Search Results

Search found 4703 results on 189 pages for 'emit knowledge'.

Page 130/189 | < Previous Page | 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137  | Next Page >

  • Why You Should Attend MySQL Connect, and Register Now

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    MySQL Connect is taking place on September 29 and 30 in San Francisco. The early bird discount enabling you to save US$ 500 is only running for a few more days, until July 13. Are you still wondering if you should sign up? Here are 10 reasons why you definitely should: Learn from other companies how they tackled similar challenges to the ones you’re facing. Find out what they learned along the way, and how you can save time, money and a lot of troubles by avoiding repeating the same mistakes and applying the best practices they’ve developed. You’ll get the chance to hear from organizations including PayPal, Verizon, Twitter, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Ning, Mozilla, CERN, Yahoo! and more! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to meet the engineers developing and supporting the MySQL products in a single location. You’ll be able to ask them all your questions, which can represent a huge time and money saver. Acquire detailed knowledge about InnoDB, the MySQL Optimizer, High Availability strategies, improving performance and scalability, enhancing security and numerous other topics. You’ll hear it straight "from the horse’s mouth" as well as from other MySQL experts in the ecosystem. Get a better understanding about Oracle’s MySQL strategy and about the MySQL roadmap, so you can better plan where to use the MySQL database and MySQL Cluster for your next web, cloud-based and other applications. Get hands-on experience about improving performance with the MySQL Performance Schema, about using MySQL Utilities, MySQL Cluster and a lot more with eight different Hands-On Labs. Express your ideas, engage into discussions and help influence the MySQL roadmap during Birds-of-a-feather sessions about replication, backup, query optimizations and other topics. Meet partners and learn about third party tools that could be useful in your architecture. Immerse yourself into the MySQL universe and hang out with MySQL experts for two days. The discussions as well as the relationships you will create can be priceless and help you execute on your next projects in a much better and faster way. Register Now to save US$500 by taking advantage of the Early bird discount running until July 13. We’ll have parallel tracks so you should consider sending a few team members to make the most of the event. Are you attending or planning to attend Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne? You can add MySQL Connect to your registration for only US$100! Finally, it’s always a lot of fun to attend a MySQL conference. The passion and the energy are contagious…and you’ll likely get plenty of new ideas. You will find all information about the program in the MySQL Connect Content Catalog. We look forward to seeing you there! You can also read interviews with Tomas Ulin and Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect. Sponsorship and exhibit opportunities are still available for the conference. You will find more information here.

    Read the article

  • Oracle Launches New Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certifications

    - by Brandye Barrington
    Today Oracle University announces the release of new Oracle Database 12c Administrator certifications. The new Oracle Database 12c certifications emphasize the foundational and advanced skills needed by Database Administrators and will prepare DBAs to leverage powerful new management and consolidation capabilities, resulting in an even more valuable credential for customers and partners. ORACLE CERTIFIED ASSOCIATE (OCA)  The Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) for Oracle Database 12c objectives measure IT professionals' mastery of day-to-day administration skills and their ability to manage the challenges they're likely to encounter on the job. This credential focuses on SQL skills, operational administration of the Oracle Database including performance and space management, and installing, patching and upgrading the Oracle Database. Earning the OCA credential requires successful completion of two exams: 1Z0-061 - Oracle Database 12c: SQL Fundamentals and 1Z0-062 - Oracle Database 12c: Installation and Administration. The OCA certification track also allows for several alternate exams which can be substituted for 1Z0-061. ORACLE CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL (OCP) Building on the competencies in the Oracle Database 12c OCA certification, the Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for Oracle Database 12c certification includes advanced knowledge and skills required of top-performing database administrators. The OCP credential focuses on developing and implementing backup and recovery strategies, designing consolidation strategies to exploit multitenant container and pluggable databases, and thorough understanding how CDB/PDBs fit into the DBaaS cloud-computing model. Today, Oracle is releasing 1Z0-060 - Upgrade to Oracle Database 12c, which allows Oracle Certified Professionals with credentials in Oracle 9i, Oracle Database 10g or Oracle Database 11g to upgrade to Oracle Database 12c with a single exam. The upgrade exam focuses on designing consolidation strategies to exploit multitenant container and pluggable databases, implementing Oracle 12c feature-rich ILM support, optimizing SQL execution using dynamic swapping of sub plans, implementing real-time data redaction within databases, as well as exploiting many additional performance, backup and recovery, security and partitioning enhancements. The exam also includes a thorough review of core DBA skills. Visit the OCP certification track for more details on the new upgrade exam as well as alternate certification paths. ORACLE CERTIFIED MASTER (OCM) The Oracle Certified Master (OCM) for Oracle Database 12c - a very challenging and elite top-level certification - certifies the most highly skilled and experienced database experts. Further information on the 12c OCM level will be announced as exam development concludes. To date, there have been more than 1.6 million Oracle certifications granted worldwide. Explore these certification tracks, exam requirements and objectives, and start toward earning your exciting new Oracle Database 12c certification credentials from Oracle.

    Read the article

  • Java Spotlight Episode 85: Migrating from Spring to JavaEE 6

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker on migrating from Spring to JavaEE 6. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel is Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Transactional Interceptors in Java EE 7 Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd on Oracle Cloud Duke’s Choice Award submissions open until June 15 Registration for the 2012 JVM Lanugage Summit now open Events June 11-14, Cloud Computing Expo, New York City June 12, Boulder JUG June 13, Denver JUG June 13, Eclipse Juno DemoCamp, Redwoood Shore June 13, JUG Münster June 14, Java Klassentreffen, Vienna, Austria June 18-20, QCon, New York City June 20, 1871, Chicago June 26-28, Jazoon, Zurich, Switzerland July 5, Java Forum, Stuttgart, Germany July 30-August 1, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Feature InterviewBert Ertman is a Fellow at Luminis in the Netherlands. Next to his customer assignments he is responsible for stimulating innovation, knowledge sharing, coaching, technology choices and presales activities. Besides his day job he is a Java User Group leader for NLJUG, the Dutch Java User Group. A frequent speaker on Enterprise Java and Software Architecture related topics at international conferences (e.g. Devoxx, JavaOne, etc) as well as an author and member of the editorial advisory board for Dutch software development magazine: Java Magazine. In 2008, Bert was honored by being awarded the coveted title of Java Champion by an international panel of Java leaders and luminaries. Paul Bakker is senior software engineer at Luminis Technologies where he works on the Amdatu platform, an open source, service-oriented application platform for web applications. He has a background as trainer where he teached various Java related subjects. Paul is also a regular speaker on conferences and author for the Dutch Java Magazine.TutorialsPart 1: http://howtojboss.com/2012/04/17/article-series-migrating-spring-applications-to-java-ee-6-part-1/Part 2: http://howtojboss.com/2012/04/17/article-series-migrating-spring-applications-to-java-ee-6-part-2/Part 3: http://howtojboss.com/2012/05/10/article-series-migrating-from-spring-to-java-ee-6-part-3/   Mail Bag What’s Cool Sang Shin in EE team @larryellison JavaOne content selection is almost complete-Notifications coming soon

    Read the article

  • links for 2011-03-08

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Empowered Business "Someone needs to be the enterprise parent that asks the question, “do you really need that?” It may be a shiny new thing, but does it make a difference in the ability to accomplish the strategy and goals?" - Enterprise Architect Todd Biske (tags: enterprisearchitecture) Knowledge Workers in the British Raj "While we’ve used technology to change business, business has also evolved to the point that it’s changing how we think about and use technology." - Peter Evans Greenwood (tags: enterprisearchitecture enterprise2.0) Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: OTN Developer Day Boston 2011 - Slides & Trip Report Arun Gupta shares slides from his Developer Day presentations. (tags: oracle otn java) Use WLST to Delete All JMS Messages From a Destination (James Bayer's Blog) James Bayer responds to a question. (tags: oracle otn weblogic jms) Triangle Circle Square: Apex in the Amazon Cloud Scott Wesley shares several links to resources covering Oracle Apex on an Amazon EC2 instance. (tags: oracle apex ec2 amazon cloud) William Vambenepe: Reading IBM's proposed standard for Cloud Architecture The always entertaining William Vambenepe gives IBM's proposed Cloud standards the full Ebert. (tags: oracle cloud ibm standards) Government Information Group Cloud Computing Research Study "The twin pressures of reduced budgets and the need for greater efficiency have led the federal government to strongly promote cloud computing as a solution whenever possible." (tags: cloudcomputing cloud) The Ron Batra Blog: Technology Whispers: Top 10 Reasons to go ExaData "Continuing my exploration of ExaData, I thought I'd take a minute to consolidate my thoughts into key reasons for which Oracle ExaData could be a good fit for your needs." - Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra (tags: oracle oracleace exadata) Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mash-Ups (Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blog) "The new Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or 3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups." (tags: oracle webcenter enterprise2.0) Antonio Romero: Great Discussion of ETL and ELT Tooling in TDWI Linkedin Group Antonio says: "There’s a great discussion of ETL and ELT tooling going on in the official TDWI Linkedin group, under the heading 'How Sustainable is SQL for ETL?' It delves into a wide range of topics." (tags: oracle linkedin etl elt) YouTube - Bunny Inc. - Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive Manager Yes, it's a commercial. But it's well done and it's funny. (tags: e20 enterprise2.0 webcenter) Markus Eisele: Both Weblogic and Glassfish are strategic products for Oracle Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele shares selected quotes pulled from the recent TechCast Live interview with Oracle's Anil Gaur and Adam Leftik (tags: oracle java weblogic glassfish) How to become an Oracle SOA expert? (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jurgan Kress shares info and links for those interested in capitalizing on SOA. (tags: oracle soa)

    Read the article

  • What's new in the RightNow November 2012 release?

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    What new in the RightNow November 2012? In order to find out, please watch this tutorial with imbedded demonstration or read the November 2012 Release notes.   News Facts The November 2012 release of     Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service marks the completion of development efforts for 2012 and continues Oracle’s commitment to enhancing the Oracle RightNow offering following the acquisition. New release delivers key capabilities designed to help organizations improve customer experiences in order to increase customer acquisition and retention, while reducing total cost of ownership. Part of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service now integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service, helping organizations intelligently and proactively engage with customers through the right channel at the right time. Chat solutions have emerged as an important component of a cross-channel customer experience strategy. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011 from 19% to 37%, and it has the highest satisfaction level of all customer service channels at 62% satisfaction. (*) To help companies deliver enhanced customer experiences, Oracle has made significant investments in Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service throughout 2012. With the addition of rules-based engagement to existing capabilities such as co-browse, mobile chat, and cross-channel knowledge integration with the contact center, all delivered via the cloud, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is differentiated as the industry-leading chat solution. The Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software as-a-service applications, including Oracle Customer Service and Support Cloud Service, which is based on the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. New Capabilities Key Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and other cross-channel capabilities include: Chat Business Rules, with over 70 built-in rule conditions, leverage the Oracle Engagement Engine to help enable organizations capture rich visitor data and invoke complex actions and triggers. Chat Business Rules allow granular control over when to engage a customer via the chat channel based on customer behavior, customer profile information and operational information. Click-to-Call provides the option for a customer to engage with a live agent over the phone during the Web browsing experience. Chat Availability Controls provide organizations with the ability to throttle volume through the chat channel based on real-time agent availability and wait time thresholds. This ability to manage the channel more efficiently allows organizations to provide a better experience to customers using the chat channel. Strategic and Operational Chat Channel Analytics provide better insight into channel and agent productivity and utilization and effectiveness with both out-of-the-box reports and ad hoc reports. New chat channel analytics provide comprehensive metrics with full data transparency. Background Service Updates improve high availability metrics for Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service during service update periods, setting the industry leading standard for sales and service delivery to customers via the chat channel. Additional Capabilities include: Improved Web developer tools for more efficient self-service user interface design Improved administration for enhanced user sessions management Increased cross-channel community collaboration Enhanced extensibility widgets and syndication management Streamlined content management and analytics capabilities Read the full announcement here

    Read the article

  • JavaOne 2012 Call for Papers

    - by Tori Wieldt
    JavaOne 2012 is happening Sept. 30-Oct 4 in San Francisco. The Call For Papers for this conference is now open. Java Evangelist Arun Gupta, who was on one of the selection committees and will be again this year, provided some great tips for submission (and a peek into the submission process): JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list. Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects. Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details." :-) The tracks this year are: Core Java Platform Development Tools and Techniques Emerging Langauges on the JVM Enterprise Services Architectures and the Cloud Java EE Web Profile and Platform Technologies Java ME, Java Card, Embedded, and Devices Java FX and Rich User Experiences IMPORTANT: Submit your proposal as soon as possible, the the Call for Papers closes April 9th, a mere three weeks away!  Follow these channels to get the latest news about #JavaOne 2012.  originally posted on blogs.oracle.com/javaone

    Read the article

  • JavaOne 2012 Call for Papers

    - by Tori Wieldt
    JavaOne 2012 is happening Sept. 30-Oct 4 in San Francisco. The Call For Papers for this conference is now open. Java Evangelist Arun Gupta, who was on one of the selection committees and will be again this year, provided some great tips for submission (and a peek into the submission process): JavaOne is a technology-focused conference so any product, marketing or seemingly marketish talk are put at the bottom of the list. Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop are better options for submitting product specific talks. Make your title catchy. Remember the attendees are more likely to read the abstract if they like the title. We try our best to recategorize the talk to a different track if it needs to but please ensure that you are filing in the right track to have all the right eyeballs looking at it. Also, it does not hurt marking an alternate track if your talk meets the criteria. Make sure to coordinate within your team before the submission - multiple sessions from the same team or company does not ensure that the best speaker is picked. In such case we rely upon your "google presence" and/or review committee's prior knowledge of the speaker. The reviewers may not know you or your product at all and you get 750 characters to pitch your idea. Make sure to use all of them, to the last 750th character. Make sure to read your abstract multiple times to ensure that you are giving all the relevant information ? Think through your presentation and see if you are leaving out any important aspects. Also look if the abstract has any redundant information that will not required by the reviewers. There are additional sections that allow you to share information about the speaker and the presentation summary. Use them to blow the horn about yourself and any other relevant details. Please don't say "call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx to find out the details." :-) The tracks this year are: Core Java Platform Development Tools and Techniques Emerging Langauges on the JVM Enterprise Services Architectures and the Cloud Java EE Web Profile and Platform Technologies Java ME, Java Card, Embedded, and Devices Java FX and Rich User Experiences IMPORTANT: Submit your proposal as soon as possible, the the Call for Papers closes April 9th, a mere three weeks away!  Follow these channels to get the latest news about #JavaOne 2012. 

    Read the article

  • SharePoint 2010 Data Retrival Techinques

    - by Jayant Sharma
    In SharePoint, we have two options to perform CRUD operation.1. using server side code2. using client side codeusing server side code, we have 1. CAML2. LINQusing client side code, we have 1. Client Object Model    1.1.      Managed Client Object Model     1.2.     Silverlight Client Object Model    1.3.     ECMA Client Object Model2. SharePoint Web Services3. ADO Data Service (based on REST Web Services)4. Using RPC Call (owssvr.dll)Which and when these options are used depend upon requirements. Every options are certain advantages and disadvantages. So, before start development of any new sharepoint project, it is important to understand the limitations of different methods.Server Object Model is used when our application is host on the same server on which sharepoint is installed. while Client Side code is used to access sharepoint from client system. In SharePoint 2010 specially Client Object Model (COM) are introduced to perform the sharepoint operations from client system. Advantage of CAML:    -  It is fast.    -  Can be use it from all kind of technology like Silverlight, or Jquery    -  You can use U2U CAML Query builder to generate CAML Query.Disadvantage Of CAML:    - Error Prone, as we can detect the error only at runtimeAdvantage of LINQ:    -  Object Oriented technique (Object Relation Model)    -  LINQ  to SharePoint provider are working with Strongly Type List Item Objects, So intellisence are present at runtime    -  No need of knowledge of CAML    -  Less Error Prone as it as it uses C# syntex.    -  You can compare two Fields of SharePoint ListDisadvantage Of LINQ:    -  List Attachment is not supported in SPMetal Tool    -  Created By, Created, Modified and Modified By Fields are not created by SPMetal Tool.    -  Custom fields are not created by SPMetal Tools    -  External Lists are not supported    -  Though at backend LINQ genenates CAML Query so it is slower than directly using CAML in Code.  Advantage of Client Object Model    -  Used to access sharepoint from client system    -  No WebServer is required at Client End    - Can use Silverlight and JavaScripts to make better and fast User experienceDisadvantage of Client Object Model    -  You cannot use RunwithEleveatedPrivilege    - Cross Site Collection query are not possible    - Lesser API's are availableADO.Net Data Services:    -  Only List based operations are possible, other type of operations are not possible.SharePoint Web Services and RPC Call:    - Previously it was used in SharePoint 2007 but after the introduction  of Client Object Model,  Microsoft recommends not to use Web Services to fetch data from SharePoint. In SharePoint 2010 it is avaliable only for backward compatibility.Ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539764Jayant Sharma

    Read the article

  • Mathemagics - 3 consecutive number

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Three Consecutive numbers When I was young and handsome (OK, OK, just young), my father used to challenge us with riddles and tricks involving Logic, Math and general knowledge. Most of the time, at least after reaching the ripe age of 10, I would see thru his tricks in no time. This one is a bit more subtle. I had to think about it for close to an hour and then when I had the ‘AHA!’ effect, I could not understand why it had taken me so long. So here it is. You select a volunteer from the audience (or a shill, but that would be cheating!) and ask him to select three consecutive numbers, all of them 1 or 2 digits. So {1, 2, 3} would be good, albeit trivial set, as would {8, 9, 10} or {97, 98, 99} but not {99, 99, 100} (why?!). Now, using a calculator – and these days almost every phone has a built in calculator – he is to perform these steps: 1.      Select a single digit 2.      Multiply it by 3 and write it down 3.      Add the 3 consecutive numbers 4.      Add the number from step 2 5.      Multiply the sum by 67 6.      Now tell me the last 2 digits of the result and also the number you wrote down in step 2 I will tell you which numbers you selected. How do I do this? I’ll give you the mechanical answer, but because I like you to have the pleasure of an ‘AHA!’ effect, I will not really explain the ‘why’. So let’s you selected 30, 31, and 32 and also that your 3 multiple was 24, so here is what you get 30 + 31 + 32 = 93 93 + 24 = 117 117 x 67 = 7839, last 2 digits are 39, so you say “the last 2 digits are 39, and the other number is 24.” Now, I divide 24 by 3 getting 8. I subtract 8 from 39 and get 31. I then subtract 1 from this getting 30, and say: “You selected 30, 31, and 32.” This is the ‘how’. I leave the ‘why’ to you! That’s all folks! PS do you really want to know why? Post a feedback below. When 11 people or more will have asked for it, I’ll add a link to the full explanation.

    Read the article

  • Rapid Planning: Next Generation MRP

    - by john.bermudez
    MRP has been a mainstay of manufacturing systems for 40 years. MRP evolved from simple inventory planning systems to become the heart of the MRPII systems which eventually became ERP. While the applications surrounding it have become broader, more sophisticated and web-based, MRP continues to operate in the loneliness of the Saturday night batch window quietly exploding bills of materials and logging exceptions for hours. During this same 40 years, manufacturing business processes have seen countless changes and improvements including JIT, TQM, Six Sigma, Flow Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. Although much logic has been added to MRP to deal with new manufacturing processes, it has not been able to keep up with the real-time pace of today's supply chain. As a result, planners have devised ingenious ways to trick MRP to handle new processes but often need to dump the output into spreadsheets of their own design in the hope of wrestling thousands of exceptions to ground. Oracle's new Rapid Planning application is just what companies still running MRP have been waiting for! The newest member of the Value Chain Planning product line, Rapid Planning is designed to empower planners with comprehensive supply planning that runs online in minutes, not hours. It enables a planner simulate the incremental impact of a new order or re-run an entire plan in a separate sandbox. Rapid Planning does a complete multi-level bill of material explosion like MRP but plans orders considering material and capacity constraints. Considering material and capacity constraints in planning can help you quickly reduce inventory and improve on-time shipments. Rapid Planning is an APS application that leverages years of Oracle development experience and customer feedback. Rather than rely exclusively on black-box heuristics, Rapid Planning is designed to give planners the computing power to use their industry experience and business knowledge to improve MRP. For example, Rapid Planning has a powerful worksheet user interface with built-in query capability that allows the planner to locate the orders she is interested in and use a mass update function to make quick work of large changes. The planner can save these queries and unique user interface to personalize their planning environment. Most importantly, Rapid Planning is designed to do supply planning in today's dynamic supply chain environment. It can be used to supplement MRP or replace MRP entirely. It generates plans that provide order-by-order details with aggregate key performance indicators that enable planners to quickly assess the overall business impact of a plan. To find out more about how Rapid Planning can help improve your MRP, please contact me at [email protected] or your Oracle Account Manager.

    Read the article

  • Am I experienced enough to learn and develop immediately using Ruby on Rails?

    - by acheong87
    General Question I understand that discussions revolving around questions of this form run the risk of becoming too specific to help others. So, perhaps a better, general question would be: What kind of experience, if any, translates easily to Ruby on Rails; and if none, then what's the learning curve like, in comparison to other popular languages? Background I have the opportunity to build a website using whatever technologies I wish to use. It's a fairly simple website, for listing products, taking payments, managing customer data, providing a back-end portal for employees to manage data, possibly hooking in flight information (the products are travel related), possibly integrating a blog and all the social-networking goodies. Specific Problem I have to let the client know by tonight whether I'm interested in taking up this project, before he talks to other potential developers, but I'm on the fence. I already work a full-time C++ development job, so the money doesn't do it for me. It's the opportunity to (be paid to) learn some new technologies and to have a real, running product in the end. I've heard and read great things about Ruby, and am really intrigued. I zipped through some introductory Ruby tutorials, no sweat. However I found the Rails tutorials a little overwhelming, especially not being able to try it out anywhere. And researching Rails hosts like Heroku and EngineYard makes me think that maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. The ship's leaving port! I wish I had more time to learn, better yet play with the language, but I have to decide soon! Should I venture or pass? Additional Details My experiences are in C/C++/Tcl/Perl/PHP/jQuery, and basic knowledge of Java/C#. I didn't study C.S. formally so I wasn't exposed to design principles, programming paradigms, etc., which is my greatest concern. Will my lack of understanding in this realm make RoR frustrating to learn? Will it be so incompatible with a C++ "way" of thinking that I'll wish I never started? Am I putting my client at risk by attempting this? If it helps, I'm quick to learn new things (self-taught so far) and care a great deal about correctness, using things for their intended purposes, and so on. I've read numerous recommendations of Agile Development with Rails and would love to read it (though perhaps, while developing in parallel, for shortness of time). Worse comes to worst, I'd give up and do the standard LAMP gig, of course, not charging the client for wasted time. But I'm hoping to avoid the project altogether if it's gonna come down to that! Thanks in advance for any tips, insights, votes of confidence, votes of discouragement (for the better), and such.

    Read the article

  • What is the start point in game development? Where to start?

    - by Dragon
    I understand, I'm not unique with such a question, there are a lot of questions like this one. But I hope you'll take a minute and maybe can give me a piece of advice. I have an idea to develop games, but I don't know where is the start point in game development. The learning curve isn't as straight as in learning of a programming language, but I want to give it a try. I have some experience with OOP and programming in general. I know (not too deep) C#, Java programming languages. I searched info on where to start, read a lot of blogs, forums and so on. Once I decided "stop wandering around, just start develop a game" and I started. At the moment I have a console version of very simple game (RPS - rock-paper-scissors) developed with C#. It has different modes: "player vs cpu" and "player vs player". Some time later I looked at the code and decided that it should be refactored or even redeveloped from the scratch. And I thought that time "GUI is what I need. I can add logic later." And now I'm here. I've already decided to make RPS with GUI, then make multiplayer and so on. I'm not thinking about 3D now, 2D is enough. It doesn't matter what language to use: C# or Java, I found frameworks for both - XNA (C#) and Slick (Java). Both are good for 2D game development. But I know nothing about sprites, how to bind objects on the screen and so on. You can say "you don't need it for such simple game like RPS", but RPS is the beginning, I have some ideas like "Tower Defense" game... you know, everybody has ideas, wishes.... and this knowledge is useful and in some way obligatory. So what is the start point to achieve my plans, ideas, wishes? Where to start? Is it possible to make game development learning curve a little bit straight? Or there're ways that amateur and game development beginners use for years? Thank you for you answers and advise in advance. P.S Sorry for that this post turned out an essay, but I tried to express my wish to start acting. Hope I managed to do it.

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • MySQL and Hadoop Integration - Unlocking New Insight

    - by Mat Keep
    “Big Data” offers the potential for organizations to revolutionize their operations. With the volume of business data doubling every 1.2 years, analysts and business users are discovering very real benefits when integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources, enabling deeper insight into their customers, partners, and business processes. As the world’s most popular open source database, and the most deployed database in the web and cloud, MySQL is a key component of many big data platforms, with Hadoop vendors estimating 80% of deployments are integrated with MySQL. The new Guide to MySQL and Hadoop presents the tools enabling integration between the two data platforms, supporting the data lifecycle from acquisition and organisation to analysis and visualisation / decision, as shown in the figure below The Guide details each of these stages and the technologies supporting them: Acquire: Through new NoSQL APIs, MySQL is able to ingest high volume, high velocity data, without sacrificing ACID guarantees, thereby ensuring data quality. Real-time analytics can also be run against newly acquired data, enabling immediate business insight, before data is loaded into Hadoop. In addition, sensitive data can be pre-processed, for example healthcare or financial services records can be anonymized, before transfer to Hadoop. Organize: Data is transferred from MySQL tables to Hadoop using Apache Sqoop. With the MySQL Binlog (Binary Log) API, users can also invoke real-time change data capture processes to stream updates to HDFS. Analyze: Multi-structured data ingested from multiple sources is consolidated and processed within the Hadoop platform. Decide: The results of the analysis are loaded back to MySQL via Apache Sqoop where they inform real-time operational processes or provide source data for BI analytics tools. So how are companies taking advantage of this today? As an example, on-line retailers can use big data from their web properties to better understand site visitors’ activities, such as paths through the site, pages viewed, and comments posted. This knowledge can be combined with user profiles and purchasing history to gain a better understanding of customers, and the delivery of highly targeted offers. Of course, it is not just in the web that big data can make a difference. Every business activity can benefit, with other common use cases including: - Sentiment analysis; - Marketing campaign analysis; - Customer churn modeling; - Fraud detection; - Research and Development; - Risk Modeling; - And more. As the guide discusses, Big Data is promising a significant transformation of the way organizations leverage data to run their businesses. MySQL can be seamlessly integrated within a Big Data lifecycle, enabling the unification of multi-structured data into common data platforms, taking advantage of all new data sources and yielding more insight than was ever previously imaginable. Download the guide to MySQL and Hadoop integration to learn more. I'd also be interested in hearing about how you are integrating MySQL with Hadoop today, and your requirements for the future, so please use the comments on this blog to share your insights.

    Read the article

  • How can I convince cowboy programmers to use source control?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    UPDATE I work on a small team of devs, 4 guys. They have all used source control. Most of them can't stand source control and instead choose not to use it. I strongly believe source control is a necessary part of professional development. Several issues make it very difficult to convince them to use source control: The team is not used to using TFS. I've had 2 training sessions, but was only allotted 1 hour which is insufficient. Team members directly modify code on the server. This keeps code out of sync. Requiring comparison just to be sure you are working with the latest code. And complex merge problems arise Time estimates offered by developers exclude time required to fix any of these problems. So, if I say nono it will take 10x longer...I have to constantly explain these issues and risk myself because now management may perceive me as "slow". The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging requires knowledge of the project at hand and, therefore, developer cooperation which I am not able to obtain. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying server code, bypassing TFS saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming. Multiply this by the 10+ projects we manage. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremely difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

    Read the article

  • Help for choosing a cost effective game server for Flash client

    - by Sapots Thomas
    I am developing a flash-based game primarily for desktops, to be hosted on facebook platform (like cityville, sims social etc). The gameplay doesn't involve real-time communication between players unlike an mmorpg. Here each player plays in his own world without any knowledge of other online players. I've written almost 95% of the game logic in actionscript on the client side. I used Smartfox Server pro on the server side (mostly used for getting data from the DB) and the entire server code is an extension written in java. I'm using json as the protocol for communication. Although I love smartfox server, as an indie, its tough for me to afford the unlimited users license. Morever its limited just to one machine. So I'm looking for an alternative to smartfox server now. The reason for choosing smartfox server earlier was to use the server properties supported by it. Server properties on smartfox server take advantage of the socket connection and are essentially server side objects in java which store some data for the player which he can change frequently during the game. And when he logs out of the game, the extension can write out the final state in the DB (I'm using MySQL). This significantly reduces the number of DB UPDATE/INSERT calls made during the game. I love the way this works since the data is secure as its on the server side and smartfox server is known to be scalable. (although I'm not sure whether this approach is used widely by gaming industry or not, since this is not an mmorpg, I'm putting all player in the lobby). So my question is whether any of the free and community supported servers like reddwarf, firebase, BlazeDS etc can provide a similar architecture so that I can use server properties without many code changes? EDIT : I am not insisting on the exact same feature (thats asking too much!), but atleast a viable messaging system on the server so that I can send actionscript objects from the client using json/binary so that its fast. OR maybe some completely different way to implement what I need here. Thanks in advance.

    Read the article

  • What is a resonable workflow for designing webapps?

    - by Evan Plaice
    It has been a while since I have done any substantial web development and I'd like to take advantage of the latest practices but I'm struggling to visualize the workflow to incorporate everything. Here's what I'm looking to use: CakePHP framework jsmin (JavaScript Minify) SASS (Synctactically Awesome StyleSheets) Git CakePHP: Pretty self explanatory, make modifications and update the source. jsmin: When you modify a script, do you manually run jsmin to output the new minified code, or would it be better to run a pre-commit hook that automatically generates jsmin outputs of javascript files that have changed. Assume that I have no knowledge of implementing commit hooks. SASS: I really like what SASS has to offer but I'm also aware that SASS code isn't supported by browsers by default so, at some point, the SASS code needs to be transformed to normal CSS. At what point in the workflow is this done. Git I'm terrified to admit it but, the last time I did any substantial web development, I didn't use SCM source control (IE, I did use source control but it consisted of a very detailed change log with backups). I have since had plenty of experience using Git (as well as mercurial and SVN) for desktop development but I'm wondering how to best implement it for web development). Is it common practice to implement a remote repository on the web host so I can push the changes directly to the production server, or is there some cross platform (windows/linux) tool that makes it easy to upload only changed files to the production server. Are there web hosting companies that make it eas to implement a remote repository, do I need SSH access, etc... I know how to accomplish this on my own testing server with a remote repository with a separate remote tracking branch already but I've never done it on a remote production web hosting server before so I'm not aware of the options yet. Extra: I was considering implementing a javascript framework where separate javascript files used on a page are compiled into a single file for each page on the production server to limit the number of file downloads needed per page. Does something like this already exist? Is there already an open source project out in the wild that implements something similar that I could use and contribute to? Considering how paranoid web devs are about performance (and the fact that the number of file requests on a website is a big hit to performance) I'm guessing that there is some wizard hacker on the net who has already addressed this issue.

    Read the article

  • Case Management Patterns with Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Contributed by Heidi Buelow, Oracle Product Management Case Management was a hot topic all week at Oracle OpenWorld so I was excited to share our current features and upcoming plans at the session Thursday morning on Case Management Patterns with Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite.  My colleague, Ravi Rangaswamy, the Case Management Development Manager, and I, Heidi Buelow, the Case Management Product Manager, discussed case management use case patterns with an interested audience.  We also talked about the current BPM Suite offering for Case Managment and showed a demo of our upcoming release where Case Management becomes a first class component in a BPM composite application. Case Management use case patterns cover a wide range of horizontal applications such as Accounts Payable, Dispute Resolution, Call Center, Employee OnBoarding, and many vertical applications in domains and industries such as Public Sector services, Insurance claims, and Healthcare.  Really, it is any use case where the resolution of a request may require a knowledge worker making decisions using experienced judgement in the current situation.  This allows for expidited care and customer satisfaction, both being highly valued for consumer loyalty, regulatory compliance, and efficient resolution. Today, BPM Suite provides the tools for creating Case Management applications using BPMN 2.0, Business Rules, and rich BAM and Case Analytics.  The Process Composer provides the agility to change rules and processes by the business users.  The case manager and case workers have the flexibilty they need.  With integrated content management and the concept of a BPM Process Spaces instance (case) space, the current release enables case management use case applications. In the next release, Case Management becomes a first class component. By this, we mean, Case is a separate component in the composite.  We are adding case attributes such as milestones, case events, case stakeholders, and more, providing a rich toolset for the use cases that require a flexible Case Management approach.  Activites become available according to the conditions that you specify and information can be protected by permissions indicated.  In BPM Studio, you design a Case and associate all of the attributes and activities that are needed, yet, at runtime you have the flexibility to add and change these as needed. We enjoyed sharing Case Management and it was well received by the audience.  The presentation is available online and we have viewlets of the demo that will be available at release time.

    Read the article

  • Securing User Account Details with MySQL

    - by Antoinette O'Sullivan
    Keeping user account details secure is always at the forefront of a Database Administrator's mind. However, users want to get up and running as soon as possible without complex login procedures. You can learn more about this and many other topics in the MySQL for Database Administrator course. For example, MySQL 5.6.6 introduced a new utility: mysql_config_editor, which makes secure access via MySQL client applications much easier to establish, while still providing a good measure of security. The mysql_config_editor stores a user's authentication details in an encrypted login file called mylogin.cnf. This login file is readable and writable for the user who invokes the utility, and invisible to everyone else. You can use it to collect all your hard-to-remember server locations and paswords safe in the knowledge that your passwords are never invoked using clear text. The MySQL for Database Administrators course is a 5-day instructor-led course which is available as a: Training-on-Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registration, following lecture material at your own pace through streaming video and booking time on a lab environment to suit your schedule. Live-Virtual Event: Attend a live event from your own desk, choosing from a selection of events on the schedule to suit different timezones. In-Class Event: Travel to an education center to attend this course. Below is a selection of the events already on the schedule. Location  Date  Delivery Language  Brisbane, Australia  18 August 2014  English  Brussels, Belgium  25 August 2014  English  Sao Paulo, Brazil  2 June 2014  Brazilian Portuguese  Cairo, Egypt  28 September 2014  Arabic  London, England  14 July 2014  English  Belfast, Ireland  15 September 2014  English  Dublin, Ireland  29 September 2014  English  Rome, Italy  16 June 2014  Italian  Seoul, Korea  9 June 2014  Korean  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  16 June 2014  English  Utrecht, Netherlands  25 August 2014  English  Edinburgh, Scotland  26 June 2014  English  Madrid, Spain  6 October 2014  Spanish  Tunis, Tunisia  27 October 2014  French  Istanbul, Turkey  14 July 2014  Turkish To register for an event, request an additional event or learn more about the authentic MySQL curriculum, go to http://education.oracle.com/mysql. To read more about MySQL security, consult the MySQL Reference Manual - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/security.html.

    Read the article

  • How valuable are you to your organization?

    - by Lance Shaw
    I don't know about you but I find it easy to get bogged down with the daily list of tasks and deliverables.  We all have lots to do and it all seems to be due tomorrow.  If you are reading this blog, than your to-do list is almost certainly filled with tasks related to the management, processing and publishing of information.  As we get mired in the daily routine of making sure that the content management needs of the organizations are met, we can easily lose sight of the value that we bring.  After all, if information and content is the lifeblood of our organizations, then surely maintaining the healthy flow of that information has real value.  But how can you measure that value and bring it forward on your résumé or your list of achievements in time for your next performance review? The AIIM organization has spent a lot of time recently researching the value of certification for "information professionals".  When it comes to enterprise content management (ECM) there are many areas of specialization including records management, content archivist, digital asset manager, content librarian and more.  Specialization can clearly drive up your value but it can also lock you into a narrow niche area of focus.  AIIM has found that what companies also need is someone that can apply their knowledge of how information is managed within the operational scope of the business in order to drive real, measurable strategic value.  When you can showcase the value of a broader, business-wide mindset to your management, you have more opportunity to make professional progress and drive real growth where it counts, your paycheck.   We here on the Oracle WebCenter team partnered with AIIM on the research they performed around the value of an information professional certification program. In a webinar this week, Doug Miles of AIIM and I will be talking about the results of that recent survey and what it is going to mean in the future to be recognized as a "Certified Information Professional" (CIP).  Oracle sponsored this research to help individuals and companies understand the value of enterprise content management and what it means across the entire organization. I hope you will join us. If any of us were stopped in the street and were asked about it, I bet most of us would think of ourselves as an "Information Professional".  Now we have a way to actually prove it!  There's only one downside that I can see...  you will have to get your business cards updated to include the "CIP" acronym after your name.  I think you will agree that is a price worth paying!

    Read the article

  • Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - All you need in one title

    It took me a while to work through the 800+ pages of this title. And yes, I really mean working not reading... Since the release of Windows 8 it should be obvious to any Windows software developer that there are new ways to develop, deploy and market applications for a broader audience. Interestingly, Microsoft started to narrow the technological gap between the various platforms - desktop, web, smartphone and XBox - and development of modern apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript couldn't be easier. Kraig covers all facets of modern Windows 8 apps from the basic building blocks and project templates in Visual Studio 2012 over to the thoughtful use of specific APIs to finally proper deployment in the App Store and potential monetization. The organisation of the book is lied out like step by step instructions or a tutorial. Kraig literally takes the reader by the hand and explains in detail in his examples about the reasons, the pros, and the cons of a certain way of implementation. Thanks to cross-references to other chapters he leaves the choice to the reader to dig deeper right now or to catch up at some time later. Personally, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the relaxed writing style. App development is not dust-dry rocket science and it should be joyful to learn about new technologies. And thanks to the richness of the various chapters and samples you could easily adapt and transfer the knowledge gained in this title to other platforms like Windows Phone 8. And last but not least: The ebook is freely available at Amazon, Microsoft Press and O'Reilly. Don't think about it, just get the book. Now. Update: I already mentioned this title in other blog entries which are related to Microsoft certification. Feel free to read on and to discover more online resources: Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5 More content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5 O'Reilly offers free webcasts on their site, too. And in case that you would like to know more about Kraig's book and his experience with various development teams, please checkout this one: Zero to App in Two Weeks: Programming Windows 8 Apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The recording should be available soon.

    Read the article

  • What do you do when you encounter an idiotic interview question?

    - by Senthil
    I was interviewing with a "too proud of my java skills"-looking person. He asked me "What is your knowledge on Java IO classes.. say.. hash maps?" He asked me to write a piece of java code on paper - instantiate a class and call one of the instance's methods. When I was done, he said my program wouldn't run. After 5 minutes of serious thinking, I gave up and asked why. He said I didn't write a main function so it wouldn't run. ON PAPER. [I am too furious to continue with the stupidity...] Believe me it wasn't trick questions or a psychic or anger management evaluation thing. I can tell from his face, he was proud of these questions. That "developer" was supposed to "judge" the candidates. I can think of several things: Hit him with a chair (which I so desperately wanted to) and walk out. Simply walk out. Ridicule him saying he didn't make sense. Politely let him know that he didn't make sense and go on to try and answer the questions. Don't tell him anything, but simply go on to try and answer the questions. So far, I have tried just 4 and 5. It hasn't helped. Unfortunately many candidates seem to do the same and remain polite but this lets these kind of "developers" just keep ascending up the corporate ladder, gradually getting the capacity to pi** off more and more people. How do you handle these interviewers without bursting your veins? What is the proper way to handle this, yet maintain your reputation if other potential employers were to ever get to know what happened here? Is there anything you can do or should you even try to fix this? P.S. Let me admit that my anger has been amplified many times by the facts: He was smiling like you wouldn't believe. I got so many (20 or so) calls from that company the day before, asking me to come to the interview, that I couldn't do any work that day. I wasted a paid day off.

    Read the article

  • If unexpected database changes cause you problems – we can help!

    - by Chris Smith
    Have you ever been surprised by an unexpected difference between you database environments? Have you ever found that your Staging database is not the same as your Production database, even though it was the week before? Has an emergency hotfix suddenly appeared in Production over the weekend without your knowledge? Has your client secretly added a couple of indices to their local version of the database to aid performance? Worse still, has a developer ever accidently run a SQL script against the wrong database without noticing their mistake? If you’ve answered “Yes” to any of the above questions then you’ve suffered from ‘drift’. Database drift is where the state of a database (schema, particularly) has moved away from its expected or official state over time. The upshot is that the database is in an unknown or poorly-understood state. Even if these unexpected changes are not destructive, drift can be a big problem when it’s time to release a new version of the database. A deployment to a target database in an unexpected state can error and fail, potentially delaying a vital, time-sensitive update. A big issue with drift is that it can be hard to spot and it can be even harder to determine its provenance. So, before you can deal with an issue caused by drift, you’ll need to know exactly what change has been made, who made it, when they made it and why they made it. Those questions can take a lot of effort to answer. Then you actually need to decide what to do. Do you rollback the change because it was bad? Retrospectively apply it to the Staging environment because it is a required change? Or script the change into version control to get it back in line with your process? Red Gate’s Database Delivery Team have been talking to DBAs, database consultants and database developers to explore the problem of drift. We’ve started to get a really good idea of how big a problem it can be and what database professionals need to know and do, in order to deal with it.  It’s fair to say, we’re pretty excited at the prospect of creating a tool that will really help and we’ve got some great feedback on our initial ideas (see image below).   We’re now well underway with the development of our new drift-spotting product – SQL Lighthouse – and we hope to have a beta release out towards the end of July. What we really need is your help to shape the product into a great tool. So, if database drift is a problem that you’d like help solving and are interested in finding out more about our product, join our mailing list to register your interest in trying out the beta release. Subscribe to our mailing list

    Read the article

  • Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

    - by David Dorf
    For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

    Read the article

  • Getting developers and support to work together

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile development has ushered in the norm of rapid iterations and change within products. One of the biggest challenges for agile development is educating the rest of the company. At my last company our biggest challenge was trying to continually train 100 employees in our customer support and training departments. It's easy to write release notes and email them to everyone. But for complex software products, release notes are not usually enough detail. You really have to educate your employees on the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN of every item. If you don't do this, you end up with customer service people who know less about your product than your users do. Ever call a company and feel like you know more about their product than their customer service people do? Yeah. I'm talking about that problem.WHO does the change effect?WHAT was the actual change?WHERE do I find the change in the product?WHY was the change made? (It's hard to support something if you don't know why it was done.)WHEN will the change be released?One thing I want to stress is the importance of the WHY something was done. For customer support people to be really good at their job, they need to understand the product and how people use it. Knowing how to enable a feature is one thing. Knowing why someone would want to enable it, is a whole different thing and the difference in good customer service. Another challenge is getting support people to better test and document potential bugs before escalating them to development. Trying to fix bugs without examples is always fun... NOT. They might as well say "The sky is falling, please fix it!"We need to over train the support staff about product changes and continually stress how they document and test potential product bugs. You also have to train the sales staff and the marketing team. Then there is updating sales materials, your website, product documentation and other items there are always out of date. Every product release causes this vicious circle of trying to educate the rest of the company about the changes.Do we need to record a simple video explaining the changes and email it to everyone? Maybe we should  use a simple online training type app to help with this problem. Ultimately the struggle is taking the time to do the training, but it is time well spent. It may save you a lot of time answering questions and fixing bugs later. How do we efficiently transfer key product knowledge from developers and product owners to the rest of the company? How have you solved these issues at your company?

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137  | Next Page >