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• Oracle UPK Content Development Tool Settings

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle UPK Content Development tool settings: Before developing UPK content, your UPK Developer needs to be configured with certain standard settings to ensure the content will have a uniform look. To set the options: 1. Open the UPK Developer. 2. Click the Tools menu. 3. Click Options. After you configure the UPK Options, you can share these preferences with other content developers by exporting them to an .ops file. This is particularly useful in workgroup environments where multiple authors are working on the same content that requires consistent output regardless of who authored the content. (To learn more about Exporting/Importing Content Defaults refer to the Content Development.pdf guide that is delivered with the UPK Developer.) Here is a list of a few UPK Developer tool settings that Oracle UPK Content Developers use to develop UPK pre-built content: Screen resolution is set to 1024 x 768. See It mode frame delay is set to 5 seconds. Know It Required % is set to 70% and all three levels of remediation are selected. We opt to automatically record keyboard shortcuts. We use the default settings for the Bubble icon and Pointer position. Bubble color is yellow (Red = 255, Green = 255, Blue = 128). Bubble text is Verdana, Regular, 9 pt. ***Intro and end frame settings match the bubble settings Note: The Content Defaults String Input Settings will change based on which application (interface) you are recording against. For example here is a list of settings for different Oracle applications: • Agile - Microsoft Sans Serif, Regular, 8 • EBS - Microsoft Sans Serif, Regular, 10 • Hyperion - Microsoft Sans Serif, Regular, 8 • JDE E1 - Arial, Regular, 10 • PeopleSoft - Arial, Regular, 9 • Siebel - Arial, Regular, 8 Remember, it is recommended that you set the content defaults before you add documents and record content. When the content defaults are changed, existing documents are not affected and continue to use the defaults that were in effect when those documents were created. - Kathryn Lustenberger, Oracle UPK & Tutor Outbound Product Management

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• New User of UPK?

  - by [email protected]

  The UPK Developer comes with a variety of manuals to help support your organization in the development and deployment of content. The Developer manuals can be found in the \Documentation\Language Code\Reference folder where the Developer has been installed. As of 3.5.x the documentation can also be accessed via the Start menu, Start\Programs\User Productivity Kit\Documentation\Reference. Content Deployment.pdf: This manual provides information on how to deploy content to your audience. Content Development.pdf: This manual provides information on how to create, maintain, and publish content using the Developer. The content of this manual also appears in the Developer help system. Content Player.pdf: This manual provides instructions on how to view content using the Player. The content of this manual also appears in the Player help system. In-Application Support Guide.pdf: This manual provides information on how implement content-sensitive, in-application support for enterprise applications using Player content. Installation & Administration.pdf: This manual provides instructions for installing the Developer in a single-user or multi-user environment as well as information on how to add and manage users and content in a multi-user installation. An Administration help system also appears in the Developer for authors configured as administrators. This manual also provides instructions for installing and configuring Usage Tracking. Upgrade.pdf: This manual provides information on how to upgrade from a previous version to the current version. Usage Tracking Administration & Reporting.pdf: This manual provides instructions on how to manage users and usage tracking reports. - Kathryn Lustenberger, Oracle UPK Outbound Product Management

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• Register Now, Free Webinar! Driving Self-Service Learning with UPK Knowledge Center

  - by Kathryn Lustenberger

  UPK Proficiency Forum  Driving Self-Service Learning with UPK Knowledge Center July 16, at 11 am Pacific Join Oracle University for the next UPK Proficiency Forum on July 16, at 11 am Pacific. Beth Renstrom and Kathryn Lustenberger from UPK Product Management at Oracle will present an exciting session on "Driving Self-Service Learning with UPK Knowledge Center. Knowledge Center is a powerful, web-based knowledge repository that delivers an out-of-the-box deployment method for UPK content, enables extensive tracking and reporting, and can serve as content repository for UPK and non-UPK content. Hear how your organization can use Knowledge Center to centralize both UPK and non-UPK assets to provide self-service, role-based, curriculum-style learning. Understand how Knowledge Center can be used to deploy a collaborative user and expert environment where users can turn knowledge into productivity, ensure on-going user competency, and measure organizational readiness across your organization. You will walk away from this session with a better understanding of Oracle’s User Productivity Professional; Knowledge Center and all the benefits it has to offer your organization. You won’t want to miss this Free seminar! Attendance is limited. Register Now!

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• Team Leaders & Authors - Manage and Report Workflow using "Print an Outline" in UPK

  - by [email protected]

  Did you know you can "print an outline?" You can print any outline or portion of an outline. Why might you want to "print an outline" in UPK... Have you ever wondered how many topics you have recorded, how many of your topics are ready for review, or even better, how many topics are complete! Do you need to report your project status to management? Maybe you just like to have a copy of your outline to refer to during development. Included in this output is the outline structure as well as the layout defined in the Details View of the Outline Editor. To print an outline, you must open either a module or section in the Outline Editor. A set of default data columns is automatically included in the output; however, you can configure which columns you want to appear in the report by switching to the Details view and customizing the columns. (To learn more about customizing your columns refer to the Add and Remove Columns section of the Content Development.pdf guide) To print an outline from the Outline Editor: 1. Open a module or section document in the Outline Editor. 2. Expand the documents to display the details that you want included in the report. 3. On the File menu, choose Print and use the toolbar icons to print, view, or save the report to a file. Personally, I opt to save my outline in Microsoft Excel. Using the delivered features of Microsoft Excel you can add columns of information, such as development notes, to your outline or you can graph and chart your Project status. As mentioned above you can configure what columns you want to appear in the outline. When utilizing the Print an Outline feature in conjunction with the Managing Workflow features of the UPK Multi-user instance you as a Team Lead or Author can better report project status. Read more about Managing Workflow below. Managing Workflow: The Properties toolpane contains special properties that allow authors to track document status or State as well as assign Document Ownership. Assign Content State The State property is an editable property for communicating the status of a document. This is particularly helpful when collaborating with other authors in a development team. Authors can assign a state to documents from the master list defined by the administrator. The default list of States includes (blank), Not Started, Draft, In Review, and Final. Administrators can customize the list by adding, deleting or renaming the values. To assign a State value to a document: 1. Make sure you are working online. 2. Display the Properties toolpane. 3. Select the document(s) to which you want to assign a state. Note: You can select multiple documents using the standard Windows selection keys (CTRL+click and SHIFT+click). 4. In the Workflow category, click in the State cell. 5. Select a value from the list. Assign Document Ownership In many enterprises, multiple authors often work together developing content in a team environment. Team leaders typically handle large projects by assigning specific development responsibilities to authors. The Owner property allows team leaders and authors to assign documents to themselves and other authors to track who is responsible for a specific document. You view and change document assignments for a document using the Owner property in the Properties toolpane. To assign a document owner: 1. Make sure you are working online. 2. On the View menu, choose Properties. 3. Select the document(s) to which you want to assign document responsibility. Note: You can select multiple documents using the standard Windows selection keys (CTRL+click and SHIFT+click). 4. In the Workflow category, click in the Owner cell. 5. Select a name from the list. Is anyone out there already using this feature? Share your ideas with the group. Those of you new to this feature, give it a test drive and let us know what you think. - Kathryn Lustenberger, Oracle UPK & Tutor Outbound Product Management

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• OpenGL ES 2/3 vs OpenGL 3 (and 4)

  - by Martin Perry

  I have migrated my code from OpenGL ES 2/3 to OpenGL 3 (I added bunch of defines and abstract classes to encapsulate both versions, so I have both in one project and compile only one or another). All I need to change was context initialization and glClearDepth. I dont have any errors. This was kind of strange to me. Even shaders are working correctly (some of them are GL ES 3 - with #version 300 es in their header) Is this a kind of good solution, or should I rewrite something more, before I start adding another functionality like geometry shaders, performance tools etc ?

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• Upcoming UPK Events

  - by kathryn.lustenberger(at)oracle.com

  February 15th: UPK: Follow Panduit's Lead and Leverage Oracle's User Productivity Kit To Achieve Your Goals - Join us for a live webcast to learn how Oracle's User Productivity Kit can help you meet and exceed your goals. The webcast will feature Jim Boss, from the Panduit Corporation, who will share how Oracle's User Productivity Kit was used with both Oracle and Non-Oracle applications to helped Panduit to meet their goals. Date: February 15th, 2011 at 12:00 PST / 3:00 EST Evite: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/65630-naod10046029mpp005c010-se-300908.html March 2nd: Synaptis teams with Oracle to deliver a UPK customer success story - Webinar Offering The Value of UPK (Customer Success Story): How to leverage the value of UPK to streamline processes and maximize end user adoption for a global implementation Join us to learn how the power of UPK can be leveraged to train end users globally in a successful and cost effective manner. A valued Oracle UPK customer will share experiences, successes, challenges, and strategies. The webinar will also include a question and answer session to give the attendees an opportunity to interact directly with the Oracle UPK customer, Synaptis, and the Oracle UPK Team. Date: March 2, 2011 Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm EST Register for this webinar March 27 - 30th: The Alliance 2011 conference is an annual event for all higher education, government, and public sector users of Oracle applications. The Alliance conference is organized and managed by the Higher Education User Group (www.heug.org). This is the 14th annual event for the HEUG. This is your opportunity to join with over 3200 other Higher Education, Federal, State and Local Government users to network, learn and share in our amazing combined experiences. The Alliance conference team is hard at work, putting together the best conference ever for 2011 - so don't delay, make your plans now to be part of Alliance 2011! When: Sunday, March 27th, 2011 - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 Where: The Colorado Convention Center (Denver, Colorado) Registration for Alliance 2011 is Now Open! UPK will be represented at this event offering: Pre-Conference Training Learn the Basics of Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) Taking Your UPKs to a Whole New Level, Advanced Use of UPK Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Beyond Basic UPK -- User Tracking and SmartHelp Leveraging Oracle and User Productivity Kit (UPK) to Develop a Comprehensive Training Program Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap -- Key to User Adoption April 10 - 14th: Registration for COLLABORATE 11 has begun - Don't miss the most comprehensive, user-driven conference devoted to Oracle applications and technology. Collaborate with a global network of more than 5,000 peers and experts to share real-world experiences, solve your challenges and gain insights to validate your technology plans. Read below to discover which group to register with for the best value. UPK will be represented at this event offering: Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Centralize all Project Team assets, AND, Deploy Fully Measurable Training with UPK Pro Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap - Key to User Adoption Registration is Now Open!

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• How to make sysctl network bridge settings persist after a reboot?

  - by Zack Perry

  I am setting up a notebook for software demo purpose. The machine has 8GB RAM, a Core i7 Intel CPU, a 128GB SSD, and runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit. The notebook is used as a KVM host and runs a few KVM guests. All such guests use the virbr0 default bridge. To enable them to communicate with each other using multicast, I added the following to the host's /etc/sysctl.conf, as shown below net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0 Afterwards, following man sysctl(8), I issued the following: sudo /sbin/sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf My understanding is that this should make these settings persist over reboots. I tested it, and was surprised to find out the following: root@sdn1 :/proc/sys/net/bridge# more *tables :::::::::::::: bridge-nf-call-arptables :::::::::::::: 1 :::::::::::::: bridge-nf-call-ip6tables :::::::::::::: 1 :::::::::::::: bridge-nf-call-iptables :::::::::::::: 1 All defaults are coming back! Yes. I can use some kludgy "get arounds" such as putting a /sbin/sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf into the host's /etc/rc.local but I would rather "do it right". Did I misunderstand the man page or is there something that I missed? Thanks for any hints. -- Zack

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• What’s New from the Oracle Marketing Cloud at Oracle OpenWorld 2014

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A Guest Post by Laura Vogel, Director, Oracle Marketing Cloud Events (pictured left) Marketing—CX Central is your hub for all things Marketing related at OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 28-October 2, 2014. Learn how to personalize the modern marketing journey to improve customer loyalty. We’re hosting more than 60 breakout sessions, half of which will highlight customer success stories from marquee brands including Bizo, Comcast, Dell, Epson, John Deere, Lane Bryant, ReadyTalk and Shutterfly. Moscone West, Levels 2 and 3To learn more about how modern marketing works, visit Moscone West, levels 2 and 3, for exciting demos of each of the Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions (BlueKai, Compendium, Eloqua, Push I/O, and Responsys). You also can check out our stations for Vertical Marketing Best Practices, the Markie Awards, and more! CX Spotlight Sessions “Accelerating Big Profits in Big Data,” Jeff Tanner, Baylor University “Using Content Marketing to Impact Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey,” Jennifer Agustin, Bizo “Expanding Your Marketing with Proven Testing and Optimization,” Brian Border, Shutterfly and Matthew Balthazor, Epson “Modern Marketing: The New Digital Dialogue,” Cory Treffiletti, Oracle A Special Marquee SessionDell’s Hayden Mugford will speak on "The Digital Ecosystem: Driving Experience Through Contact Engagement.” She will highlight how the organization built a digital ecosystem that supports a behaviorally driven, multivehicle nurturing campaign. The Dell 1:1 Global Marketing team worked with multiple partners to innovate integrations with Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Real-Time Decisions for real-time decision logic, and a content management system (CMS) that enables 100 percent customized e-mails. The program doubled average order values for nurtured contacts versus non-nurtured and tripled open and click-through rates versus push e-mail. It Wouldn’t Be an Oracle Marketing Cloud Event Without a Party!We’re hosting CX Central Fest: a unique customer experience specifically designed for attendees of CX Central. It will include a chance to rock out at a private concert featuring Los Angeles indie electronic pop group, Capital Cities! Join us Tuesday, September 30 from 7-9 p.m. Other Oracle Marketing Cloud Session Highlights Thought leadership by role Exploring the benefits of moving to the Cloud Product line roadmaps and innovations in Marketing Technical deep dives for product lines within Marketing Best practices and impactful business measurements Solutions that are integrated across CX Target AudienceSession content is geared toward professionals in Marketing, Marketing Operations, Marketing Demand Generation, Social: Chief Marketing Officers, Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers. OutcomesCustomers attending Marketing—CX Central @ OpenWorld will be able to: Gain insight into delivering consistent cross-channel marketing Discover how to provide the right information to the right customer at the right time and with the right channel Get answers to burning questions and advice on business challenges Hear from other Oracle customers about recommended best practices to help their organization move forward Network and share ideas to help create a strategy for connecting with customers in better ways Resources At a Glance Register Now Track Site—View Marketing Sessions 72 1024x768 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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;} Focus on Session Doc Downloadable Justification Email OpenWorld is a fabulous way for you to see all that Oracle Marketing Cloud has to offer. Register today.

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• Teeing Off With Chris Leone at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Kathryn Perry

  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-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 Chris Leone, Senior Vice President, Oracle Applications Development Monday morning in downtown San Francisco - lots of sunshine, plenty of traffic, and sidewalks chocked full of people with fresh faces and blister free feet. Let the week of Oracle OpenWorld begin! For a great Applications start, Chris Leone packed the house with his Fusion Applications overview session - he covered strategy, scope, roadmaps, and customer successes. Fusion Apps, the world's best SaaS suite, is built on 100 percent standards. Chris talked about its information driven user experience, its innovative design, and the choice of deployment. People can run Fusion in the cloud, in a managed / hosted environment, or on premise -- or they can use a combination of these three models. About seventy percent of our customers go with SaaS. Release 5 of Fusion Apps will become available soon. The cadence of releases will be three times a year. The key drivers are to accelerate business success (no rip and replace) and to simplify business processes. Chris told the audience that organic Fusion is the centerpiece of our cloud solutions, rounded out with acquired offerings such as Taleo Recruiting and RightNow Customer Service. From the cloud solutions, customers can expect real time and predictive BI, social capabilities, choice of deployment, and more productivity because of a next generation UX called FUSE. Chris's demo showed a super easy, new UI that touts self service navigation. We'll blog about FUSE in the very near future. Chris said the next 365 days of Fusion Apps would include more localization, more industries, more power, more mobile, and more configurability. The audience was challenged to think hard about how Fusion could be part of their three-to-five year plans. Chris set up a great opportunity for you to follow up with your customers as they explore the possibilities.

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• The Whole Enchilada — Fusion Supply Chain in the Cloud

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Tyra Crockett, Senior Manager at Oracle No other vendor can offer everything in the cloud the way Oracle can. You can get HR from Workday and CRM from Salesforce, but you can get the whole enchilada—HCM, CRM and ERP—all from Oracle on one platform. If you’re thinking about using Oracle's Cloud Services to implement the newest Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications, this post is for you. Point #1: The Oracle Cloud Applications Services portfolio includes ERP cloud services which are flexible and can adapt to fill your supply chain needs. For example, you might be opening a small distribution facility in California, but don’t have the time or IT resources to warrant a full scale supply chain implementation. You can use Oracle’s Cloud to implement the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications you need without an increase in IT staff or hardware. Then as your business grows, you can add more features and applications to your cloud.   Point #2: Whether you’re implementing a slice of the Fusion Procurement pie, or the entire ERP portfolio, you want to be up and running fast with low upfront costs and investment risks. That’s where you can trust a world-class technology organization like Oracle. Your SaaS subscription-based deployment model will take away the headaches associated with determining your software costs. You also will be able to eliminate expensive customizations and configure your deployment as you like, saving you time and money during the initial stages and upon upgrade. Point #3: Another great benefit of operating your Oracle Fusion Supply Chain in the cloud is the opportunity to standardize your processes across your entire supply chain. You can institute processes in San Francisco and be confident they will be followed in Mexico City and Hong Kong. Point #4: If data security is a concern – and it is for most of us – Oracle-managed cloud services give you the comfort of knowing that your data will always be there when you need it. You will not have to manage the IT services associated with patching and upgrade. They will be taken care of automatically. This enables you to focus on what you do best: managing your business. Point #5: Cloud services aren’t an either/or proposition. You might have very good business reasons for choosing a hybrid model -- running some applications in the cloud and others on premise. That allows you to leverage your own IT department, when and where you need to, and shift focus when necessary. I urge you to take a hard look at the Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications running in the cloud. These solutions running alongside your existing legacy systems can solve your toughest business challenges as you move forward in the 21st century.

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• Vmware software installation error

  - by Perry

  I am trying to install Vmware software, but I am facing the following error: Selecting previously unselected package vmware-view-client:i386. (Reading database ... 239594 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking vmware-view-client:i386 (from .../vmware-view-client_2.1.0-0ubuntu0.12.04_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Processing triggers for gnome-menus ... Setting up icaclient:i386 (12.1.0) ... dpkg: error processing icaclient:i386 (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Setting up vmware-view-client:i386 (2.1.0-0ubuntu0.12.04) ... Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Errors were encountered while processing: icaclient:i386 E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) A package failed to install. Trying to recover: Setting up icaclient:i386 (12.1.0) ... dpkg: error processing icaclient:i386 (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Errors were encountered while processing: icaclient:i386 Any suggestions on how to fix this issue? Thanks in advance

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• How should I configure TRIM Support for LVM logical volumes?

  - by Zack Perry

  I am setting up a notebook for software demo purpose. The machine has a Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, and runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit desktop. As it is, the SSD is configured to have a single volume group, with /boot, /swap, and / all in their respective logical volumes. They collectively consume 30GB space. I plan to use the remaining for logical volumes for KVM guests, all run Ubuntu 12.04 Server I would like to ensure that the SSD is utilized optimally. Although on this site, there are some great info about setting up TRIM support for file system setups that do not involve LVM, I have not found explicit guide regarding my planned setup. I did found this page which talks about adding issue_discards in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf. But in said file on my machine, I didn't find the cited content. I double-checked man lvm.conf(5), didn't see any mentioning of this option either. Thus, I'm not sure what to do. Furthermore, even say adding the option is the right thing to do, should I in my machine's /etc/fstab still add mount options such as noatime etc? Any tips, pointers, and/or further guidance are greatly appreciated.

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• Introducing UPK 3.6 Simulation Help (You Say It and We Do It!)

  - by kathryn.lustenberger(at)oracle.com

  We would like to thank everyone that participated in the recent documentation survey that was conducted over the last several months. Your feedback is valuable and we appreciate the time you took to provide it. Many of you commented that you would like to have "UPKs for UPK" in the documentation. In response, we are pleased to announce the availability of Simulation Help. This unique help system is a blending of the text-based Developer help and a collection of approximately 200 simulations that show authors how to create, record, refine, localize, and publish content using the Developer. You can access Simulation Help at any time using the following link: http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/upk/index.html Save this link as a favorite or bookmark in your browser for easy access anytime. We have also provided a link to a short one-question survey so you can tell us what you think of the new Simulation Help. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BJT7LV6 Thanks again for your valuable feedback on the product documentation!

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• Will my current page layout get me penalized for duplicate content?

  - by Perry Roper

  I am using WordPress and in my post sidebar I have related posts which may be of interest to the user, however, I also have an excerpt of each article which is normally the first paragraph of the post it is linking to. For example: http://musicdune.com/reviews/album-review-ellie-goulding-lights If you do a Google Search for the first excerpt in the realted posts section from that page you get 4-5 results from my domain, http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Strip+back+the+synths,+fast+beats+and+the+other+pop+elements,+and+you%E2%80%99re+left+with+something+elegant+and+soulful Is it recommended that I remove the excerpt from the related posts?

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• A Complete Customer Experience Solution (3 of 3 in 'No Customer Left Behind' Series)

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development In my previous post, I talked about taking three concrete steps to improve your customers' overall experiences: 1) understand your customer, 2) empower your ecosystem, and 3) adapt your business. To do these effectively and efficiently, it's important to find the right technology that can bridge the gaps across your channels, interactions, departments, and repositories. Oracle has spent the past three years and more than six billion dollars acquiring and developing some of the world's best-of-breed applications. The result is the most comprehensive customer experience (CX) portfolio offering in the World - bar none: ATG Best in Class Selling Experiences Fatwire Best in Class Marketing Experiences Inquira Best in Class Support Experiences Endecca Best in Class Search Experiences RightNow Best in Class Service Experiences Vitrue & Involver Best in Class Social Marketing Collective Intellect Best In Class Social Listening We don't expect organizations to eat the CX elephant in one bite, nor should they try to. There are key strategic initiatives within each of the four main pillars of our customer experience offering for which we deliver solutions: 1. Customer Experience for Marketing Social Listening and Engagement Social Marketing Marketing Websites Demand Generation and Lead Management Marketing and Loyalty Management 2. Customer Experience for Commerce Search, Navigation & Content Delivery Cross-Channel Commerce Targeting & Product Recommendations Social Commerce Order Management & Fulfillment Retail Store Operations 3. Customer Experience for Sales Sales Force Automation Social Selling Territory & Quota Management Revenue Forecasting Partner Relationship Management Quote to Cash Incentive Compensation 4. Customer Experience for Service Cross-Channel Customer Service Knowledge Management Social Customer Service Eligibility Management Contracts, Assets, and Entitlements Industry-Specific Solutions eBilling Oracle's customer experience portfolio is socially infused at each layer of our pillars rather than simply bolted on as a side process. This combines with the power of the Cloud to run the parts of the solution that need the access, efficiency, and agility from a managed infrastructure. You can get the compliance control from on-premise backbone infrastructure systems that run your business and don't change that often. Please take advantage of our teams of Oracle customer experience professionals and our key agency and technology partner ecosystem. They can help you develop strategic solution roadmaps that build and deliver customer experience and that are tailored to your business needs and objectives. No one has built a better customer service portfolio to manage the entire customer journey than Oracle. It is backed by CX thought leadership programs, a commitment from our executives, and a worldview that your technology decisions must be driven by your customer experiences to succeed. If you’d like to follow up on this conversation, please leave a comment or contact me at [email protected]. You can get more information on Oracle’s complete customer experience solution here.

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part II

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's CSO & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy Almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value. Jon ChorleyChief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product StrategyOracle Corporation

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• Introducing Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) 12.1 Thursday 26th June 2014 – Oracle, Reading, Berkshire

  - by Kathryn Lustenberger

  Join Oracle UPK Product Management and Product Development In conjunction with Larmer Brown Register Now v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} UPK Client Event – Introducing v12.1 Thursday 26th June 2014 Oracle Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berkshire Agenda Time Session 10.00am Registration and Coffee 10.30am Introductions and Objectives TWIN TRACK SESSION 10.45am Introduction to UPK (Standard) Version 12.1 Overview and Demonstration for delegates new to UPK Upgrading to UPK (Standard) Version 12.1 Demonstration of the latest release, for delegates with experience of UPK 12.25pm Q&A An opportunity for delegates to raise specific questions about the tool Q&A An opportunity for delegates to raise specific questions about the latest release 12.45pm Lunch 1.30pm Larmer Brown Development Tracker Larmer Brown’s Development Tracker addresses the challenge of ensuring that a Content Development Project will meet agreed deadlines, identifying risks with sufficient notice to take action 1.50pm Case Study How the Development Tracker addressed this client’s requirement to track, monitor and report progress on a large-scale implementation Project 2.10pm Larmer Brown Library Content for UPK This session will showcase some of Larmer Brown’s content library and consider how pre-built content can be used to your advantage 2.30pm Coffee Break 2.45pm Making the most of UPK Professional This presentation and demonstration seeks to unlock the potential of UPK Professional for those that may not be fully utilising the tool   3.20pm Case Study How this client has utilised the tracking and reporting features within UPK Professional 3.40pm Summary and Conclusions 4.00pm Close

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• Why are my Unity procedural animations jerky?

  - by Phoenix Perry

  I'm working in Unity and getting some crazy weird motion behavior. I have a plane and I'm moving it. It's ever so slightly getting about 1 pixel bigger and smaller. It looks like the it's kind of getting squeezed sideways by a pixel. I'm moving a plane by cos and sin so it will spin on the x and z axes. If the planes are moving at Time.time, everything is fine. However, if I put in slower speed multiplier, I get an amazingly weird jerk in my animation. I get it with or without the lerp. How do I fix it? I want it to move very slowly. Is there some sort of invisible grid in unity? Some sort of minimum motion per frame? I put a visual sample of the behavior here. Here's the relevant code: public void spin() { for (int i = 0; i < numPlanes; i++ ) { GameObject g = planes[i] as GameObject; //alt method //currentRotation += speed * Time.deltaTime * 100; //rotation.eulerAngles = new Vector3(0, currentRotation, 0); //g.transform.position = rotation * rotationRadius; //sine method g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.x = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().radiusX * (Mathf.Cos((Time.time*speed) + g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().startAngle)); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().radius * Mathf.Sin((Time.time*speed) + g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().startAngle); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.y = g.GetComponent<Transform>().position.y; ////offset g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z += 20; g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.x = Mathf.Lerp(g.transform.position.x,g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.x, .5f); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.z = Mathf.Lerp(g.transform.position.z, g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z, .5f); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.y = g.GetComponent<Transform>().position.y; g.transform.position = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp; } Invoke("spin",0.0f); } The full code is on github. There is literally nothing else going on. I've turned off all other game objects so it's only the 40 planes with a texture2D shader. I removed it from Invoke and tried it in Update -- still happens. With a set frame rate or not, the same problem occurs. Tested it in Fixed Update. Same issue. The script on the individual plane doesn't even have an update function in it. The data on it could functionally live in a struct. I'm getting between 90 and 123 fps. Going to investigate and test further. I put this in an invoke function to see if I could get around it just occurring in update. There are no physics on these shapes. It's a straight procedural animation. Limited it to 1 plane - still happens. Thoughts? Removed the shader - still happening.

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• Seizing the Moment with Mobility

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps Mobile devices are forcing a paradigm shift in the workplace – they’re changing the way businesses can do business and the type of cultures they can nurture. As our customers talk about their mobile needs, we hear them saying they want instant-on access to enterprise data so workers can be more effective at their jobs anywhere, anytime. They also are interested in being more cost effective from an IT point of view. The mobile revolution – with the idea of BYOD (bring your own device) – has added an interesting dynamic because previously IT was driving the employee device strategy and ecosystem. That's been turned on its head with the consumerization of IT. Now employees are figuring out how to use their personal devices for work purposes and IT has to figure out how to adapt. Blurring the Lines between Work and Personal Life My vision of where businesses will be five years from now is that our work lives and personal lives will be more interwoven together. In turn, enterprises will have to determine how to make employees’ work lives fit more into the fabric of their personal lives. And personal devices like smartphones are going to drive significant business value because they let us accomplish things very incrementally. I can be sitting on a train or in a taxi and be productive. At the end of any meeting, I can capture ideas and tasks or follow up with people in real time. Mobile devices enable this notion of seizing the moment – capitalizing on opportunities that might otherwise have slipped away because we're not connected. For the industry shapers out there, this is game changing. The lean and agile workforce is definitely the future. This notion of the board sitting down with the executive team to lay out strategic objectives for a three- to five-year plan, bringing in HR to determine how they're going to staff the strategic activities, kicking off the execution, and then revisiting the plan in three to five years to create another three- to five-year plan is yesterday's model. Businesses that continue to approach innovating in that way are in the dinosaur age. Today it's about incremental planning and incremental execution, which requires a lot of cohesion and synthesis within the workforce. There needs to be this interweaving notion within the workforce about how ideas cascade down, how people engage, how they stay connected, and how insights are shared. How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Marketplace The notion of Facebook isn’t new. We lived it pre-Internet days with America Online and Prodigy – Facebook is just the renaissance of these services in a more viral and pervasive way. And given the trajectory of the consumerization of IT with people bringing their personal tooling to work, the enterprise has no option but to adapt. The sooner that businesses realize this from a top-down point of view the sooner that they will be able to really drive significant innovation and adapt to the marketplace. There are a small number of companies right now (I think it's closer to 20% rather than 80%, but the number is expanding) that are able to really innovate in this incremental marketplace. So from a competitive point of view, there's no choice but to be social and stay connected. By far the majority of users on Facebook and LinkedIn are mobile users – people on iPhones, smartphones, Android phones, and tablets. It's not the couch people, right? It's the on-the-go people – those people at the coffee shops. Usually when you're sitting at your desk on a big desktop computer, typically you have better things to do than to be on Facebook. This is a topic I'm extremely passionate about because I think mobile devices are game changing. Mobility delivers significant value to businesses – it also brings dramatic simplification from a functional point of view and transforms our work life experience. Hernan CapdevilaVice President, Oracle Applications Development

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• Great Expectations - Fusion HCM Highlights at OOW

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Lisa Conley, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCM, Oracle Applications Development Oracle Open World is just around the corner! There's always so much to see and do and learn at the conference so I want to share some of the 'don't miss' Fusion HCM highlights with you. (Use this tool to search by session number to get a full description.) For starters, we have several customers who will be sharing their Fusion HCM implementation stories. We'll kick off these presentations with a customer panel at 12:15 on Monday in Moscone West 2005 (CON9420). You'll hear from Zillow, the Gerson Lehrman Group, UBS, and ConAgra about their experiences with our products. Oracle partners MarketSphere (CON8581) and eVerge (CON3800) have implemented Fusion HCM themselves and and will talk about how they'll use their experiences to help customers with their implementations (both are in Moscone West 2006). Beth Correa, CEO of Official Payroll Advisor, will highlight her favorite things about Oracle Fusion HCM Payroll on Tuesday at 11:45 in Moscone West 2006 (CON6691). And you'll get to hear from customers again when they speak with Steve Miranda in his Oracle Applications: Strategic Directions and Recommendations session on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004 (CON11434). To bring it all together for you, we've listed all your Fusion HCM opportunities to learn and interact in this Focus On Document. I am really looking forward to the sessions on Human Capital Management in the Cloud. The Oracle Cloud combines the multiple product offerings into a single environment that leverages a common technology infrastructure enabling users to focus on their business - not the business of managing environments. On Tuesday at 10:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004, there is a General Session entitled the Future of Oracle HCM -- Strategy and Roadmap (GEN9505). This will touch on all product lines. Fusion HCM will be highlighted in Gretchen Alarcon's Oracle HCM: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap session on Monday at 12:15 in Moscone West 2005 (CON9410). Also on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2006, is a session focused on Talent Management and how you can try out these new products, co-existing with your current product set (CON9430). This is important in that you can test the waters before diving in. ConAgra will be sharing their experience in this session as well.  And of course, if you want to have a personal demonstration, please come by the Oracle DEMOgrounds in West Exhibition Hall Level 1 or the Oracle Cloud Services Lounge at Moscone West Level 3 where our Oracle HCM Cloud Services experts will be ready to answer your questions. I hope you have a wonderful week in San Francisco.Lisa ConleyPrincipal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCMApplications DevelopmentOracle Corporation

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• How to merge two single column csv files with linux commands

  - by user1328191

  I was wondering how to merge two single column csv files into one file where the resulting file will contain two columns. file1.csv    first_name    chris    ben    jerry file2.csv    last_name    smith    white    perry result.csv    first_name,last_name    chris,smith    ben,white    jerry,perry Thanks

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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product Development

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• My Dog, Cross-Channel Shopping, and Fusion SCM

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Mark Carson, Director, Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management I was walking my dog Max in an open space behind my house. As we tromped through the tall weeds I remembered it is tick season and that I should get Max some protection. While he sniffed merrily in the tick infested brush, I started shopping in the middle of an open field on my phone. I thought it would be convenient to pick up the tick medicine from a pet store on the way home. Searching the pet store website I saw that they had the medicine, but there was no information on whether the store had any in stock and there were no options for shipping it to the store for pickup. I could return it, but not pick it up which seamed kind of odd. I really didn't feel like making calls to the local stores to find out if they had it. Since the product is popular, I tried one of the large 'everything' stores. Browsing its website I could see that it could be shipped to me, shipped to the store for free, and that the store nearest to me had it in stock. Needless to say, this store became a better option. This experience is a small example of why retailers, distributors, and manufactures have placed a high priority on enabling 'cross-channel commerce.' Shoppers like you and me expect to be able to search, compare, buy and return products on-line and over the phone using a variety of devices including PDAs, tablets and in-store kiosks. The pet store lost my business because its web channel had limited information about its stores. I have spoken with many customers and prospects about cross-channel commerce. They all realize the business implications and urgency behind cross-channel commerce but recognize there are challenges to enable it. New and existing applications must be integrated together globally through a consistent cross-channel business process. Integration is required between applications that provide the initial shopping experience and delivery applications associated with warehouses, stores, and partners. The enablement must be accomplished in a flexible way to react to fast-changing product portfolios and new acquisitions, while at the same time minimizing costs through reuse of existing systems. Meanwhile, the business must continue to grow and decision makers need to balance new capability with peak seasons. The challenges above are not unique to retail. Any customer in any industry who has multiple points for capturing orders and multiple points for fulfilling orders will face these challenges. With this in mind, we had a unique opportunity in Fusion SCM to re-think how to build a set of modular and flexible applications in the order management space that would make these challenges easier to conquer. The results are Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising. These applications can help companies, such as the pet store, enable true cross-channel commerce. The apps provide highly adaptable and flexible business processes to automate order orchestration across multiple cross-channel systems. They also show a global view of supply across warehouses, stores, and partners for real-time availability and more accurate order promising. Additional capability includes a standards-based integration framework for seamless execution and the ability to reuse existing systems for faster and lower cost implementations. OK, that was a mouthful of features and benefits. As Max waited to cross the street (he can do basic math too), I wondered if he could relate. He does not care about leash laws, pick-up courtesy, where he can/can't walk, what time of day it is, or even ticks. He does not care about how all these things could make walking complicated. He just wants to walk. Similarly, customers just want to shop and companies just want to make it easier to sell and deliver. You can learn more about Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising in cross-channel here.

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• Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Terrance Wampler, Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle I’ve spent my career designing and developing financial management systems, most of it at Oracle. Every single day I either meet with our customers or talk to them on the phone. The time is usually spent discussing various business challenges facing CFOs and Controllers, who are running Oracle’s Financials. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing and whether it makes sense for finance to go to the cloud. Here are some pros and cons that might help you make that decision. Let’s start with the benefits of cloud solutions. The first is savings. With cloud services, you pay only for those commodities that you use. That makes you feel like you're getting better value for your money. Plus, you can preserve your cash for your core business and you can get a better matching of expenses and revenues. So, at the top of the list is lower total cost of ownership. The second point has to do with optimization. With cloud services, you’ll need less IT infrastructure so you can optimize your IT resources for better-value, higher-end projects. This also leads to greater financial visibility, where there's a clear cost for the set of services or features replaced by cloud services. And, the last benefit is what I call acceleration. You can save money by speeding up the initialization and deployment of the project. You don't have to deal with IT infrastructure and you can start implementing right away. We did a quick survey of about 70 CFOs at the CFO Summit last month in New York City. We asked them why they were looking at cloud services, and not necessarily just for financials. The No. 1 response was perceived lower cost of ownership. But of course there are risks to consider. The first thing most people think about in the cloud is security and ownership of data. So, will your data really be safe? Can you meet your own privacy policy requirements? Do you really want your private financial data exposed? Do you trust the provider? Is what you see really your data? Do you own it or is it managed by someone else? Security is a big concern that comes with an emotional component. The next thing in the risk category is reliability. Is the provider proven? You’re taking what you have control over – for example, standards and policies and internal service level agreements – away from your IT department and giving it to someone else. Will you still be able to adapt to shifts in your business? Will the provider be able to grow with your business effectively? Reliability means having a provider that can give you the service infrastructure that you need. And then there’s performance, which has two components in terms of risk. Going forward, will the provider be able to scale the infrastructure or service level if you have new employees or new businesses? And second, will the price you negotiate and the rate you lock in cover additional costs and rising service fees? Another piece is cost. What happens if you don't get the service level you want? What if you end the service? What happens, if after a few years, you send the service out for bid and change service? Can you move your data? Can you move the applications? Do the integrations work? These are cost components people don’t always take into account. And, the final piece is the business case. The perception is that you can get started really quickly with cloud. It has a perceived lower cost of total ownership and it feels cool because it's cloud. But do you have a good business case for moving to the cloud? Your total cost of ownership is over three years; then you’ll renew it, so your TCO is six years. Have you compared that to other internal services that you’re offering? You might already have product that you can run this new business or division on. In that same survey at the CFO Summit, the execs thought the biggest perceived risks were security of data, ability to move data back, and the ability to create a business case to actually justify the risks. So that’s the list of pros and cons. Not to leave you hanging, I will do another post on how to balance these pros and cons and make the right decision for your business.

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• 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.

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