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• Apps UX Unveils New Face of Fusion at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Kathy.Miedema

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience The Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team is getting ready to unveil the new face of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco next week. Photos by Martin Taylor, Oracle Applications User ExperienceJeremy Ashley, Vice President of Oracle Applications User Experience, shows the new face of Fusion Applications to a group of trainers at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. Our team spent the past 6 months working on this project, which embraces simplicity with a modern, productive user experience that aims to help our applications customers rapidly scale deployment of essential self-service tasks and speed adoption by users who need quick access to do quick-entry tasks. We have spent the week before OpenWorld at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, conducting training sessions with Fusion UX Advocates (FXA), Oracle UX Sales Ambassadors (SAMBA), and members of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB). We showed the new face of Fusion to customers, partners, ACE Directors, and people from our own sales organization. Next week during OpenWorld, they will be showing demos alongside our team members. To find them, look for the Usable Apps t-shirt, with this artwork: You can also get a look at the new face of Fusion during OpenWorld at the following sessions and demopods: GEN9433 - General Session: Oracle Fusion Applications—Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap Presenter: Chris Leone, Senior Vice President, Oracle Monday, Oct. 1, 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. in Moscone West 2002/2004 AND Wednesday, Oct. 3, 10:1 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West 2002/2004 CON9407 - Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap Presenter: Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, Oracle Monday, Oct. 1, 3:15 – 4:15 p.m. in Moscone West 2008 CON9438 - Oracle Fusion Applications: Transforming Insight into Action Presenters: Jeremy Ashley, Vice President Applications User Experience, Oracle; Katie Candland, Director Applications User Experience, Oracle; Basheer Khan, founder and CEO of Innowave Technology, an Oracle ACE Director for both Fusion Middleware and Applications, and a Fusion UX Advocate Tuesday, Oct. 2, 10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West 2007 CON9467 - Oracle’s Roadmap to a Simple, Modern User Experience Presenter: Jeremy Ashley, Vice President Applications User Experience, Oracle Wednesday, Oct. 3, 3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. in Moscone West 3002/3004 On the demogrounds: Come to the Apps UX pods for a look at enterprise applications on mobile devices such as smart phones and the iPad, and stay for a demo of the new face of Oracle Fusion Applications. Our demopods will also feature some of the cutting-edge tools in Oracle’s arsenal of usability evaluation methods. The Exhibition Hall at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 will be open Monday through Wednesday, Oct. 1-3. The demogrounds for Oracle Applications are located on the lower level of Moscone West in San Francisco. Hours for the Exhibition Hall are: · Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. · Tuesday, 9:45 a.m. to 6 p.m. · Wednesday, 9:45 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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• conventions for friend methods in Perl

  - by xenoterracide

  Perl doesn't support a friend relationship between objects, nor does it support private or protected methods. What is usually done for private methods is to prefix the name with an underscore. I occasionally have methods that I think of as friend methods. Meaning that I expect them to be used by a specific object, or an object with a specific responsibility, but I'm not sure if I should make that method public (meaning foo ) or private ( _foo ) or if there's a better convention? is there a convention for friend methods?

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) Now Available!

  - by Javier Puerta

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is now available on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011 and the first ever Enterprise Manager release available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board.   New Capabilities and Features   Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins:   Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality.   Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade:   All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation:   Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2.   All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN   Customer Webcast - EM 12c Installation and Upgrade: This webcast is for customers who are interested in learning how to successfully deploy or upgrade to EM 12.1.0.2.   Customer Webcast - Installation and Upgrade - September 21(registration and info on OTN starting September 12)   Enterprise Manager 12c R2 Resources:   OTN Download Page Upgrade Guide

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• Inside Red Gate - Experimenting In Public

  - by Simon Cooper

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem!

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• How to represent a tree structure in NoSQL

  - by Vlad Nicula

  I'm new to NoSQL and have been playing around with a personal project on the MEAN stack (Mongo ExpressJs AngularJs NodeJs). I'm building a document editor of sorts that manages nodes of data. Each document is actually a tree. I have a CRUD api for documents, to create new trees and a CRUD api for nodes in a given document. Right now the documents are represented as a collection that holds everything, including nodes. The children parent relationship is done by ids. So the nodes are an map by id, and each node has references to what nodes are their children. I chose this "flat" approach because it is easier to get a node by id from a document. Being used to having a relation table between nodes and documents, a relation table between nodes and children nodes I find it a bit weird that I have to save the entire "nodes" map each time I update a node. Is there a better way to represent such a data type in NoSQL?

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• Theoretically bug-free programs

  - by user2443423

  I have read lot of articles which state that code can't be bug-free, and they are talking about these theorems: Halting problem Gödel's incompleteness theorem Rice's theorem Actually Rice's theorem looks like an implication of the halting problem and the halting problem is in close relationship with Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Does this imply that every program will have at least one unintended behavior? Or does it mean that it's not possible to write code to verify it? What about recursive checking? Let's assume that I have two programs. Both of them have bugs, but they don't share the same bug. What will happen if I run them concurrently? And of course most of discussions talked about Turing machines. What about linear-bounded automation (real computers)?

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• Branching and Merging Improvements in TFS2010

  - by jehan

  Introducing the concept of “first class branches” is a significant improvement as part of the 2010 release with respect to version control.  Not only does it help to distinguish between folders and branches, but it enables branch visualizations. Let us see improvements in detail. ·         In TFS2008, you don’t know which of the folders are Branches: All folders looks the same, all have the folder icon. Now, In TFS 2010 there is a new icon that shows which of the folder is a Branch.       ·      There is no visual means to manage branches in TFS2008:   You dont have any means to identify which branches are related and the relation type. Now, In TFS 2010 you have visual tools to see the Branches Hierarchy. In order to see a Branch Hierarchy just Right Click the Branch and choose: Branching and Merging –> View Hierarchy     ·         In TFS2008, there is no option to track changes path between the Branches:  If you have made a merge in a Branch you can’t track from which Branch this Merge came from. Now, you have the tools that shows the path of change between the Branches, you can also see where change was added on a timeline.  In order to track a change do the following: Step1: Right click the Branch and click View History   Step 2: Choose a changeset to track and click the “Track Changeset” button.     Step 3: Choose the branches that will be in the view and click “Visualize”. In above visual, you can see that Changesets 108,109,110 and 119 where merged from Main to Release1.0 Branch and then “Release_1.0” Branched to “Dev1.0. Step4: You can also see the Merges on a Timeline by clicking on the “Timeline Tracking” button.   Creating New Branches: In TFS 2010, the creation of branches has been streamlined a bit from the process in 2008.  In 2008, creating a new branch was like every other action in the system – changes were pended on the client, and then checked in to the server. Because of this creating new branch in TFS2008 was time-consuming process.  In TFS2010, the step where changes are pended has been bypassed and now performing the branch creation is entirely on the server.  With this approach, the round trip time for downloading a copy of each file on the branch and then uploading each file again has been eliminated.  Note: In TFS2010, the new branch will be created and committed as a single operation on the server. Pending changes will not be created, it doesn’t require a check-in as it will be carried out as a single operation and it’s not possible to cancel.     Manage Branch Permissions: The properties view for branches is also different than that of ordinary folders or file, containing some metadata for the branch, relationship information, and permissions for the branch. In TFS2008, the users who have checkout and Check-in permissions can create a branch. But, In TFS2010 you can control the permissions for Branches using Manage Branch permissions.   Reparent option in TFS2010: In TFS2008, if we have two branches which don’t have parent-child relation and we want perform merge between these two branches then we have to perform baseless merge using tf.exe command line. I have two branches Release_1.0 and Dev1.0_F2 which don’t have any relation between them, that’s why when I click on merge option in Release_1.0, in Target Branch it’s not showing Dev1.0_F2 branch to perform the merges.     Let us see what can we do for this in TFS2010, first perform a TFS baseless merge to establish a relationship between the parent branch and the child branches.  It will only merge the folder, not its contents. TFS baseless merges are performed via the command line using VS2010 command prompt and do the following:   tf merge /baseless <ParentBranch> <childBranch> Check in your pending changes. It will create the link between the branches but the relationships are still not completed.  Now, select the child branch in Source Control Explorer and from the File menu choose Source Control –> Branching and Merging –> Reparent.      In the dialog box,  choose the appropriate branch as the new parent.   Click Reparent and then go to parent branch and click merge. Now, will see that in Target Branch option Dev1.0_F2 branch is added.         Converting Folders to Branches and Branches to Folders: You can convert any Folder as Branch from Context Menu by performing right click on the folderàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch. In similar way, you can convert the Branches to Folder using Convert to Folder option available in File Menu (FileàSource ControlàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch). This option is not available in context menu.

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2012: Oracle Developer Cloud, ADF-Essentials, ADF Mobile and ME!

  - by Dana Singleterry

  This year at OOW, like those from the past, will certainly be unforgettable. Lots of new announcements which I can't mention here and may not event know about are sure to surprise. I'll keep this short and sweet. For every session ADF, ADF Mobile, Oracle Developer Cloud, Integration with SOA Suite, etc... take a look at the ADF Focus Document listing all the sessions ordered by day providing time and location. For Mobile specifically check out the Mobile Focus Document. OOW 2012 actually kicks off on Sunday with Moscone North demogrounds hosting Cloud. There's also the ADF EMG User Day where you can pick up many technical tips & tricks from ADF Developers / ACE Directors from around the world. A session you shouldn't miss and a great starting point for the week if you miss Sunday's ADF EMG User Day for all of you TechoFiles is Chris Tonas's keynote for developers - Monday 10:45 am at Salon 8 in the Marriott - The Future of Development for Oracle Fusion - From Desktop to Mobile to Cloud. Then peruse the ADF Focus Document to fill out your day with the many sessions and labs on ADF. Don't forge that Wednesday afternoon (4:30 - 5:30) offers an ADF Meetup which is an excellent opportunity to catch up with the Shakers and Makers of ADF from Product Managent, to customers, to top developers leveraging the ADF technology, to ACE Directors themselves. Not to mention free beer is provided to help you wind down from a day of Techno Overload. Now for my schedule and I do hope to see some of you at one of these. OOW 2012 Schedule 10/1 Monday 9:30am – 12:00pm: JDev DemoGrounds 3:15pm – 4:15pm: Intro to Oracle ADF HOL; Marriott Marquis – Salon ¾ 4:00pm – 6:00pm: Cloud DemoGrounds 10/2 Tuesday 9:45am – 12:00pm: JDev DemoGrounds 2:00pm -4:00pm: Cloud DemoGrounds 7:30 – 9:30: Team Dinner @ Donato Enoteca; Redwood City 10/3 Wednesday 10:15pm – 11:15pm: Intro to Oracle ADF HOL; Marriott Marquis – Salon 3/4 1:15pm – 2:15pm: Oracle ADF – Lessons Learned in Real-World Implementations; Moscone South – Room 309This session takes the form of a panel that consists of three customer: Herbalife, Etiya, & Hawaii State Department of Education. During the first part of this session each customer will provide a high-level overview of their application. Following this overview I'll ask questions of the customers specific to their implementations and lessons learned through their development life-cycle. Here's the session abstract: CON3535 - Oracle ADF: Lessons Learned in Real-World Implementations This session profiles and interviews customers that have been successful in delivering compelling applications based on Oracle’s Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF). The session provides an overview of Oracle ADF, and then three customers explain the business drivers for their respective applications and solutions and if possible, provide a demonstration of the applications. Interactive questions posed to the customers after their overview will make for an exciting and dynamic format in which the customers will provide insight into real-world lessons learned in developing with Oracle ADF. 3:30pm – 4:30 pm: Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile; Marriott Marquis – Salon 10A 4:30pm – 6:00pm: Meet and Greet ADF Developers/Customers; OTN Lounge 10/4 Thursday   11:15pm – 12:15pm: Intro to Oracle ADF HOL; Marriott Marquis – Salon 3/4 I'm sure our paths will cross at some point during the week and I look forward to seeing you at one of the many events. Enjoy OOW 2012!

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

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

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• Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

  - by Laila

  I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love. I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is. tricky. Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow. To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery: As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports. Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're use SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs. Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback. Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting. Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

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• 13 Things From the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know

  - by Mike Stiles

  Oracle held its first annual Oracle Social Summit, “The School for the Socially Gifted,” this past week in Las Vegas.  If anyone came to the event uncertain as to why Oracle has such an interest in social, and what its plans for social are, they left with an entirely new vision of where social is headed, and why.For those unable to attend, I was able to keep my MacBook charged just long enough to capture some of the more pertinent takeaways.1. The social enterprise is inevitable.  Social technology is disrupting the hierarchies of big companies.  It’s a revolution in corporate structures, just as it has been in various governments.  It’s not crazy to ask yourself if your CEO is the next Mubarak.  (David Kilpatrick Author of “The Facebook Effect” and founder of the Techonomy Conference) 2. The social enterprise represents collaboration on steroids.  It’s tapping into the power of your people, as opposed to keeping them “in their place.”  3. 1 in every 7 humans on earth is an active Facebook user.  75% have posted a negative comment after a poor customer experience.  The average user will inform 53 people of a bad experience.4. Checking social media is the 2nd biggest use of phones now.  Reading posts from brands is 4th.5. 70% of marketers have little or no understanding of the social conversations happening around their brand.6. Advertising, when done well, is content we care about, preferably informed by those we trust.7. Acquiring low-quality fans through gimmicks, or focusing purely on fan acquisition is a mistake.  And relying purely on organic distribution is a mistake.  (John Yi, Head of Marketing Partnerships – Facebook)8. Using all this newfound data and insight serves to positively affect the customer experience.  It allows organizations to now leverage the investments they’ve made in social up to now.9. Social is not a marketing utopia where everything is free.  It’s pay to play.  The paid component is about driving attention.  10. We are only in the infancy of ad-targeting opportunities in social.  There’s an evolution underway from interest-based targeting to action-based targeting.11. There’s actually very little overlap of the people following you on different social platforms.  Don’t assume it’s the same audience on each.12. People who can create content and who also have an understanding of what drives that content are growing increasingly valuable.13. Oracle Social’s future is enterprise SRM, integrated across marketing, selling, service, HR and every other corner of the organization.And in case you thought those were the only gems to come out of the summit, you may want to keep an eye out for Tuesday’s Social Spotlight, ever so aptly titled “13 More Things from the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know.”

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

  - by Bob Rhubart

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

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• Do you want to be an ALM Consultant?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Northwest Cadence is looking for our next great consultant! At Northwest Cadence, we have created a work environment that emphasizes excellence, integrity, and out-of-the-box thinking.  Our customers have high expectations (rightfully so) and we wouldn’t have it any other way!   Northwest Cadence has some of the most exciting customers I have ever worked with and even though I have only been here just over a month I have already: Provided training/consulting for 3 government departments Created and taught courseware for delivering Scrum to teams within a high profile multinational company Started presenting Microsoft's ALM Engagement Program  So if you are interested in helping companies build better software more efficiently, then.. Enquire at [email protected] Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Consultant An ALM Consultant with a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience with Application Lifecycle Management, Visual Studio (including Visual Studio Team System) and software design is needed. Must provide thought leadership on best practices for enterprise architecture, understand the Microsoft technology solution stack, and have a thorough understanding of enterprise application integration. The ALM Practice Lead will play a central role in designing and implementing the overall ALM Practice strategy, including creating, updating, and delivering ALM courseware and consultancy engagements. This person will also provide project support, deliverables, and quality solutions on Visual Studio Team System that exceed client expectations. Engagements will vary and will involve providing expert training, consulting, mentoring, formulating technical strategies and policies and acting as a “trusted advisor” to customers and internal teams. Sound sense of business and technical strategy required. Strong interpersonal skills as well as solid strategic thinking are key. The ideal candidate will be capable of envisioning the solution based on the early client requirements, communicating the vision to both technical and business stakeholders, leading teams through implementation, as well as training, mentoring, and hands-on software development. The ideal candidate will demonstrate successful use of both agile and formal software development methods, enterprise application patterns, and effective leadership on prior projects. Job Requirements Minimum Education: Bachelor’s Degree (computer science, engineering, or math preferred). Locale / Travel: The Practice Lead position requires estimated 50% travel, most of which will be in the Continental US (a valid national Passport must be maintained).  This is a full time position and will be based in the Kirkland office. Preferred Education: Master’s Degree in Information Technology or Software Engineering; Premium Microsoft Certifications on .NET (MCSD) or MCPD or relevant experience; Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) or relevant experience. Minimum Experience and Skills: 7+ years experience with business information systems integration or custom business application design and development in a professional technology consulting, corporate MIS or software development environment. Essential Duties & Responsibilities: Provide training, consulting, and mentoring to organizations on topics that include Visual Studio Team System and ALM. Create content, including labs and demonstrations, to be delivered as training classes by Northwest Cadence employees. Lead development teams through the complete ALM and/or Visual Studio Team System solution. Be able to communicate in detail how a solution will integrate into the larger technical problem space for large, complex enterprises. Define technical solution requirements. Provide guidance to the customer and project team with respect to technical feasibility, complexity, and level of effort required to deliver a custom solution. Ensure that the solution is designed, developed and deployed in accordance with the agreed upon development work plan. Create and deliver weekly status reports of training and/or consulting progress. Engagement Responsibilities: · Provide a strong desire to provide thought leadership related to technology and to help grow the business. · Work effectively and professionally with employees at all levels of a customer’s organization. · Have strong verbal and written communication skills. · Have effective presentation, organizational and planning skills. · Have effective interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team environment. Enquire at [email protected]

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• PASS: 2013 Summit Location

  - by Bill Graziano

  HQ recently posted a brief update on our search for a location for 2013.  It includes links to posts by four Board members and two community members. I’d like to add my thoughts to the mix and ask you a question.  But I can’t give you a real understanding without telling you some history first. So far we’ve had the Summit in Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Denver and Seattle.  Each has a little different feel and distinct memories.  I enjoyed getting drinks by the pool in Orlando after the sessions ended.  I didn’t like that our location in Dallas was so far away from all the nightlife.  Denver was in downtown but we had real challenges with hotels.  I enjoyed the different locations.  I always enjoyed the announcement during the third keynote with the location of the next Summit. There are two big events that impacted my thinking on the Summit location.  The first was our transition to the new management company in early 2007.  The event that September in Denver was put on with a six month planning cycle by a brand new headquarters staff.  It wasn’t perfect but came off much better than I had dared to hope.  It also moved us out of the cookie cutter conferences that we used to do into a model where we have a lot more control.  I think you’ll all agree that the production values of our last few Summits have been fantastic.  That Summit also led to our changing relationship with Microsoft.  Microsoft holds two seats on the PASS Board.  All the PASS Board members face the same challenge: we all have full-time jobs and PASS comes in second place professionally (or sometimes further back).  Starting in 2008 we were assigned a liaison from Microsoft that had a much larger block of time to coordinate with us.  That changed everything between PASS and Microsoft.  Suddenly we were talking to product marketing, Microsoft PR, their event team, the Tech*Ed team, the education division, their user group team and their field sales team – locally and internationally.  We strengthened our relationship with CSS, SQLCAT and the engineering teams.  We had exposure at the executive level that we’d never had before.  And their level of participation at the Summit changed from under 100 people to 400-500 people.  I think those 400+ Microsoft employees have value at a conference on Microsoft SQL Server.  For the first time, Seattle had a real competitive advantage over other cities. I’m one that looked very hard at staying in Seattle for a long, long time.  I think those Microsoft engineers have value to our attendees.  I think the increased support that Microsoft can provide when we’re in Seattle has value to our attendees.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  There’s a significant (and vocal!) percentage of our membership that wants the Summit outside Seattle.  Post-2007 PASS doesn’t know what it’s like to have a Summit outside of Seattle.  I think until we have a Summit in another city we won’t really know the trade-offs. I think a model where we move every third or every other year is interesting.  But until we have another Summit outside Seattle and we can evaluate the logistics and how important it is to have depth and variety in our Microsoft participation we won’t really know. Another benefit that comes with a move is variety or diversity.  I learn more when I’m exposed to new things and new people.  I believe that moving the Summit will give a different set of people an opportunity to attend. Grant Fritchey writes “It seems that the board is leaning, extremely heavily, towards making it a permanent fixture in Seattle.”  I don’t believe that’s true.  I know there was discussion of that earlier but I don’t believe it’s true now. And that brings me to my question.  Do we announce the city now or do we wait until the 2012 Summit?  I’m happy to announce Seattle vs. not-Seattle as soon as we sign the contract.  But I’d like to leave the actual city announcement until the 2011 Summit.  I like the drama and mystery of it.  I also like that it doesn’t give you a reason to skip a Summit and wait for the next one if it’s closer or back in Seattle.  The other side of the coin is that your planning is easier if you know where it is.  What do you think?

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• New Working Environment Starting November

  - by Jenson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is actually a post dated update. After I’ve been working in the private sectors for so many years (the 2 years when I was working as IT trainer in a secondary school is not counted, as I was working under a contract with a private IT training agency), I’ve decided to try my luck into public sector. And fortunately, I passed the interview and I was offered a position of Web Administrator in a government statutory board, that’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (of Singapore). During my previous employment with a Japanese MNC (multinational company), it was a totally new environment for me, as I had never worked for a Japanese company before, but the first time I work for Japanese company also gave me the very first nightmare I have with them, and vowed not to work for them anymore, and any other Japanese companies. No doubt I have freedom of choosing the tools and methods I wish to use for the projects, but the project management is simply too messy and out of order. And a lot of time, I don’t find that everyone is working as a team, more like achieving their own goals. Accountability for project is not shared, all lumped onto the shoulders of the developer in charge (they called it Software Engineer). I was working on a windows based .NET project, which I already voiced out that it’s not manageable by just 1 software engineer, but it seems like nobody cares, even the one who propose the solution to customer doesn’t care much. What he cares is whether you deliver the project on time so that he can please his customer and the senior management of his good work. Too many stories to tell, and I just simple doesn’t want to talk too much on this as it has already became the past to me. With my new title with the government agency, I hope to contribute my best to them, while learning as much as I can. I will share whatever I can on technologies, methodologies, and etc whichever I’m allowed and permitted to (of course, for those non-work-related stuff, I would be glad to share with you without much hesitation). Thank you! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• #OOW 2012: Big Data and The Social Revolution

  - by Eric Bezille

  As what was saying Cognizant CSO Malcolm Frank about the "Futur of Work", and how the Business should prepare in the face of the new generation  not only of devices and "internet of things" but also due to their users ("The Millennials"), moving from "consumers" to "prosumers" :  we are at a turning point today which is bringing us to the next IT Architecture Wave. So this is no more just about putting Big Data, Social Networks and Customer Experience (CxM) on top of old existing processes, it is about embracing the next curve, by identifying what processes need to be improve, but also and more importantly what processes are obsolete and need to be get ride of, and new processes put in place. It is about managing both the hierarchical and structured Enterprise and its social connections and influencers inside and outside of the Enterprise. And this does apply everywhere, up to the Utilities and Smart Grids, where it is no more just about delivering (faster) the same old 300 reports that have grown over time with those new technologies but to understand what need to be looked at, in real-time, down to an hand full relevant reports with the KPI relevant to the business. It is about how IT can anticipate the next wave, and is able to answers Business questions, and give those capabilities in real-time right at the hand of the decision makers... This is the turning curve, where IT is really moving from the past decade "Cost Center" to "Value for the Business", as Corporate Stakeholders will be able to touch the value directly at the tip of their fingers. It is all about making Data Driven Strategic decisions, encompassed and enriched by ALL the Data, and connected to customers/prosumers influencers. This brings to stakeholders the ability to make informed decisions on question like : “What would be the best Olympic Gold winner to represent my automotive brand ?”... in a few clicks and in real-time, based on social media analysis (twitter, Facebook, Google+...) and connections link to my Enterprise data. A true example demonstrated by Larry Ellison in real-time during his yesterday’s key notes, where “Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together” is not only about extreme performances but also solutions that Business can touch thanks to well integrated Customer eXperience Management and Social Networking : bringing the capabilities to IT to move to the IT Architecture Next wave. An example, illustrated also todays in 2 others sessions, that I had the opportunity to attend. The first session bringing the “Internet of Things” in Oil&Gaz into actionable decisions thanks to Complex Event Processing capturing sensors data with the ready to run IT infrastructure leveraging Exalogic for the CEP side, Exadata for the enrich datasets and Exalytics to provide the informed decision interface up to end-user. The second session showing Real Time Decision engine in action for ACCOR hotels, with Eric Wyttynck, VP eCommerce, and his Technical Director Pascal Massenet. I have to close my post here, as I have to go to run our practical hands-on lab, cooked with Olivier Canonge, Christophe Pauliat and Simon Coter, illustrating in practice the Oracle Infrastructure Private Cloud recently announced last Sunday by Larry, and developed through many examples this morning by John Folwer. John also announced today Solaris 11.1 with a range of network innovation and virtualization at the OS level, as well as many optimizations for applications, like for Oracle RAC, with the introduction of the lock manager inside Solaris Kernel. Last but not least, he introduced Xsigo Datacenter Fabric for highly simplified networks and storage virtualization for your Cloud Infrastructure. Hoping you will get ready to jump on the next wave, we are here to help...

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• Correct definition of the term "Yak Shaving"

  - by StevenWilkins

  The wiktionary has two different definitions: Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. The actually useless activity you do that appears important when you are consciously or unconsciously procrastinating about a larger problem. This post defines it as: yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task. I personally prefer the final definition because it contains the word "fiddly" which I think perfectly describes a typical yak shaving task. What is the best definition you've come across or can provide?

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• NEW: Oracle Practice Exams

  - by Harold Green

  The Oracle University team continues to strive to make high-quality certification preparation tools available to our candidates. In support of this effort, we have expanded our relationship with Kaplan SelfTest.   Kaplan SelfTest is now an Oracle Authorized Practice Test Provider delivering a new feature-rich and fully authorized series of certification practice exams. Practice tests are one of the most effective ways candidates can prepare for an Oracle certification exam. Authorized practice exams help candidates to self assess their knowledge using realistic exam simulations. These practice exams utilize best-in-class practice exam tools including: Learning Mode (fully customize your own practice exam preferences), Certification Mode (simulates a real, timed testing situation) and Flash Cards (self check on key topical concepts). Customers may purchase practice exams from Oracle, with 30-day or 12-month access, or from Kaplan SelfTest directly. As an added benefit, Oracle University Learning Credits may be applied to purchases made from Oracle. View a current list of available practice tests.

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• Graduate Life in Oracle by Ramakrishna Nalabothula

  - by david.talamelli

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

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• Green (Screen) Computing

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently was given an assignment to create a UX where a user could use the up and down arrow keys, as well as the tab and enter keys to move through a Silverlight datagrid that is going be used as part of a high throughput data entry UI. And to be honest, I’ve not trapped key codes since I coded JavaScript a few years ago.  Although the frameworks I’m using made it easy, it wasn’t without some trial and error.    The other thing that bothered me was that the customer tossed this into the use case as they were delivering the use case.  Fine.  I’ll take a whack at anything and beat up myself and beg (I’m not beyond begging for help) the community for help to get something done if I have to. It wasn’t as bad as I thought and I thought I would hopefully save someone a few keystrokes if you wanted to build a green screen for your customer.   Here’s the ValueConverter to handle changing the strings to decimals and then back again.  The value is a nullable valuetype so there are few extra steps to take.  Usually the “ConvertBack()” method doesn’t get addressed but in this case we have two-way binding and the converter needs to ensure that if the user doesn’t enter a value it will remain null when the value is reapplied to the model object’s setter.  1: using System; 2: using System.Windows.Data; 3: using System.Globalization; 4:  5: public class NullableDecimalToStringConverter : IValueConverter 6: { 7: public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) 8: { 9: if (!(((decimal?)value).HasValue)) 10: { 11: return (decimal?)null; 12: } 13: if (!(value is decimal)) 14: { 15: throw new ArgumentException("The value must be of type decimal"); 16: } 17:  18: NumberFormatInfo nfi = culture.NumberFormat; 19: nfi.NumberDecimalDigits = 4; 20:  21: return ((decimal)value).ToString("N", nfi); 22: } 23:  24: public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) 25: { 26: decimal nullableDecimal; 27: decimal.TryParse(value.ToString(), out nullableDecimal); 28:  29: return nullableDecimal == 0 ? null : nullableDecimal.ToString(); 30: } 31: }            The ConvertBack() method uses TryParse to create a value from the incoming string so if the parse fails, we get a null value back, which is what we would expect.  But while I was testing I realized that if the user types something like “2..4” instead of “2.4”, TryParse will fail and still return a null.  The user is getting “puuu-lenty” of eye-candy to ensure they know how many values are affected in this particular view. Here’s the XAML code.   This is the simple part, we just have a DataGrid with one column here that’s bound to the the appropriate ViewModel property with the Converter referenced as well. 1: <data:DataGridTextColumn 2: Header="On-Hand" 3: Binding="{Binding Quantity, 4: Mode=TwoWay, 5: Converter={StaticResource DecimalToStringConverter}}" 6: IsReadOnly="False" /> Nothing too magical here.  Just some XAML to hook things up.   Here’s the code behind that’s handling the DataGridKeyup event.  These are wired to a local/private method but could be converted to something the ViewModel could use, but I just need to get this working for now. 1: // Wire up happens in the constructor 2: this.PicDataGrid.KeyUp += (s, e) => this.HandleKeyUp(e);   1: // DataGrid.BeginEdit fires when DataGrid.KeyUp fires. 2: private void HandleKeyUp(KeyEventArgs args) 3: { 4: if (args.Key == Key.Down || 5: args.Key == Key.Up || 6: args.Key == Key.Tab || 7: args.Key == Key.Enter ) 8: { 9: this.PicDataGrid.BeginEdit(); 10: } 11: }   And that’s it.  The ValueConverter was the biggest problem starting out because I was using an existing converter that didn’t take nullable value types into account.   Once the converter was passing back the appropriate value (null, “#.####”) the grid cell(s) and the model objects started working as I needed them to. HTH.

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• How to Waste Your Marketing Budget

  - by Mike Stiles

  Philosophers have long said if you find out where a man’s money is, you’ll know where his heart is. Find out where money in a marketing budget is allocated, and you’ll know how adaptive and ready that company is for the near future. Marketing spends are an investment. Not unlike buying stock, the money is placed in areas the marketer feels will yield the highest return. Good stock pickers know the lay of the land, the sectors, the companies, and trends. Likewise, good marketers should know the media available to them, their audience, what they like & want, what they want their marketing to achieve…and trends. So what are they doing? And how are they doing? A recent eTail report shows nearly half of retailers planned on focusing on SEO, SEM, and site research technologies in the coming months. On the surface, that’s smart. You want people to find you. And you’re willing to let the SEO tail wag the dog and dictate the quality (or lack thereof) of your content such as blogs to make that happen. So search is prioritized well ahead of social, multi-channel initiatives, email, even mobile - despite the undisputed explosive growth and adoption of it by the public. 13% of retailers plan to focus on online video in the next 3 months. 29% said they’d look at it in 6 months. Buying SEO trickery is easy. Attracting and holding an audience with wanted, relevant content…that’s the hard part. So marketers continue to kick the content can down the road. Pretty risky since content can draw and bind customers to you. Asked to look a year ahead, retailers started thinking about CRM systems, customer segmentation, and loyalty, (again well ahead of online video, social and site personalization). What these investors are missing is social is spreading across every function of the enterprise and will be a part of CRM, personalization, loyalty programs, etc. They’re using social for engagement but not for PR, customer service, and sales. Mistake. Allocations are being made seemingly blind to the trends. Even more peculiar are the results of an analysis Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins made. She looked at how much time people spend with media types and how marketers are investing in those media. 26% of media consumption is online, marketers spend 22% of their ad budgets there. 10% of media time is spent with mobile, but marketers are spending 1% of their ad budgets there. 7% of media time is spent with print, but (get this) marketers spend 25% of their ad budgets there. It’s like being on Superman’s Bizarro World. Mary adds that of the online spending, most goes to search while spends on content, even ad content, stayed flat. Stock pickers know to buy low and sell high. It means peering with info in hand into the likely future of a stock and making the investment in it before it peaks. Either marketers aren’t believing the data and trends they’re seeing, or they can’t convince higher-ups to acknowledge change and adjust their portfolios accordingly. Follow @mikestilesImage via stock.xchng

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• 13 MORE Things from the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our previous blog, we started giving those of you who couldn’t make it just a sampling of the valuable takeaways from the first annual Oracle Social Summit, held Nov 14 and 15 in Las Vegas. And while yes, 13 items is a pretty healthy sampling, we wanted to go the extra mile and give you 13 more, an indication of just how much great information came out of it.  Follow the arrow, and come on in as if you were there with us. 1. Weber Shandwick takes a 70/20/10 approach when advising clients how to allocate resources to paid social opportunities. 70% of spend should go toward paid opportunities the agency and client both know work, 20% should go toward paid social the agency knows works, and 10% should go toward experimentation. (Matt Dickman – Weber Shandwick) 2. By 2017, the technically competent CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. (Gartner Study) 3. CIOs are focused on infrastructure. As the roles of the CMO and CIO continue coming together, those CIOs have to make a very conscious decision to get CMOs what they need. 4. It’s now harder for brands to differentiate based on product. The advantage will go to the brands that are successful in garnering customer trust. 5. More and more, enterprise software is going to start looking like the software consumers are used to seeing and using. 6. You will see brands prioritizing mobile and dropping investments in www, HTML, POS systems, etc. 7. The social graph has to be added to brands’ customer data for a more holistic view. Customers will give you the information you need if the reward is appropriate. 8. Viacom did a study that showed viewers are most honest on social. Not so much on surveys or other feedback vehicles. 9. How are you determining your influencers? Influence isn’t about reach. It’s about getting people to change behavior. 10. A mix of skills is becoming critically important in a social staff. It shouldn’t be a mixture of several disciplines, not just a bunch of “social experts.” 11. If senior management isn’t engaged, the social team is forced into guessing what might be considered a “success” by the C-suite. 12. Mobile customization will be getting big investments from brands in 2013. Brands need to provide shoppers utility, not just information. 75% will use mobile this holiday season to avoid in-store madness. 13. Data becomes information, information becomes insight, and insight becomes actionable. The Oracle Social Summit brought together brands, agencies, Oracle social experts and industry thought leaders to take a serious look at where social stands today, and where it’s headed in the near future. Given the speed of social’s evolution, attending such events (or at least reading nifty summary blogs) is a good investment in making sure your enterprise isn’t falling gradually behind.

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• Keystore and Credential Store interplay in OWSM - 11g

  - by Prakash Yamuna

  One of the most common problems faced by customer's is the use of the keystore and it's interplay with the credential store.Here is a picture that describes these relationships.(Click on the picture for a larger image). The picture makes some assumptions in describing the relationship. Some of assumptions are: a) the key used for signing and encryption are the same. b) A keystore can have multiple keys and each key can have it's own alias. In the picture I show only a single key with alias "orakey". c) The keystore being described here is a JKS keystore. Things can vary slightly for other type of keystores. I hope to have a detailed How To that provides the larger picture and then shows these relationships in that context and this picture was created in the context of that How-To. However I think people will find this picture useful on a standalone basis as well. The <serviceInstance> is the entry you will find in jps-config.xml

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• Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

  - by Bill Evjen

  The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

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• Compelling Reasons For Migrating to Oracle Database 11g

  - by margaret hamburger

  IDC's white paper Maximizing Your Investment in Oracle Application Software: The Case for Migrating to Oracle Database 11g  describes compelling business, operational, and technical reasons for Oracle application customers to upgrade or Oracle Database 11g. In researching this paper, IDC found that the upgrade process is smooth, the latest version offers key benefits over older versions, and the new features and procedures are easy to learn and well worth implementing. The paper highlights users of Oracle applications, such as Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise applications, Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It includes a review of Oracle Database 11g improvements and new features along with best practices from Oracle users who upgraded to Oracle Database 11g.

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