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• Paper-free Customer Engagement

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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;} Appropriate repost from our friends at the AIIM blog: Digital Landfill -- John Mancini, supporting our mission of enabling customer engagement through better technology choices.  ---------- My wife didn't even give me a card for #wpfd - and they say husbands are bad at remembering anniversaries Well, today is the third World Paper Free Day.  I just got off the Tweet Jam, and there was a host of ideas for getting rid of -- or at least reducing -- paper. When we first started talking about "paper-free" most of the reasons raised to pursue this direction were "green" reasons.  I'm glad to see that the thinking has moved on to questions about how getting rid of paper and digitizing processes helps improve customer engagement.  And the bottom line.  And process responsiveness.  Not that the "green" reasons have gone away, but it's nice to see a maturation in the BUSINESS reasons to get rid of paper. Our World Paper Free Handbook (do not, do not, do not print it!) looks at how less paper in the workplace delivers significant benefits. Key findings show eliminating paper from processes can improve the responsiveness of customer service by 300 percent. Removing paper from business processes and moving content to PCs and tablets has the added advantage of helping companies adopt mobile-enable processes and eliminate elapsed time, lost forms, poor data and re-keying. To effectively mobile-enable processes and reduce reliance on paper, data should be captured as close to the point of origination as possible, which makes information easily available to whomever needs it, wherever they are, in the shortest time possible. This handbook summarizes the value of automating manual, paper-based processes. It then goes a step beyond to provide actionable steps that will set you on the path to productivity, profitability, and, yes, less paper.  Get your copy today and send the link around to your peers and colleagues.  Here's the link; please share it! http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/AIIM-White-Papers/WPFD-Revolution-Handbook And don't miss out on the real world discussions about increasing engagement with WebCenter in new webinars being offered over the next couple of weeks:  October 30, 2012:  ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter November 1, 2012: WebCenter Content for Applications: Streamline Processes with Oracle WebCenter Content Management for Human Resources Applications Available On-Demand:  Using Oracle WebCenter to Content-Enable Your Business Applications

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• Are there any free hit counters that don't track users?

  - by David Englund

  Are there any free services that increment a simple hit counter without tracking the users of the site? I would like to know how many visitors there are to my site, excluding bots. I don't need detailed information like unique visitors or where the user is from (in fact, that's exactly what I don't want). I have been researching free hit counters, and it seems that most (all?) of them display advertisements and their terms of service indicate that they can use the data they collect from the client site however they want. Google Analytics also does this and tracks users across sites. The site is static HTML, so an external link or iframe of some sort is easiest for me to implement. I could switch to a Ruby or Node.js back-end, in which case lots of other options open up (like Ruby impressionist and more low-level implementations), but my hosting service is pretty limited. If the answer to my question is simply "no," what are my other options?

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• Ubuntu doesn't "see" external USB Hard Disk

  - by Mina Michael

  It's NTFS. It's USB2. I'm using Ubuntu 13.04. It works perfectly fine on Windows (which excludes cable and hardware problems). I have two Ubuntu computers and it's not detected on either. It's about 500 GB. Edits: Following the first link, I input sudo lsusb in a terminal; before and after connecting the HDD. The difference was Bus 001 Device 012: ID 14cd:6116 Super Top M6116 SATA Bridge. There it is! ("sata bridge" used to appear in a windows notification when I plugged in the HDD in!). ...This means that Ubuntu detects it but is it not mounting it? I tried this: sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt But gives this: mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist I also tried: sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt but it stays with no output forever. I left it in background for about 30 min.s. sudo fdisk -l gives out this: Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xa42d04a3 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 63 80324 40131 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 * 80325 102481919 51200797+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 263874558 312580095 24352769 5 Extended /dev/sda4 102481920 263872511 80695296 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda5 263874560 310505471 23315456 83 Linux /dev/sda6 310507520 312580095 1036288 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x5822aaea Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 2048 976769023 488383488 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT The part below "Partition table entries are not in disk order" takes about 5 minutes to appear. The outputs of ls /dev/ | grep sd before and after connecting the HDD: before: sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 ,after: sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sdd sdd1 The second output has the lines sdd and sdd1 different from the first one. IT SHOWED THE FILES!! The command sudo mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt worked after I typed in sudo fdisk -l!!! Thanks a million!! :) :)

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• System freeze after opening Wi-Fi menu can boot into the machine and use Internet in recovery mode

  - by Michael

  So right now sitting in front of my Alienware area 51 desktop. It has a Broadcom Netlink BCM 5784M gigabit ethernet PCI E card. Most of the time able to get through the login screen and to the main screen if I click on the wireless settings on the top right-hand corner the system immediately freezes the cursor does not move at all keyboards are unresponsive. I was doing some quick Google searching and I found a suggestion to boot into recovery mode I did this and did a apt-get Distribution update which ran successfully installed then I rebooted into the regular system same thing I'm pretty sure it's the network card because even if I don't click the settings if a network related dialog opens such as disconnection or connection the system again immediately freezes. I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 ** update 1 ** Just was able to use my system for a little bit however when I went into Firefox and hit the web it again froze so obviously a driver problem but I'm not sure how to get drivers for Broadcom which apparently according to the description on stack-overflow is terrible Any ideas? Sorry for lack of punctuation on an ipad.

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• Can someone explain how a GUI works and when I should start using one?

  - by David

  I've been learning C++ for about a month now, and before I go any further, I'd like to clear up this tedious question I keep on having. I know what a GUI is, but I don't really know how it works, and maybe examples of popular ones...? Although I know command line programming is the bare fundamentals, I think it'd be fun messing around with a GUI. Although I have around 3 million other questions, I'll save them :D

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• What do you look for when debugging deadlocks?

  - by Michael K

  Recently I've been working on projects that heavily use threading. I think that I'm OK at designing them; use stateless design as much as possible, lock access to all resources that more than one thread needs, etc. My experience in functional programming has helped that immensely. However, when reading other people's thread code, I get confused. I am debugging a deadlock right now, and since the coding style and design are different from my personal style, I am having a difficult time seeing potential deadlock conditions. What do you look for when debugging deadlocks?

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• P-Commerce – What The Heck Is That?

  - by Michael Hylton

  We’ve heard of e-commerce, m-commerce (Mobile Commerce), and f-commerce (Facebook Commerce) but what is p-commerce?  It’s not truly a customer touchpoint or channel but the emphasis on personalization of the buying experience. Ask yourself how well do you know your customer?  Are you able to take what you know about them and apply it to their commerce activity with you and personalize the shopping experience? Much of this is dictated by have a complete 360 degree view of your customer, collecting data from your website, sales interactions, historical commerce purchases, call center activity, how they got to your website, etc. and applying it to their current commerce interaction.  Customers expect to have a similar interaction on your website as they would in your brick-and-mortar store, displaying the products and services that they might be interested in purchasing.

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• Plug-in or framework recommendation for showing content preview fly-over in CMS

  - by Michael Huang

  The requirement is to have either front end plug-in or back end processor that generates the preview of contents (such as images, videos, PDF files, HTML pages) in a preview popup when user mouse hovers the content. I did some research on this, seems that there are assorted jquery plugins for each type of files, but what we are looking for is a framework that handles all types of file previews. Ideally, we want to generate preview images on the backend, considering the cost of retrieving content on front end. I did find some open source or proprietary CMS that provides this feature, but usually they are shipped as one suite and the API for file preview might not be open. Is there any java or jquery framework that handles file preview? Thanks a lot

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• How to programmatically fetch a list of applications from the Software Center

  - by David Planella

  Im writing a PyGI app where I'd like to show a list of matching applications from the Ubuntu Software Centre in an auto-completion text entry or dropdwon. I haven't yet figured out the best way to present the information, I just want to make it easier for the user to type the name of an application. But before that, I'd like to figure out how to get the data. Is there an API to get a list of all applications from the Software Centre, or indirectly through the Applications Dash in Unity?

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• TransportWithMessageCredential & Service Bus – Introduction

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Recently we have been working on a project using the Windows Azure Service Bus to expose line of business applications. One of the topics we discussed a lot was around the security aspects of the solution. Most of the samples you see for Windows Azure Service Bus often use the shared secret with the Access Control Service to protect the service bus endpoint but one of the problems we found was that with this scenario any claims resulting from credentials supplied by the client are not passed through to the service listening to the service bus endpoint. As an example of this we originally were hoping that we could give two different clients their own shared secret key and the issuer for each would indicate which client it was. If the claims had flown to the listening service then we could check that the message sent by client one was a type they are allowed to send. Unfortunately this claim isn't flown to the listening service so we were unable to implement this scenario. We had also seen samples that talk about changing the relayClientAuthenticationType attribute would allow you to authenticate the client within the service itself rather than with ACS. While this was interesting it wasn't exactly what we wanted. By removing the step where access to the Relay endpoint is protected by authentication against ACS it means that anyone could send messages via the service bus to the on-premise listening service which would then authenticate clients. In our scenario we certainly didn't want to allow clients to skip the ACS authentication step because this could open up two attack opportunities for an attacker. The first of these would allow an attacker to send messages through to our on-premise servers and potentially cause a denial of service situation. The second case would be with the same kind of attack by running lots of messages through service bus which were then rejected the attacker would be causing us to incur charges per message on our Windows Azure account. The correct way to implement our desired scenario is to combine one of the common options for authenticating against ACS so the service bus endpoint cannot be accessed by an unauthenticated caller with the normal WCF security features using the TransportWithMessageCredential security option. Looking around I could not find any guidance on how to implement this correctly so on the back of setting this up I decided to write a couple of articles to walk through a couple of the common scenarios you may be interested in. These are available on the following links: Walkthrough - Combining shared secret and username token Walkthrough – Combining shared secret and certificates

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• What are some good, simple examples for queues?

  - by Michael Ekstrand

  I'm teaching CS2 (Java and data structures), and am having some difficulty coming up with good examples to use when teaching queues. The two major applications I use them for are multithreaded message passing (but MT programming is out of scope for the course), and BFS-style algorithms (and I won't be covering graphs until later in the term). I also want to avoid contrived examples. Most things that I think of, if I were actually going to solve them in a single-threaded fashion I would just use a list rather than a queue. I tend to only use queues when processing and discovery are interleaved (e.g. search), or in other special cases like length-limited buffers (e.g. maintaining last N items). To the extent practical, I am trying to teach my students good ways to actually do things in real programs, not just toys to show off a feature. Any suggestions of good, simple algorithms or applications of queues that I can use as examples but that require a minimum of other prior knowledge?

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• Open source login solution

  - by David

  Authentication is such a general problem, which most websites have to implement. There are a few commercial solutions, but all lack sufficient functionality to customize the registration process. Therefore, I am looking for an open-source alternative. I am using PHP and with PostgreSQL as database, but as far as I understand one could utilize authentication solutions using other technologies and integrate them into our site in various ways. Therefore, I am looking for such solutions in any technology apart from those requiring Microsoft infrastructure... I would prefer Open Source solution, which have already implemented the following features: Has password recovery procedure Username is the email address of the user Has "Remember me" functionailty (meaning that the user is logged in automatically without seeing the login page) email address verification Google has gotten me nowhere on this and neither a search on this site...

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• How do we provide valid time estimates during Sprint Planning without doing "too much" design?

  - by Michael Edenfield

  My team is getting up to speed with Scrum, but most of us are more familiar with non-agile or "pseudo-"agile methodologies. The part that is the biggest hurdle for us is running an efficient Sprint Planning meeting where we break our backlog items into tasks, and estimate hours. (I'm using the terminology from the VS2010 Scrum Template; apologies if I use the wrong word somewhere.) When we try to figure out how long a task is going to take, we often fall into the trap of designing the feature at the code level -- table layout, interfaces, etc -- in order to figure out how long that's going to take. I'm pretty sure this is not the appropriate place to be doing that kind of design. We should be scheduling tasks for these design meetings during the sprint. However, we are having trouble figuring out how else to come up with meaningful estimates for the tasks. Are there any practical habits/techniques/etc. for making a judgement call about how long a feature is going to take, without knowing how you plan to implement it? If our time estimates are going to change significantly once the design has been completed, how can we properly budget our Sprint backlog ahead of time? EDIT: Just to clarify, since some of the comments/answers are very valid but I think addressing the wrong question. We know that what we're doing is not right, and that we should be building time into the sprint for this design. Conceptually all of the developers understand that. We also also bringing in a team member with Scrum experience to keep us on track if we start going off into the weeds. The problem is that, without going through this design process, we are finding it difficult to provide concrete time estimates for anything. We are constantly saying things like "well if we design it this way it might take 8 hours but if we end up having to do this other way instead that will take about 32 but it might not be as bad once we start trying to write it...". I also assume that this process will get better once we have some historical velocity to work from, but many of the technologies and architectural patterns we are using are new to us. But if potentially-wildly-wrong estimates are just a natural part of adapting this process then we will just need to recondition ourselves to accept that :)

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• Hello PCI Council, are you listening?

  - by David Dorf

  Mention "PCI" to any retailer and you'll instantly see them take a deep breath and start looking for the nearest exit.  Nobody wants to be insecure, but few actually believe that PCI does anything more than focus blame directly on retailers.  I applaud PCI for making retailers more aware of the importance of security, but did you have to make them PAINFULLY aware?  POS vendors aren't immune to this pain either as we have to undergo lengthy third-party audits in addition to the internal secure programming programs.  There's got to be a better way. There's a timely article over at StorefrontBacktalk that discusses the inequity of PCI's rules, and also mentions that the PCI Council is accepting comments until April 15th. As a vendor, my biggest issue with PCI is that they require vendors to disclose the details of any breaches, in effect "ratting out" customers.  I don't think its a vendor's place to do this.  I'd rather have the trust of my customers so we can jointly solve the problem. Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's Chief Security Officer, has an interesting blog posting on this very topic.  Its a bit of a long read, but I found it very entertaining and thought-provoking.  Here's an excerpt: ...heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give [the] PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. I encourage you to read the entire posting, Pain Comes Instantly, and then provide feedback to the PCI Council.

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• How mature is FreeBASIC?

  - by David

  A friend of mine is considering using FreeBASIC in a critical production environment. They currently use GWBasic, and they want to make a soft transition towards more modern languages. I am just worried that there might be undetected bugs in the software. I see that their version number is 0.22.0, which indicates, that it is not quite mature yet. I also read this discussion, without being able to conclude. Also on their Sourceforge pages there is no indication of whether it is Alpha or Beta (which anyways is not a very good indicator). Does anyone have own experience about the maturity, ideas on how to judge the maturity, or know of companies using FreeBASIC in a critical production environment?

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• Pidgin XML

  - by David Totzke

  I'm looking at an xml document that gets passed to a COM object (yes, I said the "C" word) to save a new record.  You can tell by the "new|" at the top of the file before the xml declaration.  If we were saving, there would be "edit|" at the top.  Couldn't you just have a root element with something like: <myRootElement mode="new"> Ah, here's why that won't work... There's no single root element but that's ok because next we find that this document is actually several documents.  <?xml version="1.0"?> appears several times.  The final document opens with <myElementStart> and closes with <myElementEnd> so it's not even well-formed. This isn't a style thing.  This is broken.  I mean, basic well-formed XML only has two rules; three if you count the xml declaration but it works as a document for DTO purposes without it. One root element. Close all elements with a matching tag. As a result, both ends of this conversation need to speak the same dialect of broken XML in order to communicate.  To join the conversation, you must also learn pidgin XML. How can you start out so right - XML being the obvious choice in this instance - and then go so horribly wrong? Dave Just because I can…

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• More on Map Testing

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I have been chatting with Maurice den Heijer recently about his codeplex project for the BizTalk Map Testing Framework (http://mtf.codeplex.com/). Some of you may remember the article I did for BizTalk 2009 and 2006 about how to test maps but with Maurice's project he is effectively looking at how to improve productivity and quality by building some useful testing features within the framework to simplify the process of testing maps. As part of our discussion we realized that we both had slightly different approaches to how we validate the output from the map. Put simple Maurice does some xpath validation of the data in various nodes where as my approach for most standard cases is to use serialization to allow you to validate the output using normal MSTest assertions. I'm not really going to go into the pro's and con's of each approach because I think there is a place for both and also I'm sure others have various approaches which work too. What would be great is for the map testing framework to provide support for different ways of testing which can cover everything from simple cases to some very specialized scenarios. So as agreed with Maurice I have done the sample which I will talk about in the rest of this article to show how we can use the serialization approach to create and compare the input and output from a map in normal development testing. Prerequisites One of the common patterns I usually implement when developing BizTalk solutions is to use xsd.exe to create .net classes for most of the schemas used within the solution. In the testing pattern I will take advantage of these .net classes. The Map In this sample the map we will use is very simple and just concatenates some data from the input message to the output message. Hopefully the below picture illustrates this well. The Test In the test I'm basically taking the following actions: Use the .net class generated from the schema to create an input message for the map Serialize the input object to a file Run the map from .net using the standard BizTalk test method which was generated for running the map Deserialize the output file from the map execution to a .net class representing the output schema Use MsTest assertions to validate things about the output message The below picture shows this: As you can see the code for this is pretty simple and it's all strongly typed which means changes to my schema which can affect the tests can be easily picked up as compilation errors. I can then chose to have one test which validates most of the output from the map, or to have many specific tests covering individual scenarios within the map. Summary Hopefully this post illustrates a powerful yet simple way of effectively testing many BizTalk mapping scenarios. I will probably have more conversations with Maurice about these approaches and perhaps some of the above will be included in the mapping test framework.   The sample can be downloaded from here: http://cid-983a58358c675769.office.live.com/self.aspx/Blog%20Samples/More%20Map%20Testing/MapTestSample.zip

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• Constituent Experience Counts In Public Sector

  - by Michael Seback

    Businesses and government organizations are operating in an era of the empowered customer where service  and communication channels are challenged every day.  Consumers in the private sector have high expectations from purchasing gifts online, reading reviews on social sites, and expecting the companies they do business with to know and reward them.   In the Public Sector, constituents also expect government organizations to provide consistent and timely service across agencies and touch points.  Examples include requesting critical city services, applying for social assistance or reviewing insurance plans for a health insurance exchange. If an individual does not receive the services they need at the right time and place, it can create a dire situation – involving housing, food or healthcare assistance. Government organizations need to deliver a fast, reliable and personalized experience to constituents. Look at a few recent statistics from a Government focused survey: How do you define good customer service? 70 % improved services, 48% shortest time to provide information, 44% shortest time to resolve complaints What are ways/opportunities to improve customer service? 69% increased collaboration across agencies and 41% increased customer service channels Are you using data collected to make informed decisionsto improve customer service efforts? 39% data collection is limited, not used to improve decision making Source: Re-Imagining Customer Service in Government, 2012 Click here to see the highlights.  Would you like to get started – read Eight Steps to great constituent experiences for government.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 24, 2013

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  Video: How To Embed Custom Content Into Fusion Applications Watch this video tutorial from the Fusion Applications Developer Relations YouTube Channel to learn how to embed reports, charts, twitter streams, web pages, news feeds, and other custom content into Fusion Applications. Oracle GoldenGate 12c - New Release, New Features | Michael Rainey Rittman Mead's Michael Rainey takes you on guided tour through the GoldenGate 12c features that "are relevant to data warehouse and data migration work we typically see in the business intelligence world." Reproducing WebLogic Stuck Threads with ADF CreateInsert Operation and ORDER BY Clause | Andrejus Baranovskis Another post from Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovsikis on dealing with WebLogic Stuck Threads. This one includes a test case application you can download. Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2 Installation in VirtualBox with 0 MHz | Dr. Frank Munz Oracle ACE Director Frank Munz shares the results of some detective work to discover the cause of a strange problem in an Oracle WebLogic installation. The Impact of SaaS - The Times They Are A-Changin' | Floyd Teter Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares some truly interesting insight gained in conversations with three Fortune 500 CIOs. Thought for the Day "All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'." — Moss Hart, playwright, screenwriter (October 24, 1904 – December 20, 1961) Source: brainyquote.com

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• Right-Time Retail Part 1

  - by David Dorf

  This is the first in a three-part series. 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;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

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• Fix Your Broken Organization

  - by Michael Snow

  Simple. Powerful. Proven. Face it, your organization is broken. Customers are not the focus they should be. Processes are running amok. Your intranet is a ghost town. And colleagues wonder why it’s easier to get things done on the Web than at work. What’s the solution?Join us for this Webcast. Christian Finn will talk about three simple, powerful, and proven principles for improving your organization through collaboration. Each principle will be illustrated by real-world examples. Discover: How to dramatically improve workplace collaboration Why improved employee engagement creates better business results What’s the value of a fully engaged customer Time to Fix What’s Broken Register now for this Webcast—the tenth in the Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Series.

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• How do I keep the Thunderbird profile in sync between multiple computers?

  - by David Planella

  I'd like to find a definitive solution to automatically keep my Thunderbird profile in sync between my laptop and my desktop computer. I'm using IMAP, so keeping the e-mail itself in sync is not an issue I can use Ubuntu One for the contacts, so that should not be an issue, either. However, there are a bunch of other files and folders in the Thunderbird profile, and I'm not sure which ones I should keep in sync and which ones I shouldn't bother about. Ideally, I'd like to use Ubuntu One to mark the required ones for syncing, but I would appreciate any help in deciding which ones exactly need to be synced.

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• Mapping Your Customer Experience Journey

  - by Michael Hylton

  For those who attended today’s Oracle Customer Experience Summit keynote you heard from Brian Curran talk about the strategies and best practices to implement customer experience (CX) in your organization.  He spoke about how this evolving journey begins by understanding six steps to transform your business and put your customers front and center.  Here are those key six steps: What are the strategic business objectives in your company? What are your operational objectives and KPIs necessary to measure a CX project? Build an income statement and create “what if” scenarios and see how changes impact your business’ bottom line.  Explore what keeps you from getting to your own goals for your business. Define the business objectives and opportunities you want to meet? Understand the trends and accelerators in the market?  What factors are going on in the market affect that impact your business?  Social?  Mobile?  Cloud?  Just to name a few.  Many of these trends may signal a change in the way people think about your business. What approach will you take to solve these issues?  Understand who your customer is.  How do you need to adapt your business to build relevant, personalized customer experiences. What technologies can you implement to address CX?  Does technology help you solve your problem? A great way to begin your customer experience journey is a concept called journey mapping, one of the most powerful and deceptively simple tools for unlocking CX innovation at your organization. Here is where you can learn more about how you can bring this concept into your business to drive great customer experiences.

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• Service to test app on all the iPhones?

  - by David

  I have some developers creating an iPhone app, often the app will not work on one type of iPhone even though it worked on another one using the same version of iOS. Therefore, I am looking for a service where I can test the app natively on all the iPhone versions running various versions of iOS. I would like to be able to interact with the iPhones myself, so that I know that a specific bug has actually been fixed before, pushing to App Store and waiting 9 days for the review before I can hear the sad news from customers. Googling got me nowhere. Do such services exist?

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• How do I enable or disable the global application menu?

  - by Michael Ekstrand

  I'm fairly excited for Unity, as it looks like a promising new direction for Ubuntu. However, I do have a concern - will it be possible to use Unity without the global menu? I have my window manager set to focus-follows-mouse/sloppy focus, and find the productivity gains to be immense. Sloppy focus is incompatible, however, with global menus, as it is possible for the focus to change while you move from window to menu. Will Unity support an option to use window menus while still using Unity?

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