Search Results

Search found 13388 results on 536 pages for 'professional experience'.

Page 487/536 | < Previous Page | 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494  | Next Page >

• Who owns the IP rights of the software without written employment contract? Employer or employee? [closed]

  - by P T

  I am a software engineer who got an idea, and developed alone an integrated ERP software solution over the past 2 years. I got the idea and coded much of the software in my personal time, utilizing my own resources, but also as intern/employee at small wholesale retailer (company A). I had a verbal agreement with the company that I could keep the IP rights to the code and the company would have the "shop rights" to use "a copy" of the software without restrictions. Part of this agreement was that I was heavily underpaid to keep the rights. Recently things started to take a down turn in the company A as the company grew fairly large and new head management was formed, also new partners were brought in. The original owners distanced themselves from the business, and the new "greedy" group indicated that they want to claim the IP rights to my software, offering me a contract that would split the IP ownership into 50% co-ownership, completely disregarding the initial verbal agreements. As of now there was no single written job description and agreement/contract/policy that I signed with the company A, I signed only I-9 and W-4 forms. I now have an opportunity to leave the company A and form a new business with 2 partners (Company B), obviously using the software as the primary tool. There would be no direct conflict of interest as the company A sells wholesale goods. My core question is: "Who owns the code without contract? Me or the company A? (in FL, US)" Detailed questions: I am familiar with the "shop rights", I don't have any problem leaving a copy of the code in the company for them to use/enhance to run their wholesale business. What worries me, Can the company A make any legal claims to the software/code/IP and potential derived profits/interests after I leave and form a company B? Can applying for a copyright of the code at http://www.copyright.gov in my name prevent any legal disputes in the future? Can I use it as evidence for legal defense? Could adding a note specifying the company A as exclusive license holder clarify the arrangements? If I leave and the company A sues me, what evidence would they use against me? On what basis would the sue since their business is in completely different industry than software (wholesale goods). Every single source file was created/stored on my personal computer with proper documentation including a copyright notice with my credentials (name/email/addres/phone). It's also worth noting that I develop significant part of the software prior to my involvement with the company A as student. If I am forced to sign a contract and the company A doesn't honor the verbal agreement, making claims towards the ownership, what can I do settle the matter legally? I like to avoid legal process altogether as my budget for court battles is extremely limited at the moment. Would altering the code beyond recognition and using it for the company B prevent the company A make any copyright claims? My common sense tells me that what I developed is by default mine in terms of IP, unless there is a signed legal agreement stating otherwise. But looking online it may be completely backwards, this really worries me. I understand that this is not legal advice, and I know to get the ultimate answer I need to hire a lawyer. I am only hoping to get some valuable input/experience/advice/opinion from those who were in similar situation or are familiar with the topic. Thank you, PT

  Read the article

• What Counts For a DBA: Replaceable

  - by Louis Davidson

  Replaceable is what every employee in every company instinctively strives not to be. Yet, if you’re an irreplaceable DBA, meaning that the company couldn’t find someone else who could do what you do, then you’re not doing a great job. A good DBA is replaceable. I imagine some of you are already reaching for the lighter fluid, about to set the comments section ablaze, but before you destroy a perfectly good Commodore 64, read on… Everyone is replaceable, ultimately. Anyone, anywhere, in any job, could be sitting at their desk reading this, blissfully unaware that this is to be their last day at work. Morbidly, you could be about to take your terminal breath. Ideally, it will be because another company suddenly offered you a truck full of money to take a new job, forcing you to bid a regretful farewell to your current employer (with barely a “so long suckers!” left wafting in the air as you zip out of the office like the Wile E Coyote wearing two pairs of rocket skates). I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be present at the meeting where your former work colleagues discuss your potential replacement. It is perhaps only at this point, as they struggle with the question “What kind of person do we need to replace old Wile?” that you would know your true worth in their eyes. Of course, this presupposes you need replacing. I’ve known one or two people whose absence we adequately compensated with a small rock, to keep their old chair from rolling down a slight incline in the floor. On another occasion, we bought a noise-making machine that frequently attracted attention its way, with unpleasant sounds, but never contributed anything worthwhile. These things never actually happened, of course, but you take my point: don’t confuse replaceable with expendable. Likewise, if the term “trained seal” comes up, someone they can teach to follow basic instructions and push buttons in the right order, then the replacement discussion is going to be over quickly. What, however, if your colleagues decide they’ll need a super-specialist to replace you. That’s a good thing, right? Well, usually, in my experience, no it is not. It often indicates that no one really knows what you do, or how. A typical example is the “senior” DBA who built a system just before 16-bit computing became all the rage and then settled into a long career managing it. Such systems are often central to the company’s operations and the DBA very skilled at what they do, but almost impossible to replace, because the system hasn’t evolved, and runs on processes and routines that others no longer understand or recognize. The only thing you really want to hear, at your replacement discussion, is that they need someone skilled at the fundamentals and adaptable. This means that the person they need understands that their goal is to be an excellent DBA, not a specialist in whatever the-heck the company does. Someone who understands the new versions of SQL Server and can adapt the company’s systems to the way things work today, who uses industry standard methods that any other qualified DBA/programmer can understand. More importantly, this person rarely wants to get “pigeon-holed” and so documents and shares the specialized knowledge and responsibilities with their teammates. Being replaceable doesn’t mean being “dime a dozen”. The company might need four people to take your place due to the depth of your skills, but still, they could find those replacements and those replacements could step right in using techniques that any decent DBA should know. It is a tough question to contemplate, but take some time to think about the sort of person that your colleagues would seek to replace you. If you think they would go looking for a “super-specialist” then consider urgently how you can diversify and share your knowledge, and start documenting all the processes you know as if today were your last day, because who knows, it just might be.

  Read the article

• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

  Read the article

• "Why We Chose Fusion CRM" by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group This year The Athene Group (www.theathenegroup.com) celebrated our tenth anniversary. The company has accomplished a lot in ten years overcoming a number of hurdles and challenges to have grown organically to a 150+ person global company with offices in the US, UK, and India and customers in the US, Canada, and Europe. Now more than ever with the current global landscape from an economic and competitive standpoint it was vital that we make some changes to remain successful for the next ten years. There were two key initiatives that we discussed internally that would enable us to successfully accomplish this – collaboration and the concept of “insight to action”. With our existing Oracle CRM On Demand platform we had components of this but not the full depth and breadth that we were looking for. When we started to discuss Fusion CRM we immediately saw several next generation tools that would embrace these two objectives. For a consulting and development organization the collaboration required between business development and consulting delivery is as important as the collaboration required during the projects between the project delivery and account management teams. The Activity Streams functionality in Fusion CRM immediately addressed the communication of key discussion topics and exchanges around our clients. Of course when we saw the Oracle Social Network (which is part of our Fusion CRM roadmap) we were blown away. The combination OSN and our CRM is going to make us more effective as we discuss and work cohesively on client engagements – ensuring mutual success for both Athene and our clients. When we looked at “insight to action” we saw that we had a great platform when folks were at their desks, unfortunately a lot of our business development and consulting folks are on the road. The Fusion Mobile Sales and Fusion Outlook Desktop provide information to our teams when they are on the go. So that they can provide real-time information and react to real-time information provided by their peers. We are in the early stages of our transformative experience with Fusion CRM but we believe the platform along with our people and processes are going to help us achieve our goals in the future.

  Read the article

• Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

  - by cibrax

  Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS.  Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires  advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right.  However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator;   public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { }   public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; }   public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; }   return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>();   var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); }   return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

  Read the article

• New features in TFS Demo Setup 1.0.0.2

  - by Tarun Arora

  Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/ | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas Just pushed out the 2nd release of the TFS Demo setup on CodePlex, below a quick look at some of the new features/improvements in the tool… Details of the existing features can be found here. Feature 1 – Set up Work Items Queries as Team Favorites The task board looks cooler when the team favourite work item queries show up on the task board. The demo setup console application now has the ability to set up the work item queries as team favorites for you. If you want to see how you can add Team Favorites programmatically, refer to this blogpost here. Image 1 – Task board without Team Favorites Let’s see how the TFS Demo Setup application sets-up team favorites as part of the run… Open up the DemoDictionary.xml and you should be able to see the new node <TeamFavorites> this accepts multiple <TeamFavorite>. You simply need to specify the <Type> as Query and in the <Name> specify the name of the work item query that you would like added as a favorite. Image 2 – Highlighting the TeamFavorites block in DemoDictionary.xml So, when the demo set up application is run with the above config, work item queries “Blocked Tasks” and “Open Impediments” are added as team favorites. They then show up on the task board, as highlighted in the screen shot below. Image 3 – Team Favorites setup during the TFS demo setup app execution Feature 2 – Choose what you want to setup and exclude the rest I had a great feature request come in requesting the ability to exclude parts of the setup at the sole discretion of the executioner. To accommodate this, I have added an attribute with each block, the attribute “Run” accepts “true” or “false”. If you set the flag to true then at the time of execution that block would be considered for setup and if you set the flag to false, the block will be ignored during the setup. So, lets look at an example below… The attribute "Run” is set to true for TeamSettings, Team Favorites, TeamMembers and WorkItems. So, all of these would be setup as part of the demo setup application execution. Image 4 – New Attribute Run added to all blocks in DemoDictionary.xml If I did not want to recreate the team and did not want to add new work items but only wanted to add favorites and team members to the existing team “AgileChamps1” then I could simple run the application with below DemoDictionary.xml. Note – TeamSettings Run=”false” and WorkItems Run=”false”. Image 5 – TeamFavorites and TeamMembers set as true and others set to false Feature 3 – Usability Improvement If you try and assign a work item to a team member that does not exist then the application throws a nasty exception. This behaviour has now been changed, upon adding such a work item, the work items will be created and not assigned to any user. The work item id will be printed to the console making it simple for you to assign the work item manually. As you can see in the screen shot below, I am trying to assign the work item to a user “Tarun” and a user “v2” both are *not valid users in my team project collection* so the tool creates the work items and provides me the work item id and lets me know that since the user is invalid the work item could not be assigned to the user. Better user experience ae Image 6 – Behaviour if work item assigned to users are in valid users in team project That’s about it for the current release. I have some new features planned for the next release. Mean while if you have any ideas/comments please feel free to leave a comment. Stay tuned for more… Enjoy! Other posts on TFS Demo Setup can be found here.

  Read the article

• How to Mentor a Junior Developer

  - by Josh Johnson

  This title is a little broad but I may need to give a little background before I can ask my question properly. I know that similar questions have been asked here already. But in my case I'm not asking if I should be mentoring someone or if the person is a good fit for being a software developer. That is not my place to judge. I have not been asked outright, but it is apparent that myself and other fellow senior developers are to mentor the new developers that start here. I have no problem with this whatsoever and, in many cases, it lends me a fresh perspective on things and I end up learning in the process. Also, I remember how beneficial it was in the beginning of my career when someone would take some time to teach me something. When I say "new developer" they could be anywhere from fresh out of college to having a year or two of experience. Recently and in the past we've had people start here who seem to have an attitude toward development/programming which is different from mine and hard for me to reconcile; they seem to extract just enough information to get the task done but not really learn from it. I find myself going over and over the same issues with them. I understand that part of this could be a personality thing, but I feel it's my job to do my best and sort of push them out of the nest while they're under my wing, so to speak. How can I impart just enough information so that they will learn but not give so much as to solve the problem for them? Or perhaps: What's the proper response to questions that are designed to take the path of least resistance and, in essence, force them to learn instead of take the easy way out? These questions are probably more general teaching questions and don't have that much to do specifically with software development. Note: I do not get a say in what tasks they are working on. Management doles the task out and it could be anything from a very simple bug fix to starting an entire application by themselves. While this is not ideal by any means and obviously presents its own gauntlet of challenges, I feel it's a topic best left for another question. So the best I can do is help them with the problem at hand and try to help them break it down into simpler problems and also check their commit logs and point out mistakes that they made. My main objectives are to: Help them out and give them the tools they need to start becoming more self-reliant. Steer them in the right direction and break bad development habits early on. Lessen the amount of time I spend with them (the personality type described above seems to need much more one-on-one time and does not do well over IM or email. While that's generally fine, I can't always stop what I'm working on, break my stride, and help them debug an error on a moments notice; I have my own projects that need to get done).

  Read the article

• Oracle EMEA News Digest - May 2014

  - by Steve Walker

  Systems Oracle introduced a technology preview of an OpenStack® distribution that allows Oracle Linux and Oracle VM users to work with the open source cloud software. This provides customers with additional choices and interoperability while taking advantage of the efficiency, performance, scalability, and security of Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. The distribution is delivered as part of the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Premier Support offerings, at no additional cost. Oracle plans to work further with the OpenStack community to develop and enhance its enterprise-class capabilities to meet customer demands. Also in the Open Source arena, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL Fabric. MySQL Fabric provides an integrated system that makes it simpler to manage groups of MySQL databases. It delivers both high availability - via failure detection and failover - and scalability through automated data sharding. Oracle Database, Middleware and Technology The company made two announcements for Oracle Tuxedo, the #1 application server for C, C++, COBOL and Java deployments in private cloud or traditional data center environments. With enhanced management and monitoring features and tighter integration with Oracle technologies, the latest release of Oracle Tuxedo 12c enables organizations to dramatically increase application throughput, while reducing total cost of ownership and time to market for new application development and deployment. Oracle also introduced the latest release of its mainframe application rehosting platform, Oracle Tuxedo ART 12c, to help organizations speed up migration projects and accelerate the adoption of the new environment by current IT staff. It enables organizations to accelerate the rehosting of IBM mainframe applications and greatly enhance management and supportability of the rehosted applications while reducing costs and risk. Applications According to new Oracle studies, B2B and B2C commerce professionals find integrated, omni-channel customer experiences increasingly valuable to their organizations, and are continuing to invest in technologies and digital content strategies to facilitate them. The studies—one for B2B and one for B2C—surveyed e-commerce professionals in business and technology departments from around the world. Although the priorities, success metrics, and technology investments differed between the two groups, customer acquisition and retention emerged as common themes across B2B and B2C. Growing market share and enhancing customer experience are cited as top investment areas for all e-commerce professionals. In product news, Oracle announced the latest release of Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications (version 11.1.1.8.1, in case anyone asks). It includes prebuilt connectors between Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics and Oracle’s JD Edwards. Additionally, a new Oracle Human Resources Analytics module for developing and maintaining a skilled workforce has been introduced. In use at more than 4,000 companies worldwide, Oracle BI Applications support leading enterprise applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offering high-performing analytics at a lower cost. Industries For the Communications Industry, Oracle has launched a new release of the Oracle Communications Core Session Manager. This gives CSPs a new way to design, deploy and manage complex networking services and embrace next-generation technology, It provides them with an immediate entry point for  network function virtualization (NFV) efforts, allowing them to realize immediate benefits associated with network virtualization – including increased service agility and improved network resource sharing. And for the Utilities Industry, Oracle is releasing solutions with new business features and enhanced technical architecture that help position utilities for success now and into the future. Oracle has provided new releases for its customer information system,  meter data management system, customer self-service solution and mobile workforce management solution.

  Read the article

• Wisdom Lies in Collaborative Power and Intelligence

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  By Alakh Verma, Director, Platform Technology Solutions   In my recent blog posts, I shared insights on Predictive Analytics (Will Predictive Analytics at 'Speed of Thoughts' Help Businesses?), Real Time Decisions (How critical are Real Time decisions in business today?) and their significance in our lives in general and in businesses today. In the current business paradigm shift- with evolutionary social business, it is paramount that businesses look for wisdom in collaborative power and intelligence and equip their employees with the tools to engage with one another. There is an old time saying that 5 sticks tied together are stronger and unable to break as opposed to an individual stick. We have recently witnessed the power of ordinary people uniting together and fought collaboratively using Facebook and Twitter to topple down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya—and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. And an India one man’s (Anna Hazare) campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands to the streets in support. As anyone who has worked in a sizeable organization knows, there is no guarantee that the organization as a whole will perform efficiently and achieve its goals, even if each employee is individually efficient and every team has a high level of productivity. To achieve enterprise productivity, it is necessary not only for individuals and groups to “do things right” by working productively but also for the enterprise as a whole to “do the right things” - form the right teams, make the right decisions, allocate resources correctly, and effectively coordinate activities across the entire organization. Most organizations fall short of the optimal level of enterprise productivity because of one or more of these reasons, all at a great cost to the business.  They are disconnected from themselves with various parts of the organization unintentionally working at cross-purposes with each other.  Information that exists is not getting shared or reused.  Human talent is not being applied where it is most needed.  The same problems are being solved repeatedly by multiple groups. Intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity, with a potentially dramatic impact on the financial performance of the business. Whether it is a simple email exchange, a physical or virtual meeting, a task force, or a large-scale project, the activity is inherently collaborative.  In fact, collaboration can be defined as the work that takes place among people when a business process is not pre-determining how the work should take place. Collaboration is many things: information sharing, brainstorming, problem solving, best practice negotiation, innovation, coordination of activity, alignment of purpose, and so forth.  Collaboration is the “white space” between the business processes; it is the glue that holds an organization together, and the lubricant that allows the machinery to keep running.  Real time search and collaborative capabilities of the right people with the right content supported by defined processes will provide unparallel wisdom in the organization in the most competitive business environment today. Interestingly, technologies such as Oracle WebCenter offer these capabilities in our Web based business transactions and compliment in the overall collaborative intelligence and power to truly transform organizations to social businesses. Looking to learn more about engaging your employees to collaborate together and providing a complete user experience for your customers? You won't want to miss our webcast today! Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  Read the article

• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for September 2-8, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 items shared on the OTN Facebook Page for the week of September 2-8, 2012. Adding a runtime LOV for a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena illustrates how to customize the parameters tab for a taskflow in WebCenter. Tips on Migrating from AquaLogic .NET Accelerator to WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET | Scott Nelson "It has been a very winding path and this blog entry is intended to share both the lessons learned and relevant approaches that led to those learnings," says Scott Nelson. "Like most journeys of discovery, it was not a direct path, and there are notes to let you know when it is practical to skip a section if you are in a hurry to get from here to there." Free Event: Oracle Technology Network Architect Day – Boston, MA – 9/12/2012 Sure, you could ask a voodoo priestess for help in improving your solution architecture skills. But there's the whole snake thing, and the zombie thing, and other complications. So why not keep it simple and register for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA. There's no magic, just a full day of technical sessions covering Cloud, SOA, Engineered Systems, and more. Registration is free, but seating is limited. You'll curse yourself if you miss this one. Starting and Stopping Fusion Applications the Right Way | Ronaldo Viscuso While the fastartstop tool that ships with Oracle Fusion Applications does most of the work to start/stop/bounce the Fusion Apps environment, it does not do it all. Oracle Fusion Applications A-Team blogger Ronaldo Viscuso's post "aims to explain all tasks involved in starting and stopping a Fusion Apps environment completely." Article Index: Architect Community Column in Oracle Magazine Did you know that Oracle Magazine features a regular column devoted specifically to the architect community? Every issue includes insight and expertise from architects who regularly work with Oracle Technologies. Click here to see a complete list of these articles. Using FMAP and AnalyticsRes in a Oracle BI High Availability Implementation | Art of Business Intelligence "The fmap syntax has been used for a long time in Oracle BI / Siebel Analytics when referencing images inherent in the application as well as custom images," says Oracle ACE Christian Screen. "This syntax is used on Analysis requests an dashboards." Dodeca Customer Feedback - The Rosewood Company | Tim Tow Oracle ACE Director Tim Tow shares anecdotal comments from one of his clients, a company that is deploying Dodeca to replace an aging VBA/Essbase application. Configuring UCM cache to check for external Content Server changes | Martin Deh Oracle WebCenter and ADF A-Team blogger shares the background information and the solution to a recently encountered customer scenario. Attend OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 The OTN Architect Day roadshow stops in Boston next week, then it's on to Los Angeles for another all architecture, all day event on Thursday October 25, 2012 at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Like all Architect Day events, this one is absolutley free, so register now. The Role of Oracle VM Server for SPARC In a Virtualization Strategy New OTN article from Matthias Pfutzner. Thought for the Day "Practicing architects, through eduction, experience and examples, accumulate a considerable body of contextual sense by the time they're entrusted with solving a system-level problem…" — Eberhardt Rechtin (January 16, 1926 – April 14, 2006) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

  Read the article

• Is a university education really worth it for a good programmer?

  - by Jon Purdy

  The title says it all, but here's the personal side of it: I've been doing design and programming for about as long as I can remember. If there's a programming problem, I can figure it out. (Though admittedly StackOverflow has allowed me to skip the figuring out and get straight to the doing in many instances.) I've made games, esoteric programming languages, and widgets and gizmos galore. I'm currently working on a general-purpose programming language. There's nothing I do better than programming. However, I'm just as passionate about design. Thus when I felt leaving high school that my design skills were lacking, I decided to attend university for New Media Design and Imaging, a digital design-related major. For a year, I diligently studied art and programmed in my free time. As the next year progressed, however, I was obligated to take fewer art and design classes and more technical classes. The trouble was of course that these classes were geared toward non-technical students, and were far beneath my skill level at the time. No amount of petitioning could overcome the institution's reluctance to allow me to test out of such classes, and the major offered no promise for any greater challenge in the future, so I took the extreme route: I switched into the technical equivalent of the major, New Media Interactive Development. A lot of my credits moved over into the new major, but many didn't. It would have been infeasible to switch to a more rigorous technical major such as Computer Science, and having tutored Computer Science students at every level here, I doubt I would be exposed to anything that I haven't already or won't eventually find out on my own, since I'm so involved in the field. I'm now on track to graduate perhaps a year later than I had planned, which puts a significant financial strain on my family and my future self. My schedule continues to be bogged down with classes that are wholly unnecessary for me to take. I'm being re-introduced to subjects that I've covered a thousand times over, simply because I've always been interested in it all. And though I succeed in avoiding the cynical and immature tactic of failing to complete work out of some undeserved sense of superiority, I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned by the lack of intellectual stimulation. Further, my school requires students to complete a number of quarters of co-op work experience proportional to their major. My original major required two quarters, but my current requires three, delaying my graduation even more. To top it all off, college is putting a severe strain on my relationship with my very close partner of a few years, so I've searched diligently for co-op jobs in my area, alas to no avail. I'm now in my third year, and approaching that point past which I can no longer handle this. Either I keep my head down, get a degree no matter what it takes, and try to get a job with a company that will pay me enough to do what I love that I can eventually pay off my loans; or I cut my losses now, move wherever there is work, and in six months start paying off what debt I've accumulated thus far. So the real question is: is a university education really more than just a formality? It's a big decision, and one I can't make lightly. I think this is the appropriate venue for this kind of question, and I hope it sticks around for the sake of others who might someday find themselves in similar situations. My heartfelt thanks for reading, and in advance for your help.

  Read the article

• PARTNER WEBCAST- ORACLE COMPETENCE - PROGRAM (COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  I am pleased to invite you to join the second (Competence Virtual). In Competence - program we will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Competencewill be presented on 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Competence is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. What are the Benefits for Partners? Find out how Competence helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customer’s solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleagues alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Applications portfolio – for your and your Customer’s benefit.   Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Product breakout sessions:- Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy- Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review- Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution- Oracle Transportation Management- Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management- Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences- EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview- Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 For more details please visit and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery FormatCompetence- program (Competence Virtual) is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Competence consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. You can also see Competence afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Competence web casts will be presented as follows: June the 4th  2012 September the 3rd  2012 December the 3rd  2012 March the 4th  2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me at [email protected]. Best regards Markku RouhiainenDirector, Applications Partner EnablementWestern Europe

  Read the article

• How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]

  - by Simucal

  Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other schools in the mid-west. We got our butts kicked. You are given a packet with about 11 problems (1 problem per page) and you have 4 hours to solve as many as you can. They'll run your program you submit against a set of data and your output must match theirs exactly. In fact, the judging is automated for the most part. In any case.. I went there fairly confident in my programming skills and I left there feeling drained and weak. It was a terribly humbling experience. In 4 hours my team of 3 people completed only one of the problems. The top team completed 4 of them and took 1st place. The problems they asked were like no problems I have ever had to answer before. I later learned that in order to solve them some of them effectively you have to use graphs/graph algorithms, trees, stacks. Some of them were simply "greedy" algo's. My question is, how can I better prepare for this semesters programming competition so I don't leave there feeling like a complete moron? What tips do you have for me to be able to answer these problems that involve graphs, trees, various "well known" algorithms? How can I easily identify the algorithm we should implement for a given problem? I have yet to take Algorithm Design in school so I just feel a little out of my element. Here are some examples of the questions asked at the competitions: ACM Problem Sets Update: Just wanted to update this since the latest competition is over. My team placed 1st for our small region (about 6-7 universities with between 1-5 teams each school) and ~15th for the midwest! So, it is a marked improvement over last years performance for sure. We also had no graduate students on our team and after reviewing the rules we found out that many teams had several! So, that would be a pretty big advantage in my own opinion. Problems this semester ranged from about 1-2 "easy" problems (ie bit manipulation, string manipulation) to hard (graph problems involving fairly complex math and network flow problems). We were able to solve 4 problems in our 5 hours. Just wanted to thank everyone for the resources they provided here, we used them for our weekly team practices and it definitely helped! Some quick tips that I have that aren't suggested below: When you are seated at your computer before the competition starts, quickly type out various data structures that you might need that you won't have access to in your languages libraries. I typed out a Graph data-structure complete with floyd-warshall and dijkstra's algorithm before the competition began. We ended up using it in our 2nd problem that we solved and this is the main reason why we solved this problem before anyone else in the midwest. We had it ready to go from the beginning. Similarly, type out the code to read in a file since this will be required for every problem. Save this answer "template" someplace so you can quickly copy/paste it to your IDE at the beginning of each problem. There are no rules on programming anything before the competition starts so get any boilerplate code out the way. We found it useful to have one person who is on permanent whiteboard duty. This is usually the person who is best at math and at working out solutions to get a head start on future problems you will be doing. One person is on permanent programming duty. Your fastest/most skilled "programmer" (most familiar with the language). This will save debugging time also. The last person has several roles between assessing the packet of problems for the next "easiest" problem, helping the person on the whiteboard work out solutions and helping the person programming work out bugs/issues. This person needs to be flexible and be able to switch between roles easily.

  Read the article

• Tweeting about Oracle Applications Usability: Points to Consider

  - by ultan o'broin

  Here are a few pointers to anyone interested in tweeting about Oracle Applications usability or user experience (UX). These are based on my own experiences and practice, and may not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle, of course (touché, see the footer). If you are an Oracle employee and tweet about our offerings, then read up and follow the corporate social media policy. For the record, I tweet under the following account names: @ultan, @localization, @gamifyOracle, and @usableapps. The last two are supposedly Oracle subject-dedicated, but I mix it up on occassion. Fill out your Twitter account profile, and add a profile picture too. Disclose your interest. Don’t leave either the profile or image blank if you want to be taken seriously (or followed by me). Don’t tweet from a locked down Twitter account, as the message cannot be circulated to anyone who doesn't follow you. Open up the account if you really want to get that UX message out. Stay on message. The usable apps website, Misha Vaughan's VoX blog, and the Oracle Applications blog are good sources of UX messages and information, but you can find many other product team, individual, and corporate-wide sources with a little bit of searching. Set up a Google Alert with pertinent related keywords to get a daily digest of new information right in your inbox. Be original about it. Add your own insight and wit to the message, were relevant. Just circulating and RTing stock headlines adds no value to your effort or to the reader, and is somewhat lazy, in my opinion. Leave room for RTing of your tweet. So, don’t max out those 140 characters. Keep it under 130 if you want to be RTed without modification (or at all-I am not a fan of modifying tweets [MT], way too much effort for the medium). Remove articles and punctuation marks and use fragments, abbreviations, and so on at will to keep the tweet short enough, but leave keywords intact, as people search on those. Follow any Fusion UX Advocates who are on Twitter too (you can search for these names), and not just Oracle employees. Don't just follow people you like or think like you, or those who you think like you or are like-minded. Take a look at who is following or being followed by other tweeters and er, follow up. Create and socialize others to use an easily remembered or typed hashtag, or use what’s already popularized (for an event or conference, for example). We used #gamifyOracle for the applications UX gamification design jam, and other popular applications UX ones are #fusionapps and #usableapps (or at least I’m trying to popularize it). But, before you start the messaging, if you want to keep a record of the hashtag traffic, then set it up with an archiving service. Twitter’s own tweet lifespan is short. Don't mix up hashtags (#) with Twitter handles (@) that have the same name. Sending a tweet to @gamifyOracle will just be seen by @gamifyOracle (me) and any followers we have in common. Sending it to #gamifyOracle is seen by anyone following or searching for that hashtag. No dissing the competition. But there is no rule about not following them on Twitter to see the market reactions to Oracle announcements and this can even let you can tailor your own message accordingly. Don’t be boring. Mix it up a bit. Every 10th or so tweet, divert into other areas of interest, personal ones, even. No constant “I just received K+ in this and that” or “I just checked into wherever” on foursquare pouring into the Twittersteam, please. I just don’t care and will probably unfollow such people pretty quickly. And now, your Twitter tips and experiences with this subject? Them go in the comments...

  Read the article

• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part I

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems. In my next post, I will share examples of companies that have made that shift and talk more about the distributed orchestration process.

  Read the article

• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 4

  - by AshishRay

  This is Part 4 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In Part 3, I talked in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing, and the distance implications you have to keep in mind. In this final article of the series, I will talk about how you can nicely complement Data Guard SYNC with the ability to failover in seconds. Wait - Did I Say “Seconds”? Did I just say that some customers do Data Guard failover in seconds? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Data Guard has an automatic failover capability, aptly called Fast-Start Failover. Initially available with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Data Guard SYNC transport mode (and enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support Data Guard ASYNC transport mode), this capability, managed by Data Guard Broker, lets your Data Guard configuration automatically failover to a designated standby database. Yes, this means no human intervention is required to do the failover. This process is controlled by a low footprint Data Guard Broker client called Observer, which makes sure that the primary database and the designated standby database are behaving like good kids. If something bad were to happen to the primary database, the Observer, after a configurable threshold period, tells that standby, “Your time has come, you are the chosen one!” The standby dutifully follows the Observer directives by assuming the role of the new primary database. The DBA or the Sys Admin doesn’t need to be involved. And - in case you are following this discussion very closely, and are wondering … “Hmmm … what if the old primary is not really dead, but just network isolated from the Observer or the standby - won’t this lead to a split-brain situation?” The answer is No - It Doesn’t. With respect to why-it-doesn’t, I am sure there are some smart DBAs in the audience who can explain the technical reasons. Otherwise - that will be the material for a future blog post. So - this combination of SYNC and Fast-Start Failover is the nirvana of lights-out, integrated HA and DR, as practiced by some of our advanced customers. They have observed failover times (with no data loss) ranging from single-digit seconds to tens of seconds. With this, they support operations in industry verticals such as manufacturing, retail, telecom, Internet, etc. that have the most demanding availability requirements. One of our leading customers with massive cloud deployment initiatives tells us that they know about server failures only after Data Guard has automatically completed the failover process and the app is back up and running! Needless to mention, Data Guard Broker has the integration hooks for interfaces such as JDBC and OCI, or even for custom apps, to ensure the application gets automatically rerouted to the new primary database after the database level failover completes. Net Net? To sum up this multi-part blog article, Data Guard with SYNC redo transport mode, plus Fast-Start Failover, gives you the ideal triple-combo - that is, it gives you the assurance that for critical outages, you can failover your Oracle databases: very fast without human intervention, and without losing any data. In short, it takes the element of risk out of critical IT operations. It does require you to be more careful with your network and systems planning, but as far as HA is concerned, the benefits outweigh the investment costs. So, this is what we in the MAA Development Team believe in. What do you think? How has your deployment experience been? We look forward to hearing from you!

  Read the article

• Chalk Talk with John: How Does SOA Add Value to Your Enterprise?

  - by John Brunswick

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} In this episode of Chalk Talk with John we revisit our town of Middleware Fields from What Does User Experience Mean to You? to look at demystifying the business value of SOA. Middleware fields is an extremely eco-conscious community and has been trying to setup a commuting program for their employees. Though a good idea, they soon run into challenges ensuring that people are able to use the commuting services easily.  Take a look below to see how SOA is like a transit pass for your enterprise and how it addresses common issues you may have with your enterprise systems. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About me: Hi, I am John Brunswick, an Oracle Enterprise Architect. As an Oracle Enterprise Architect, I focus on the alignment of technical capabilities in support of business vision and objectives, as well as the overall business value of technology.  Before coming to Oracle, I was a Practice Manager within BEA System's Business Interaction Division consulting organization, orchestrating enterprise systems in support of line of business goals. Follow me on Twitter and visit my site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

  Read the article

• Graduate Life in Oracle by Ramakrishna Nalabothula

  - by david.talamelli

  Preparation for the BIG interview: I prepared in both technical and logical aspects to face the Oracle Interview. I had to cover almost all main areas in technical and many types of problems in logical areas. We attended mock- interviews and written tests at our college, browsed websites and communities. Having started with such a rigorous preparation before Oracle visited the college; it was possible for me to make it into the list of final selection. I put in a big effort to reach this position and I am very happy to achieve this. Why I chose Oracle: Oracle is one of the best technology providers and has a large customer base. I think it is not an easy job to offer services to that many customers. So, the company needs young and dynamic people and I wanted to be one among them. This gave me spirit and led me to walk into Oracle. I am working on different technologies and learning something new in the field. Having many customers is challenging Oracle and my work is challenging me. I am confident enough that customers to both me and Oracle will never lose their faith. Learning at Oracle: The style of learning is good and never resembles a classroom session in a college. It is always fun to learn here. There is no exam to track the performance. There is enough time until we completely learn it. There is no concept of stiff competition. Peers help through KT (Knowledge Transfers) and there are good resources in the Oracle to learn. People are always there to direct you to those. There are lots of opportunities for Web learning too! My Work Area: My team gives me a great opportunity to offer service to the entire product. There were no situations when I got tense with my work or targets and deliverables. I work with a Global Team and my manager is based in the UK. I have a lot of freedom and flexibility. I use the work from home option in case of any disturbances in the city or due to personal problems. I have a weekly meeting with my manager and use Instant Messenger for status updates. My manager plans very well to give me enough time to complete tasks. I have good coordination from the team towards our deadlines. My work has also brought me close to many people across various technology and product teams. I am glad to make many friends across Oracle. I am enjoying my time and work here. I cover all the major activities in the team. I am thankful to everyone from the Development and Quality Assurance Team to have high confidence in me by assigning such big responsibilities. Primary tasks are maintaining the environments that are very unstable at times. This really requires big time and effort to trace the root causes. I am working and still learning on all these areas. The happiest thing is I got chances to travel to USA & UK for training and for supporting a few customer demo projects. I have got to explore more across two countries and got sponsored to visit the places around due to Oracle's policies. I am very much thankful for these what I have from Oracle and for the cooperation there from other colleagues. Fun at Work: Oracle has a club from Employees to conduct games and events. I had an opportunity to participate in competitions, tournaments inside Oracle and Inter-Corporate for all games. I thank Oracle for providing me all these opportunities and I would like to extend my thanks to Senior Management for their confidence in me. I thank Oracle HR Recruiting Team too for selecting me into Oracle and giving me this opportunity to share my experience and feelings. Ramakrishna Nalabothula

  Read the article

• Open source adventures with... wait for it... Microsoft

  - by Jeff

  Last week, Microsoft announced that it was going to open source the rest of the ASP.NET MVC Web stack. The core MVC framework has been open source for a long time now, but the other pieces around it are also now out in the wild. Not only that, but it's not what I call "big bang" open source, where you release the source with each version. No, they're actually committing in real time to a public repository. They're also taking contributions where it makes sense. If that weren't exciting enough, CodePlex, which used to be a part of the team I was on, has been re-org'd to a different part of the company where it is getting the love and attention (and apparently money) that it deserves. For a period of several months, I lobbied to get a PM gig with that product, but got nowhere. A year and a half later, I'm happy to see it finally treated right. In any case, I found a bug in Razor, the rendering engine, before the beta came out. I informally sent the bug info to some people, but it wasn't fixed for the beta. Now, with the project being developed in the open, I was able to submit the issue, and went back and forth with the developer who wrote the code (I met him once at a meet up in Bellevue, I think), and he committed a fix. I tried it a day later, and the bug was gone. There's a lot to learn from all of this. That open source software is surprisingly efficient and often of high quality is one part of it. For me the win is that it demonstrates how open and collaborative processes, as light as possible, lead to better software. In other words, even if this were a project being developed internally, at a bank or something, getting stakeholders involved early and giving people the ability to respond leads to awesomeness. While there is always a place for big thinking, experience has shown time and time again that trying to figure everything out up front takes too long, and rarely meets expectations. This is a lesson that probably half of Microsoft has yet to learn, including the team I was on before I split. It's the reason that team still hasn't shipped anything to general availability. But I've seen what an open and iterative development style can do for teams, at Microsoft and other places that I've worked. When you can have a conversation with people, and take ideas and turn them into code quickly, you're winning. So why don't people like winning? I think there are a lot of reasons, and they can generally be categorized into fear, skepticism and bad experiences. I can't give the Web stack teams enough credit. Not only did they dream big, but they changed a culture that often seems immovable and hopelessly stuck. This is a very public example of this culture change, but it's starting to happen at every scale in Microsoft. It's really interesting to see in a company that has been written off as dead the last decade.

  Read the article

• More Stuff less Fluff

  - by brendonpage

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brendonpage/archive/2013/11/08/more-stuff-less-fluff.aspxYAGNI – "You Aren't Going To Need It". This is an acronym commonly used in software development to remind developers to only write what they need. This acronym exists because software developers have gotten into the habit of writing everything they need to solve a problem and then everything they think they're going to possibly need in the future. Since we can't predict the future this results in a large portion of the code that we write never being used. That extra code causes unnecessary complexity, which makes it harder to understand and harder to modify when we inevitably have to write something that we didn't think of. I've known about YAGNI for some time now but I never really got it. The words made sense and the idea was clear but the concept never sank in. I was one of those devs who'd happily write a ton of code in the anticipation of future needs. In my mind this was an essential part of writing high quality code. I didn't realise that in doing so I was actually writing low quality code. If you are anything like me you are probably thinking "Lies and propaganda! High quality code needs to be future proof." I agree! But what makes code future proof? If we could see into the future the answer would be simple, code that allows for or meets all future requirements. Since we can't see the future the best we can do is write code that can easily adapt to future requirements, this means writing flexible code. Flexible code is: Fast to understand. Fast to add to. Fast to modify. To be flexible code has to be simple, this means only making it as complex as it needs to be to meet those 3 criteria. That is high quality code. YAGNI! The art is in deciding where to place the seams (abstractions) that will give you flexibility without making decisions about future functionality. Robert C Martin explains it very nicely, he says a good architecture allows you to defer decisions because if you can defer a decision then you have the flexibility to change it. I've recently had a YAGNI experience which brought this all into perspective. I was working on a new project which had multiple clients that connect to a server hosted in the cloud. I was tasked with adding a feature to the desktop client that would allow users to capture items that would then be saved to the cloud. My immediate thought was "Hey we have multiple clients so I should build a web service for these items, that way we can access them from other clients", so I went to work and this is what I created.  I stood back and gazed upon what I'd created with a warm fuzzy feeling. It was beautiful! Then the time came for the team to use the design I'd created for another feature with a new entity. Let's just say that they didn't get the same warm fuzzy feeling that I did when they looked at the design. After much discussion they eventually got it through to me that I'd bloated the design based on an assumption of future functionality. After much more discussion we cut the design down to the following. This design gives us future flexibility with no extra work, it is as complex as it needs to be. It has been a couple of months since this incident and we still haven't needed to access either of the entities from other clients. Using the simpler design allowed us to do more stuff with less stuff!

  Read the article

• Good DBAs Do Baselines

  - by Louis Davidson

  One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

  Read the article

• VirtualBox 3.2 is released! A Red Letter Day?

  - by Fat Bloke

  Big news today! A new release of VirtualBox packed full of innovation and improvements. Over the next few weeks we'll take a closer look at some of these new features in a lot more depth, but today we'll whet your appetite with the headline descriptions. To start with, we should point out that this is the first Oracle-branded version which makes today a real Red-letter day ;-)  Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 Version 3.2 moves VirtualBox forward in 3 main areas ( handily, all beginning with "P" ) : performance, power and supported guest operating system platforms.  Let's take a look: Performance New Latest Intel hardware support - Harnessing the latest in chip-level support for virtualization, VirtualBox 3.2 supports new Intel Core i5 and i7 processor and Intel Xeon processor 5600 Series support for Unrestricted Guest Execution bringing faster boot times for everything from Windows to Solaris guests; New Large Page support - Reducing the size and overhead of key system resources, Large Page support delivers increased performance by enabling faster lookups and shorter table creation times. New In-hypervisor Networking - Significant optimization of the networking subsystem has reduced context switching between guests and host, increasing network throughput by up to 25%. New New Storage I/O subsystem - VirtualBox 3.2 offers a completely re-worked virtual disk subsystem which utilizes asynchronous I/O to achieve high-performance whilst maintaining high data integrity; New Remote Video Acceleration - The unique built-in VirtualBox Remote Display Protocol (VRDP), which is primarily used in virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, has been enhanced to deliver video acceleration. This delivers a rich user experience coupled with reduced computational expense, which is vital when servers are running hundreds of virtual machines; Power New Page Fusion - Traditional Page Sharing techniques have suffered from long and expensive cache construction as pages are scrutinized as candidates for de-duplication. Taking a smarter approach, VirtualBox Page Fusion uses intelligence in the guest virtual machine to determine much more rapidly and accurately those pages which can be eliminated thereby increasing the capacity or vm density of the system; New Memory Ballooning- Ballooning provides another method to increase vm density by allowing the memory of one guest to be recouped and made available to others; New Multiple Virtual Monitors - VirtualBox 3.2 now supports multi-headed virtual machines with up to 8 virtual monitors attached to a guest. Each virtual monitor can be a host window, or be mapped to the hosts physical monitors; New Hot-plug CPU's - Modern operating systems such Windows Server 2008 x64 Data Center Edition or the latest Linux server platforms allow CPUs to be dynamically inserted into a system to provide incremental computing power while the system is running. Version 3.2 introduces support for Hot-plug vCPUs, allowing VirtualBox virtual machines to be given more power, with zero-downtime of the guest; New Virtual SAS Controller - VirtualBox 3.2 now offers a virtual SAS controller, enabling it to run the most demanding of high-end guests; New Online Snapshot Merging - Snapshots are powerful but can eat up disk space and need to be pruned from time to time. Historically, machines have needed to be turned off to delete or merge snapshots but with VirtualBox 3.2 this operation can be done whilst the machines are running. This allows sophisticated system management with minimal interruption of operations; New OVF Enhancements - VirtualBox has supported the OVF standard for virtual machine portability for some time. Now with 3.2, VirtualBox specific configuration data is also stored in the standard allowing richer virtual machine definitions without compromising portability; New Guest Automation - The Guest Automation APIs allow host-based logic to drive operations in the guest; Platforms New USB Keyboard and Mouse - Support more guests that require USB input devices; New Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 - Support for the latest version of Oracle's flagship Linux platform; New Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") - Support for both the desktop and server version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution; And as a man once said, "just one more thing" ... New Mac OS X (experimental) - On Apple hardware only, support for creating virtual machines run Mac OS X. All in all this is a pretty powerful release packed full of innovation and speedups. So what are you waiting for?  -FB 

  Read the article

• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for December 9-15, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  You click, we listen. The following list reflects the Top 10 most popular items posted on the OTN ArchBeat Facefbook page for the week of December 9-15, 2012. DevOps Basics II: What is Listening on Open Ports and Files – WebLogic Essentials | Dr. Frank Munz "Can you easily find out which WebLogic servers are listening to which port numbers and addresses?" asks Dr. Frank Munz. The good doctor has an answer—and a tech tip. Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 4: Complex Dimensions | Stewart Bryson "Another important entity for reporting in the Customer Tracking application is the Contact entity," says Stewart Bryson. "At first glance, it might seem that we should simply build another dimension called Dim – Contact, and use analyses to combine our Customer and Contact dimensions along with our Activity fact table to analyze Customer and Contact behavior." SOA 11g Technology Adapters – ECID Propagation | Greg Mally "Many SOA Suite 11g deployments include the use of the technology adapters for various activities including integration with FTP, database, and files to name a few," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Greg Mally. "Although the integrations with these adapters are easy and feature rich, there can be some challenges from the operations perspective." Greg's post focuses on technical tips for dealing with one of these challenges. Podcast: DevOps and Continuous Integration In Part 1 of a 3-part program, panelists Tim Hall (Senior Director of product management for Oracle Enterprise Repository and Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture), Robert Wunderlich (Principal Product Manager for Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack) and Peter Belknap (Director of product management for Oracle SOA Integration) discuss why DevOps matters and how it changes development methodologies and organizational structure. Good To Know - Conflicting View Objects and Shared Entity | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares his thoughts -- and a sample application -- dealing with an "interesting ADF behavior" encountered over the weekend. Cloud Deployment Models | B. R. Clouse Looking out for the cloud newbies... "As the cloud paradigm grows in depth and breadth, more readers are approaching the topic for the first time, or from a new perspective," says B. R. Clouse. "This blog is a basic review of cloud deployment models, to help orient newcomers and neophytes." Service governance morphs into cloud API management | David Linthicum "When building and using clouds, the ability to manage APIs or services is the single most important item you can provide to ensure the success of the project," says David Linthicum. "But most organizations driving a cloud project for the first time have no experience handling a service-based architecture and don't see the need for API management until after deployment. By then, it's too late." Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: Password Policy in OAM 11g R2 | Rob Otto Rob Otto continues the Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team "Oracle Access Manager Academy" series with a detailed look at OAM's ability to support "a subset of password management processes without the need to use Oracle Identity Manager and LDAP Sync." Understanding the JSF Lifecycle and ADF Optimized Lifecycle | Steven Davelaar Could you call that a surprise ending? Oracle WebCenter & ADF Architecture Team (A-Team) member learned a lot more than he expected while creating a UKOUG presentation entitled "What you need to know about JSF to be succesful with ADF." Expanding on requestaudit - Tracing who is doing what...and for how long | Kyle Hatlestad "One of the most helpful tracing sections in WebCenter Content (and one that is on by default) is the requestaudit tracing," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Kyle Hatlestad. Get up close and technical in his post. Thought for the Day "There is no code so big, twisted, or complex that maintenance can't make it worse." — Gerald Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

  Read the article

• Join us on our Journey to be #1 in SaaS!

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  WHY ORACLE? Oracle is a robust organization that has proven to maintain growth and innovation at all levels with a constant evolving attitude. The main ingredient of Oracles success is the 105.000 talented employees who constantly amaze each other in building a better and more innovative organization. Oracle is a company where YOU can make a difference. What is OD? Oracle Direct is a state-of-the-art, multi-channel EMEA sales operation bringing to life the benefits of Oracle’s complete technology stack. It offers you the unique opportunity to work with the most talented and like-minded sales professionals in the industry.  You will have access to world class training and structured career development programmes allowing you to accelerate your Solution Sales career across a multitude of product lines and a choice of attractive locations. What positions are OD Hiring?   Oracle is on a journey to be the #1 SaaS vendor in EMEA.  Due to recent expansion and acquisitions within our Cloud Business, we are now growing our EMEA Cloud Applications Sales Group in Dublin. We have many exciting NEW opportunities across our CRM and HCM SaaS Sales teams. As a SaaS Sales Account Manager, you will proactively manage an assigned territory / vertical with responsibility for the full sales cycle. This role requires strong business development, solution selling, account management and closing skills. WHY ORACLE? Oracle is a robust organization that has proven to maintain growth and innovation at all levels with a constant evolving attitude. The main ingredient of Oracles success is the 105.000 talented employees who constantly amaze each other in building a better and more innovative organization. Oracle is a company where YOU can make a difference. What is OD? Oracle Direct is a state-of-the-art, multi-channel EMEA sales operation bringing to life the benefits of Oracle’s complete technology stack. It offers you the unique opportunity to work with the most talented and like-minded sales professionals in the industry.  You will have access to world class training and structured career development programmes allowing you to accelerate your Solution Sales career across a multitude of product lines and a choice of attractive locations. What positions are OD Hiring? Oracle is on a journey to be the #1 SaaS vendor in EMEA.  Due to recent expansion and acquisitions within our Cloud Business, we are now growing our EMEA Cloud Applications Sales Group in Dublin. We have many exciting NEW opportunities across our CRM and HCM SaaS Sales teams. As a SaaS Sales Account Manager, you will proactively manage an assigned territory / vertical with responsibility for the full sales cycle. This role requires strong business development, solution selling, account management and closing skills. What is the Business Development Group (BDG) The Business Development Group is the key entry point in Oracle for the future Sales and Management talent of the organisation. We are the Demand Generation engine for Oracle in EMEA. We provide revenue generating, quality sales pipeline to our Inside and Field Sales professionals as well as to our Channel Partners. Our current focus is to provide an agile and flexible service offering to our customers and stakeholders to meet ever changing business needs, whilst constantly striving to improve the customer experience, quality of our pipeline, market coverage and penetration. As a SaaS Business Development Consultant (BDC) you will be the first touch point with new customers. Your goal is to proactively identify and qualify business opportunities leading to revenue for Oracle. You will work closely with your Inside Sales colleagues who will progress your qualified pipeline and opportunities. Work for us Work for the only multi-pillar SaaS vendor in the market Be part of a FUN, fast paced and truly International sales team  Develop you solution sales EXPERTISE Drive your CAREER development within a structured and supportive environment The Profile You have a passion for selling cutting-edge technology You thrive in a fast paced and dynamic work environment where being the best is paramount Your priority is always the customer You live for a challenge and you love to win Join us on our Journey to be #1 in SaaS and be part of our Cloud Success Story! You will find more information about open roles here

  Read the article

• A story of Murphy&ndash;my technical issues at TechDays Switzerland #chtd

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I had two sessions at the recent Swiss TechDays. While the first one (Advanced Development for Windows Phone 8) went extremely well (I think), I had a very annoying technical issue in the beginning of my second session. First let me add that I talked to Microsoft about that and I hope they will change a few things in the room assignment for next year. My two sessions were one right after the other, with only 15 minutes break to change room. I don’t mind having two sessions so close from each other, but I would really like them to be in the same room in order to avoid having to move my laptops (plural, that will become important later) and redoing the tech check. That being said, I am guilty of not checking where my talks would be before the day before the conference, and when I did notice, it was too late to change it. After my first session, I quickly moved to the other room and setup my main laptop, a Dell Precision. We tested the video output (VGA) and didn’t notice anything special. The projectors are using a fairly high resolution (kudos to the Basel conference center for not having old school 1024x768 projectors anymore, that makes Blend really hard to demo ;) but since everything went great during the first talk, I was not worried. In fact I even had some time to chat with some early attendees about my Microsoft Surface and the Samsung Slate 7, which I had carried with me in addition to the Precision. I just thought it would be nice to show the hardware that Windows 8 can run on, without thinking any further. When the session started, I immediately noticed that the main screen was not showing anything. I thought I had just forgotten to switch to “duplicate” for the video output, and did that with a quick Win-P. However it didn’t “hold”. After 2 seconds, it reverted back to a black display for my attendees. Then I started to really worry. We tried everything, switching from VGA to HDMI, changing the resolution, setting the projector as primary display, but nothing did the trick. The projector was just refusing to show my screen. Now, to show you how despaired I started to be, I even considered using the “extend” setting (which worked just fine), and to use one of the feedback monitors on the floor but really it was super cumbersome. Eventually, my last resort arrived: I started my Samsung Slate 7, which by chance has Visual Studio 12 and Blend 5 installed, plugged the HDMI projector in the dock (yes, I had the dock with me, which I usually don’t!), connected it to internet (had to enter a long password for that), loaded the source code from my main machine using a USB stick and…. finally started to give my presentation. All in all I think we lost about 10 minutes. Amongst the most horrible minutes of my whole life, truly (yes I am blessed, I didn’t have that many horrible minutes in my life ;) I really want to apologize to my attendees. We joked a bit during the attempts to resolve the issue, the reactions I had after the session were all very nice and sympathetic. Only a handful of people left my session while I was having the issues, and I really don’t blame them (who knew how long the problem would last!!). But still, I probably talked at more than 60 sessions over the years, and this was by far my most painful moment. What did I learn? So what did I learn from this? Well from now on I will always have my slate ready with the latest source code, internet connection and every tool I might need during the presentation. This way, if I detect even a hint that the Precision might not work, I will just switch to the Slate. The experience of presenting on the slate is actually not bad at all, it is just a bit slow for my taste, but it does work. By the way, I will be posting the code and slides for my sessions very soon, I just need to “clean it and zip it”. Stay tuned, and thanks again for your patience in that horrible circumstance. Cheers Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494  | Next Page >