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  • Efficient way to secure tomcat database connections

    - by Greymeister
    Our customer has a problem with database information in plaintext within a server.xml or context.xml file on the Tomcat server. I've looked at several sites like OWASP and it seems like there's no obvious solution. I've also seen things like this wordpress blog which describe implementing a custom Tomcat extension to do this. There must exist some standard implementation(s) already without having to roll your own. Does anyone have experience with such a solution?

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  • md5sum or sha1sum of legitmate microsoft system files

    - by martyvis
    Is there a database or repository of the legitimate checksums for Microsoft system files? We think we have a 0day on DNS for Windows 2003 SP2 using IRC for command and control. (Latest McAfee does not see an issue). I want to compare our customer's dns.exe and associated DLLs with the real ones. (I will grab a fresh SP2 and hotfixed system to do this, but wonder how to do this in future without needed to do this.)

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  • Capacity Planner errors

    - by Gabrie
    Hi Performing a discovery at customer site and although systems do get discovered, I get a lot (100000+) of these errors in the log: 02/01/2010 10:45:48:1:2200: Module = vcpDiscover Function = GetObfuscatedName Source = vcpDiscover Error = Method '~' of object '~' failed(-2147467259:0:5003251) 02/01/2010 10:45:48:1:2200: Module = vcpDiscover Function = GetObfuscatedName Source = vcpDiscover Error = Method '~' of object '~' failed(-2147467259:0:5003251) Any tips? Using latest version, just downloaded it. Gabrie

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  • Shopping for a very compact and powerful workstation [closed]

    - by qdot
    I'm on the market for something small, size of an Mac Mini, could be heavier, that packs a lot of compute power - goal is to have a fast, known development machine at customer's site, but still easier to fly with than desktop-replacement laptops. If Mac Mini came with a quad-core i7, it would be my likely choice. Any other manufacturers to look at? Or perhaps a Mini can be upgraded beyond official specs?

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  • DELL Inspiron N 5050 doesn't Power On until I Plug-in the Charger

    - by hannanessay
    I bought a Dell Inspiron N 5050 last week, and recently discovered a problem with my laptop. It doesn't Power On until and unless I Plug-in the charger. After I plug-in the charger, it boots up fine, and continues to work well after disconnecting the charger. I don't know what the problem is exactly? I was planning to contact Customer Care, but I wanted to know if I could fix it myself. Please help!

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  • Multiple Simultaneous VPN Connection Limit

    - by stukelly
    Is it possible to have more than two active VPN connections on Windows XP? I have a customer with three VPN client connections on Windows XP Professional. I can connect to any two sites at the same time, but the third connection always fails. Is this a limit within the operating system?

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  • Alternative to MS Dynamics CRM 4.0?

    - by Trondh
    hi, A customer of mine have been testing a trial of MS CRM 4.0 that I installed for them, but they concluded that it might be a bit heavy for them. I promised them to look into other CRM applications that use SQL Server as the backend and preferably has an Outlook plugin so you can do "CRM Stuff" directly from Outlook. If anyone knows about alternatives, I would appreciate it if you leave a link here!

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  • Application to automatically switch between two applications in Windows

    - by OverloadUT
    Does an application exist that will cause the computer to switch (bring in to focus) between two different applications, on a timer? This is for Windows 7. I need this for a screen that will display publicly to customers. I want the screen to switch between two different applications every, say, 30 seconds. I figure there are enough businesses out there will customer-facing monitors these days that something simple like this must exist!

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  • What is the function of those film covers on electronic equipment such as mobile screens but also peripheral plastics on a laptop?

    - by leladax
    I understand it may "protect" an area but I don't get why the customer gets it and then takes it off after it was being protected in a full box anyway. Also, should those film covers that surround the plastics around a laptop screen (and not the screen itself) and maybe also on the keyboard be kept on as much as possible? I noticed if one tries to keep them on as much as possible they tend to go off by themselves anyway, but anyway, what's the status quo about it?

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  • Recover license for Photoshop CS3

    - by Buddy
    At the company I work at, an employee was let go. His laptop was a company laptop with Photoshop CS3 installed on it. Photoshop was deactivated so it could be installed on another computer. The license was bought online and emailed to someone, however, that computer crashed and the email with the license is lost. Is there a way to recover the license from the laptop? Are we better off contacting Adobe's customer support?

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  • Replacing hard drives in a LaCie 2big Network

    - by Jason
    I have a LaCie 2big Network that currently has 2 500GB drives in it (mirror). I'd like to upgrade the drives to 1TB each using something like this I know that Lacie sells a 1TB drive designed for the 2big Network but it would seem to me that these drives are standard drives with the Lacie holder included. Do I need to use their drives or can I get my own? (Their customer support pushes me towards their drives) I'm assuming the device can format the drives for me when I add them in.

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  • NGINX Cache Viewstate and Cookies

    - by user42833
    We are running NGINX 7.65 on a Ubuntu 10 server. NGINX is setup as a reverse proxy to an IIS website where the viewstate is passed through the headers. We want to set up the cache feature in NGINX but need to make sure it does not mess up the viewstate and cookies associated with each individual customer. Will adding this to the nginx.conf file fix this - proxy_pass_header Header or is there more that would need to be done? Thanks,

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  • Advice on Auditing VPN Connections

    - by WhiteAdam
    I've inherited a network that is truly a mess and the VPN config is amazingly long with confusing group names and very little documentation. I am curious to see how others have gone about auditing these types of connections. Are there any forms out there? What information should I collect? I assume things like Customer, Department, Technical Lead, and etc. Thanks in advance for any advice on this nightmare.

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  • Apache shuts down from time to time

    - by Dugi
    I'm having trouble with my VPS as it keeps shutting apache down at least twice a day. The server is running on CentOS 6 with the latest apache. By shutting down I mean I have to go into SSH and type in this command in order to bring it up again: /sbin/service httpd start I'm not very good with servers and my host doesn't seem to have a nice customer service. Any help would be appreciated as these unexpected downtimes really know to kill one's mood.

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  • Eject LiveCD + Reboot

    - by JPerkSter
    We use LiveCD's alot in my line of work. Whether it be fscking file systems, recovering data from a customer to rm'd his server, etc. I'm looking for a quick way to eject the CDROM and reboot the server. Does anyone have any one-liners to do this or any other suggestions? Using 'eject' doesn't work most of the time, from what I've tested / used. We're using RHEL / Cent on most of our servers if that helps :D

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  • Export Specific Page from MediaWiki

    - by wag2639
    We have an internal document wiki running on MediaWiki (latest stable). Is there a way we can export a specific page for a customer without giving them access to the entire wiki (which is currently behind a PAM-based authentication). Edit1: Sorry for the vagueness, I meant is there a way to syndicate a specific page so that they don't actually have access to the wiki but the content is still available and up-to-date. For example, the page I want them to see http://mysite.com/wiki/page_to_see Can I have it available at http://mysite.com/outsite_wiki

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  • SSL, CNAME, and multiple domains

    - by DarthCaniac
    Say I have an SSL Certificate for a super cool site that I offer, like https://secure.coolsite.com/ (Not my site, just an example). Then lets say I had a customer who wanted to have a CNAME to my site on his server, like https://mycoolsite.his-site.com/ Would he need a regular SSL certificate on his end, would I need to have a second certificate on my end (And just "install" it on my webserver), or would I need a multi-domain SSL certificate, or he just has to list my site as an alias on his certificate? Thanks!

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  • How can I populate other columns after user selects choice in drop-down?

    - by user360332
    I have a spreadsheet that is essentially going to be a form for our user to print out and hand to the necessary individuals. What the user needs to be able to do is select a customer number from a drop down, choose his number, have 2 other (so a total of 3) columns populate. I need the rest of the worksheet to stay in place. I have tried just about everything. How can I solve this with the simplest solution possible?

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  • How to add/update lotus notes signature 8.5 from C# using API

    - by faris
    I want build a third party tool to make our employees fill the Contact Form information , and then make him able to add his information as a signature image to the Lotus notes .. so if the customer want to send a new email , the signature will be added automatically to the email .. I use lotus notes V. 8.5 .. But how I can do it ,, is there any API available to make this happens ? I appreciates any help ...

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  • Asterisk Dial() - passing URL to softphone

    - by Giuc
    According to https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+11+Application_Dial the Dial() application is capable of sending an URL to the extension being called. I suppose there are softphones implementing this, maybe popping up a browser pointing to the given URL - perfect to open up automatically a CRM customer page when receiving a call by identifying his caller id. Do you know of any softphone implementing this functionality?

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  • is Drupal good business POS [on hold]

    - by mavili
    I've got to work on a POS-type web application for a money transfer, shipping, and other customer services like translation and help-out charges. I was planning to do that in pure PHP without frameworks or CMS's, but then Drupal came into play and I'm wondering if I should learn Drupal and do the app with it. My question is, is Drupal good for such a work, and if it is will it take me more than a week to learn enough to make it possible? For info, I'm a decent PHP programmer.

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  • jQuery toggle fucntion not working as expected

    - by Bunny Rabbit
    <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function(){ $('div#menu div') .bind('mouseover',function(event){ popHelp(this); }) .bind('mouseout',function(event){ clearHelp(); }) .toggle( function(event){$('#menu div a').not(this).css('opacity',1);$(event.target).css('opacity',0.4)}, function(event){$(event.target).css('opacity',1)} ) $('div.item').not('#mainPage') .hide() $('#customerManagement').click(function(event){ $('.item').hide('slow'); $('#customerManagementCon').toggle('slow'); return false; }) $('#userManagement').click(function(){ $('.item').hide('slow'); $('#userManagementCon').toggle('slow'); return false; }) $('#storageManagement').click(function(){ $('.item').hide('slow'); $('#storageManagementCon').toggle('slow'); return false; }) $('#searchManagement').click(function(){ $('.item').hide('slow'); $('#searchManagementCon').toggle('slow'); return false; }) $('#signOff').click(function(){ $('.item').hide('slow'); $('#signOffCon').toggle('slow'); return false; }) } ); function popHelp(ref){ var text; if(ref.id=="customerManagement") text="click here for customer management"; else if(ref.id=="userManagement") text="click here for user management"; else if(ref.id=="storageManagement") text="click here for storage management"; else if(ref.id=="searchManagement") text="search management"; else if(ref.id=="signOff") text="click here to sign off"; $('#helpConsole').append('<div class="help">'+text+'<div>'); } function clearHelp(){ $('#helpConsole > div').remove(); } </script> <style type="text/css" > #helpConsole { background-color:Aqua; margin-left:500px; width:300px; height:100px; outline-width:medium; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="menu"> <table border="2"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="5">Welcome $Employee Name</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td><div id="customerManagement" class="menuItem"><a>Customer Management</a></div></td> <td><div id="userManagement" class="menuItem"><a>User Management</a></div></td> <td><div id="storageManagement" class="menuItem"><a>Storage Management</a></div></td> <td><div id="searchManagement" class="menuItem"><a>Search Management</a></div></td> <td><div id="signOff" class="menuItem"><a>Sign Off</a></div></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <div id="helpConsole"><h3>help</h3></div> <div id="mainPage" class="item"><h1>Storage Service</h1></div> <div id="customerManagementCon" class="item"> <h3>Customer Management</h3> </div> <div id="userManagementCon" class="item"> <h3>User Management</h3> </div> <div id="storageManagementCon" class="item"> <h3>Storage Management</h3> </div> <div id="searchManagementCon" class="item"> <h3>Search Mangement</h3> </div> <div id="signOffCon" class="item"> <h3>Sign Off</h3> </div> <div id="menuItemCon" class="item">menuItem</div> </body> The toggle function in this code is not working as expected though it shows the #menu items when clicked it doesn't hide them always .

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  • Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

    - by HCM-Oracle
    By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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  • Currency Conversion in Oracle BI applications

    - by Saurabh Verma
    Authored by Vijay Aggarwal and Hichem Sellami A typical data warehouse contains Star and/or Snowflake schema, made up of Dimensions and Facts. The facts store various numerical information including amounts. Example; Order Amount, Invoice Amount etc. With the true global nature of business now-a-days, the end-users want to view the reports in their own currency or in global/common currency as defined by their business. This presents a unique opportunity in BI to provide the amounts in converted rates either by pre-storing or by doing on-the-fly conversions while displaying the reports to the users. Source Systems OBIA caters to various source systems like EBS, PSFT, Sebl, JDE, Fusion etc. Each source has its own unique and intricate ways of defining and storing currency data, doing currency conversions and presenting to the OLTP users. For example; EBS stores conversion rates between currencies which can be classified by conversion rates, like Corporate rate, Spot rate, Period rate etc. Siebel stores exchange rates by conversion rates like Daily. EBS/Fusion stores the conversion rates for each day, where as PSFT/Siebel store for a range of days. PSFT has Rate Multiplication Factor and Rate Division Factor and we need to calculate the Rate based on them, where as other Source systems store the Currency Exchange Rate directly. OBIA Design The data consolidation from various disparate source systems, poses the challenge to conform various currencies, rate types, exchange rates etc., and designing the best way to present the amounts to the users without affecting the performance. When consolidating the data for reporting in OBIA, we have designed the mechanisms in the Common Dimension, to allow users to report based on their required currencies. OBIA Facts store amounts in various currencies: Document Currency: This is the currency of the actual transaction. For a multinational company, this can be in various currencies. Local Currency: This is the base currency in which the accounting entries are recorded by the business. This is generally defined in the Ledger of the company. Global Currencies: OBIA provides five Global Currencies. Three are used across all modules. The last two are for CRM only. A Global currency is very useful when creating reports where the data is viewed enterprise-wide. Example; a US based multinational would want to see the reports in USD. The company will choose USD as one of the global currencies. OBIA allows users to define up-to five global currencies during the initial implementation. The term Currency Preference is used to designate the set of values: Document Currency, Local Currency, Global Currency 1, Global Currency 2, Global Currency 3; which are shared among all modules. There are four more currency preferences, specific to certain modules: Global Currency 4 (aka CRM Currency) and Global Currency 5 which are used in CRM; and Project Currency and Contract Currency, used in Project Analytics. When choosing Local Currency for Currency preference, the data will show in the currency of the Ledger (or Business Unit) in the prompt. So it is important to select one Ledger or Business Unit when viewing data in Local Currency. More on this can be found in the section: Toggling Currency Preferences in the Dashboard. Design Logic When extracting the fact data, the OOTB mappings extract and load the document amount, and the local amount in target tables. It also loads the exchange rates required to convert the document amount into the corresponding global amounts. If the source system only provides the document amount in the transaction, the extract mapping does a lookup to get the Local currency code, and the Local exchange rate. The Load mapping then uses the local currency code and rate to derive the local amount. The load mapping also fetches the Global Currencies and looks up the corresponding exchange rates. The lookup of exchange rates is done via the Exchange Rate Dimension provided as a Common/Conforming Dimension in OBIA. The Exchange Rate Dimension stores the exchange rates between various currencies for a date range and Rate Type. Two physical tables W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are used to provide the lookups and conversions between currencies. The data is loaded from the source system’s Ledger tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores the exchange rates between currencies with a date range. On the other hand, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G stores the currency conversions between the document currency and the pre-defined five Global Currencies for each day. Based on the requirements, the fact mappings can decide and use one or both tables to do the conversion. Currency design in OBIA also taps into the MLS and Domain architecture, thus allowing the users to map the currencies to a universal Domain during the implementation time. This is especially important for companies deploying and using OBIA with multiple source adapters. Some Gotchas to Look for It is necessary to think through the currencies during the initial implementation. 1) Identify various types of currencies that are used by your business. Understand what will be your Local (or Base) and Documentation currency. Identify various global currencies that your users will want to look at the reports. This will be based on the global nature of your business. Changes to these currencies later in the project, while permitted, but may cause Full data loads and hence lost time. 2) If the user has a multi source system make sure that the Global Currencies and Global Rate Types chosen in Configuration Manager do have the corresponding source specific counterparts. In other words, make sure for every DW specific value chosen for Currency Code or Rate Type, there is a source Domain mapping already done. Technical Section This section will briefly mention the technical scenarios employed in the OBIA adaptors to extract data from each source system. In OBIA, we have two main tables which store the Currency Rate information as explained in previous sections. W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are the two tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores all the Currency Conversions present in the source system. It captures data for a Date Range. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G has Global Currency Conversions stored at a Daily level. However the challenge here is to store all the 5 Global Currency Exchange Rates in a single record for each From Currency. Let’s voyage further into the Source System Extraction logic for each of these tables and understand the flow briefly. EBS: In EBS, we have Currency Data stored in GL_DAILY_RATES table. As the name indicates GL_DAILY_RATES EBS table has data at a daily level. However in our warehouse we store the data with a Date Range and insert a new range record only when the Exchange Rate changes for a particular From Currency, To Currency and Rate Type. Below are the main logical steps that we employ in this process. (Incremental Flow only) – Cleanup the data in W_EXCH_RATE_G. Delete the records which have Start Date > minimum conversion date Update the End Date of the existing records. Compress the daily data from GL_DAILY_RATES table into Range Records. Incremental map uses $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY as an extra parameter. Generate Previous Rate, Previous Date and Next Date for each of the Daily record from the OLTP. Filter out the records which have Conversion Rate same as Previous Rates or if the Conversion Date lies within a single day range. Mark the records as ‘Keep’ and ‘Filter’ and also get the final End Date for the single Range record (Unique Combination of From Date, To Date, Rate and Conversion Date). Filter the records marked as ‘Filter’ in the INFA map. The above steps will load W_EXCH_RATE_GS. Step 0 updates/deletes W_EXCH_RATE_G directly. SIL map will then insert/update the GS data into W_EXCH_RATE_G. These steps convert the daily records in GL_DAILY_RATES to Range records in W_EXCH_RATE_G. We do not need such special logic for loading W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. This is a table where we store data at a Daily Granular Level. However we need to pivot the data because the data present in multiple rows in source tables needs to be stored in different columns of the same row in DW. We use GROUP BY and CASE logic to achieve this. Fusion: Fusion has extraction logic very similar to EBS. The only difference is that the Cleanup logic that was mentioned in step 0 above does not use $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY parameter. In Fusion we bring all the Exchange Rates in Incremental as well and do the cleanup. The SIL then takes care of Insert/Updates accordingly. PeopleSoft:PeopleSoft does not have From Date and To Date explicitly in the Source tables. Let’s look at an example. Please note that this is achieved from PS1 onwards only. 1 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 45 31 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 46 PSFT stores records in above fashion. This means that Exchange Rate of 45 for USD to INR is applicable for 1 Jan 2010 to 30 Jan 2010. We need to store data in this fashion in DW. Also PSFT has Exchange Rate stored as RATE_MULT and RATE_DIV. We need to do a RATE_MULT/RATE_DIV to get the correct Exchange Rate. We generate From Date and To Date while extracting data from source and this has certain assumptions: If a record gets updated/inserted in the source, it will be extracted in incremental. Also if this updated/inserted record is between other dates, then we also extract the preceding and succeeding records (based on dates) of this record. This is required because we need to generate a range record and we have 3 records whose ranges have changed. Taking the same example as above, if there is a new record which gets inserted on 15 Jan 2010; the new ranges are 1 Jan to 14 Jan, 15 Jan to 30 Jan and 31 Jan to Next available date. Even though 1 Jan record and 31 Jan have not changed, we will still extract them because the range is affected. Similar logic is used for Global Exchange Rate Extraction. We create the Range records and get it into a Temporary table. Then we join to Day Dimension, create individual records and pivot the data to get the 5 Global Exchange Rates for each From Currency, Date and Rate Type. Siebel: Siebel Facts are dependent on Global Exchange Rates heavily and almost none of them really use individual Exchange Rates. In other words, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G is the main table used in Siebel from PS1 release onwards. As of January 2002, the Euro Triangulation method for converting between currencies belonging to EMU members is not needed for present and future currency exchanges. However, the method is still available in Siebel applications, as are the old currencies, so that historical data can be maintained accurately. The following description applies only to historical data needing conversion prior to the 2002 switch to the Euro for the EMU member countries. If a country is a member of the European Monetary Union (EMU), you should convert its currency to other currencies through the Euro. This is called triangulation, and it is used whenever either currency being converted has EMU Triangulation checked. Due to this, there are multiple extraction flows in SEBL ie. EUR to EMU, EUR to NonEMU, EUR to DMC and so on. We load W_EXCH_RATE_G through multiple flows with these data. This has been kept same as previous versions of OBIA. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G being a new table does not have such needs. However SEBL does not have From Date and To Date columns in the Source tables similar to PSFT. We use similar extraction logic as explained in PSFT section for SEBL as well. What if all 5 Global Currencies configured are same? As mentioned in previous sections, from PS1 onwards we store Global Exchange Rates in W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G table. The extraction logic for this table involves Pivoting data from multiple rows into a single row with 5 Global Exchange Rates in 5 columns. As mentioned in previous sections, we use CASE and GROUP BY functions to achieve this. This approach poses a unique problem when all the 5 Global Currencies Chosen are same. For example – If the user configures all 5 Global Currencies as ‘USD’ then the extract logic will not be able to generate a record for From Currency=USD. This is because, not all Source Systems will have a USD->USD conversion record. We have _Generated mappings to take care of this case. We generate a record with Conversion Rate=1 for such cases. Reusable Lookups Before PS1, we had a Mapplet for Currency Conversions. In PS1, we only have reusable Lookups- LKP_W_EXCH_RATE_G and LKP_W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. These lookups have another layer of logic so that all the lookup conditions are met when they are used in various Fact Mappings. Any user who would want to do a LKP on W_EXCH_RATE_G or W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G should and must use these Lookups. A direct join or Lookup on the tables might lead to wrong data being returned. Changing Currency preferences in the Dashboard: In the 796x series, all amount metrics in OBIA were showing the Global1 amount. The customer needed to change the metric definitions to show them in another Currency preference. Project Analytics started supporting currency preferences since 7.9.6 release though, and it published a Tech note for other module customers to add toggling between currency preferences to the solution. List of Currency Preferences Starting from 11.1.1.x release, the BI Platform added a new feature to support multiple currencies. The new session variable (PREFERRED_CURRENCY) is populated through a newly introduced currency prompt. This prompt can take its values from the xml file: userpref_currencies_OBIA.xml, which is hosted in the BI Server installation folder, under :< home>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\userpref_currencies.xml This file contains the list of currency preferences, like“Local Currency”, “Global Currency 1”,…which customers can also rename to give them more meaningful business names. There are two options for showing the list of currency preferences to the user in the dashboard: Static and Dynamic. In Static mode, all users will see the full list as in the user preference currencies file. In the Dynamic mode, the list shown in the currency prompt drop down is a result of a dynamic query specified in the same file. Customers can build some security into the rpd, so the list of currency preferences will be based on the user roles…BI Applications built a subject area: “Dynamic Currency Preference” to run this query, and give every user only the list of currency preferences required by his application roles. Adding Currency to an Amount Field When the user selects one of the items from the currency prompt, all the amounts in that page will show in the Currency corresponding to that preference. For example, if the user selects “Global Currency1” from the prompt, all data will be showing in Global Currency 1 as specified in the Configuration Manager. If the user select “Local Currency”, all amount fields will show in the Currency of the Business Unit selected in the BU filter of the same page. If there is no particular Business Unit selected in that filter, and the data selected by the query contains amounts in more than one currency (for example one BU has USD as a functional currency, the other has EUR as functional currency), then subtotals will not be available (cannot add USD and EUR amounts in one field), and depending on the set up (see next paragraph), the user may receive an error. There are two ways to add the Currency field to an amount metric: In the form of currency code, like USD, EUR…For this the user needs to add the field “Apps Common Currency Code” to the report. This field is in every subject area, usually under the table “Currency Tag” or “Currency Code”… In the form of currency symbol ($ for USD, € for EUR,…) For this, the user needs to format the amount metrics in the report as a currency column, by specifying the currency tag column in the Column Properties option in Column Actions drop down list. Typically this column should be the “BI Common Currency Code” available in every subject area. Select Column Properties option in the Edit list of a metric. In the Data Format tab, select Custom as Treat Number As. Enter the following syntax under Custom Number Format: [$:currencyTagColumn=Subjectarea.table.column] Where Column is the “BI Common Currency Code” defined to take the currency code value based on the currency preference chosen by the user in the Currency preference prompt.

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