optimal? Let us start this with an example. I created a database and a table using following script: USE master Go --Drop Database if exists IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM SYS.databases WHERE name = 'AddColumn') DROP DATABASE AddColumn --Create the database CREATE DATABASE AddColumn GO USE AddColumn GO --Drop the table if exists IF EXISTS ( SELECT 1 FROM sys.tables WHERE Name = 'ExistingTable') DROP TABLE ExistingTable GO --Create the table CREATE TABLE ExistingTable (ID BIGINT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, DateTime1 DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), DateTime2 DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), DateTime3 DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), DateTime4 DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), Gendar CHAR(1) DEFAULT 'M', STATUS1 CHAR(1) DEFAULT 'Y' ) GO -- Insert 100,000 records with defaults records INSERT INTO ExistingTable DEFAULT VALUES GO 100000 Before adding a Column Before adding a column let us look at some of the details of the database. DBCC IND (AddColumn,ExistingTable,1) By running the above query, you will see 637 pages for the created table. Adding a Column You can add a column to the table with following statement. ALTER TABLE ExistingTable Add NewColumn INT NULL Above will add a column with a null value for the existing records. Alternatively you could add a column with default values. ALTER TABLE ExistingTable Add NewColumn INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1 The above statement will add a column with a 1 value to the existing records. In the below table I measured the performance difference between above two statements. Parameter Nullable Column Default Value CPU 31 702 Duration 129 ms 6653 ms Reads 38 116,397 Writes 6 1329 Row Count 0 100000 If you look at the RowCount parameter, you can clearly see the difference. Though column is added in the first case, none of the rows are affected while in the second case all the rows are updated. That is the reason, why it has taken more duration and CPU to add column with Default value. We can verify this by several methods. Number of Pages The number of data pages can be obtained by using DBCC IND command. Though, this an undocumented dbcc command, many experts are ok to use this command in production. However, since there is no official word from Microsoft, use this “at your own risk”. DBCC IND (AddColumn,ExistingTable,1) Before Adding the Columns 637 Adding a Column with NULL 637 Adding a column with DEFAULT value 1270 This clearly shows that pages are physically modified. Please note, a high value indicated in the Adding a column with DEFAULT value  column is also a result of page splits. Continues…

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  • Fiber in Cable Management Arm

    - by mrtroy
    I'm aware of the existing debate on cable management arms. For those people who DO use cable management arms, do you put Fiber into the arms? It looks like I'm fine on minimum bend radii, but am looking for additional opinions before I do anything. -Troy

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  • Cannot find Power Management Tab in XP

    - by Andrew Heath
    I have the problem that when I send my computer to sleep it wakes if you bump the table, floor, burp etc. I have read many threads that say go to Device Manager Mouse Properties Power Management Tab and uncheck the box for wake. My problem is I do not have a Power Management Tab! Anyone know how to enable the tab or stop the mouse from waking my machine? And no, turning it upside down doesn't work either!

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  • Knowledge and user generated content management system to track files, research, proposals, etc.?

    - by Eshwar
    I'll try keep it short. Here's the scenario: We have employees all over the world performing similar work i.e. research, generating powerpoint slides, word documents, graphics, etc. Many times a lot of this previous work can be reused for another future project. The current arrangement is email and phone calls which as you would agree is quick if you know where to look but otherwise archaic and very very inefficient. So I am looking for software that will allow me to do the following: Tag files e.g. an investor presentation on cellphone usage in kenya would be tagged investor, cellphone, kenya Manage references e.g. if we read something on the internet, should be able to paste that link in some fashion and tag it as above. Preferably cloud based so that it can be accessed by anybody and additionally would be nice (though NOT must) to have access levels (director, manager, everyone) A nice interface that non technically savvy folks can warm up to ;) A desktop app would be handy so that people don't always have to click upload or something A tree based system is inefficient in this case because content is usually linked across branches and also people might not quite agree on one format of a tree. Tagging works around this very nicely. What I have considered so far: Evernote (for its more professional look) Springpad (for its versatility with content) Mendeley (this is a research manager and in some ways ideal, but i fear its limited to PDFs) The goal is that when somebody wants to look for a document, they don't have to ask a colleague, they can just search with keywords and all relevant information shows up. Thanks!

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  • Tips/tricks to manage a new team with new code

    - by Fanatic23
    How do you handle yourself in a new team where you are the senior most developer and most others in the team are junior to you by several years. The task ahead of the team is something nobody else including you has accomplished in their career before. Management insists on higher productivity of the whole team, and as senior developer you are responsible. Any tips for coming out trumps in a situation like this? Clearly, the entire team needs time to learn and let's not forget the team's new. However, deadlines are up ahead as well...

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  • Premera Blue Cross Deploys PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 Human Capital Management, Financial Management, Enterprise Learning Management and Enterprise Portal Solutions

    - by jay.richey
    Optimum Solutions Implements Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 at Premera Blue Cross Premera chose to upgrade to the latest version of PeopleSoft to help the company achieve its strategic goals, which include building and maintaining a skilled employee team that enables the company to deliver highly efficient and valuable service to plan subscribers, sponsors, and healthcare providers. Its decision was influenced by the key capabilities in PeopleSoft Talent Management 9.1, as well as the common technology enhancements for the PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.50 toolset across all business process areas, which has helped Premera to maximize process automation, increased ease of use, and minimize long term IT support overhead. Read more...

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  • Please allow us to cancel loading of log in SQL Server Management Studio Log Viewer

    - by simonsabin
    The log viewer in management studio is really neat, however if you have large log files or are accessing a remote server over a slow connection it can take a long time to load the log records. Generally you only need the last x records, so you don’t need to load all the records. It would be great to have a cancel button to allow us to cancel the loading of the log records in SQL Server Management Studio. As an aside one of the best features in SQL 2005 was the ability to cancel your connection attempt...(read more)

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  • Recommended programming language for linux server management and web ui integration

    - by Brendan Martens
    I am interested in making an in house web ui to ease some of the management tasks I face with administrating many servers; think Canonical's Landscape. This means doing things like, applying package updates simultaneously across servers, perhaps installing a custom .deb (I use ubuntu/debian.) Reviewing server logs, executing custom scripts, viewing status information for all my servers. I hope to be able to reuse existing command line tools instead of rewriting the exact same operations in a different language myself. I really want to develop something that allows me to continue managing on the ssh level but offers the power of a web interface for easily applying the same infrastructure wide changes. They should not be mutually exclusive. What are some recommended programming languages to use for doing this kind of development and tying it into a web ui? Why do you recommend the language(s) you do? I am not an experienced programmer, but view this as an opportunity to scratch some of my own itches as well as become a better programmer. I do not care specifically if one language is harder than another, but am more interested in picking the best tools for the job from the beginning. Feel free to recommend any existing projects that already integrate management of many systems into a single cohesive web ui, except Landscape (not free,) Ebox (ebox control center not free) and webmin (I don't like it, feels clunky and does not integrate well with the "debian way" of maintaining a server, imo. Also, only manages one system.) Thanks for any ideas! Update: I am not looking to reinvent the wheel of systems management, I just want to "glue" many preexisting and excellent tools together where possible and appropriate; this is why I wonder about what languages can interact well with pre-existing command line tools, while making them manageable with a web ui.

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  • Recommendation for Document Management Solution

    - by BillN
    We've just been informed by our software vendor that the custom document management system they'd written is no longer in development, and will not be supported in the future. So we are looking at new document management systems. Requirements: Multiple input vectors, we receive documents via e-mail, fax, scanning, and from the originating application Ability to Redact or obscure data. Customers may fax an order with CC data, we want to attach the image of the order form with the order record, but the CC data needs to be protected. Same with Tax IDs. Certain users should be able to see the redacted data, but access should be logged. Version control on documents. We'd like Product Development and Marketing to be able to track various versions of documents like Packaging Designs, but ensure that users have the latest approved version. AD integration, my users don't need another password. Ability to integrate to other apps. Our current system, offers function keys in the order-entry system, that will spawn the viewer application, and open the correct document. Mass import facility, we have a half a terabyte of existing documents in the old system that we would like to import. Retention Policy. I'd like a way to have the system comply with the corporate retention policy, so that when a document of a certain type reaches a certain age, it gets deleted, or atleast marked for manual deletion. We are a Windows Server and HP-UX shop. Does anybody have any experience with Document Management systems that they would like to share? Thanks.

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