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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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• 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

  - by Mike Stiles

  If customers have changed, if the way they research and shop have changed, if their expectations have changed, if their ability to act on dissatisfaction has changed, but your customer experience has NOT changed, what was once “good enough” may now be crippling. Well, the customer has changed, and why wouldn’t they? You’ve probably changed too in your role as consumer. There’s more info available, it’s easier to get, there’s more choice, you’re more mobile, you’re more connected, it’s easier to buy, and yes, it’s easier to switch brands if experiences don’t meet your now higher expectations. Thanks to technological advances, we as marketers can increasingly work borderline miracles. But if we’re still not adamantly adopting customer centricity, and if we aren’t making the customer experience paramount amongst business goals, the tech is wasted. A far more modern customer experience is called for. Here are 6 ways to get there: 1. Modern Marketing: Marketing data is aggregated and targeted to the right customers, who are getting personal, relevant communications. In return, you’re getting insight that finally properly attributes revenue to your marketing efforts. 2. Modern Selling: Demand is being driven across all channels with modern selling tools. Productivity is up thanks to coordinated communication and selling, and performance is ever optimized using powerful analytics. 3. Modern CPQ: You’re cross-selling and upselling more effectively since reps and channel partners have been empowered with the ability to quickly, automatically generate 100% accurate, customer-friendly quotes complete with price controls and automated approvals. 4. Modern Commerce: You’re leveraging data and delivering personalized, targeted digital experiences to everyone. You’re attracting more visitors, and you’re able to scale and keep up with the market and control the experience. 5. Modern Service: You’re better serving your customers by making it easier for them to engage with your brand, plus you’re lowering your costs by increasing agent and tech support efficiencies. 6. Modern Social: You’re getting faster, deeper, more accurate insights from social and turning content around faster, which then goes out to the right people at the right time in the right place. You’ve also gotten proactive in your service, and customers love that. For far too many brands, the buying journey of Need, Research, Select, Buy, Use, Recommend across the multiple connect points of Social, Mobile, Store, Call Center, Site, Ecommerce is a disconnected mess. Oracle’s approach to CX is to connect every interaction your customer has with your brand, avoiding the revenue losses lousy customer experiences bring. How important is the experience to customers? 94% are willing to pay more of their hard-earned money to have better ones, while a meager 1% say they get the good, consistent experiences they expect. Brands, your words aren’t as loud anymore, so your actions as they relate to customer experience are going to have to do the talking. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Julien Tromeur, freeimages.com

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• A "First" at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Adam May, Director, Fusion CRM, Oracle Applications Development There are always firsts at OpenWorld. These firsts keep the conference fresh and are the reason people come back year after year. An important first this year is our Fusion CRM customers who are using the product and deriving real benefit from Fusion CRM. Everyone can learn from and interact with them -- including us!  We love talking to customers, especially those who are using our solutions in unexpected ways because they challenge us! At previous OpenWorlds, we presented our overall Fusion vision and our plans for Fusion CRM. Those presentations helped customers plan their strategies and map out their new release uptakes. Fast forward to March of this year when the first Fusion CRM customer went live. Since then we've watched the pace of go-lives accelerate every single month. Now we're at the threshold of another OpenWorld -- with over 45,000 attendees, 2,500 sessions and LOTS of other activities. To avoid having our customers curl into a ball with sensory overload, we designed a Focus On Document to outline the most important Fusion CRM activities. Here are some of the highlights: Anthony Lye's "Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap" on Monday at 3:15 p.m. The CRM Pavilion, open in Moscone West from Monday through Wednesday; features our strategic Fusion CRM partners and provides live demonstrations of their capabilities General Session: "Oracle Fusion CRM--Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use" on Tuesday at 11:45 a.m.; features Anthony Lye and Deloitte "Meet the Fusion CRM Experts" on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.; this session gives customers the opportunity to interact one-on-one with Fusion experts divided into eight categories of expertise CRM Social Reception on Tuesday from 6-8 p.m.; there's no better way to spend the early evening than discussing Fusion CRM with Oracle experts and strategic partners over appetizers and drinks Wednesday night is Oracle's Customer Appreciation event; enjoy Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, etc. beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Treasure Island Be sure to drink plenty of water before sleeping Wednesday night and don't stay out too late because we have lots of great content on Thursday; at the top of the list is "Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement" at 11:15 a.m. We hope you have a fantastic experience at OpenWorld 2012! And here's a little video treat to whet your appetite: http://www.youtube.com/user/FusionAppsAtOracle

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• Problems Enforcing Referential Integrity on SQL Server Tables

  - by SidC

  Hello All, I have a SQL Server 2005 database comprised of Customer, Quote, QuoteDetail tables. I want/need to enforce referential integrity such that when an insert is made on quotedetail, the quote and customer tables are also affected. I have tried my best to set up primary/foreign keys on my tables but need some help. Here's the scripts for my tables as they stand now (please don't laugh): Customers: USE [Diel_inventory] GO /****** Object: Table [dbo].[Customers] Script Date: 05/08/2010 03:39:04 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Customers]( [pkCustID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [CompanyName] [nvarchar](50) NULL, [Address] [nvarchar](50) NULL, [City] [nvarchar](50) NULL, [State] [nvarchar](2) NULL, [ZipCode] [nvarchar](5) NULL, [OfficePhone] [nvarchar](12) NULL, [OfficeFAX] [nvarchar](12) NULL, [Email] [nvarchar](50) NULL, [PrimaryContactName] [nvarchar](50) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_Customers] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([pkCustID] ASC)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY] ) ON [PRIMARY] Quotes: USE [Diel_inventory] GO /****** Object: Table [dbo].[Quotes] Script Date: 05/08/2010 03:30:46 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Quotes]( [pkQuoteID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [fkCustomerID] [int] NOT NULL, [QuoteDate] [timestamp] NOT NULL, [NeedbyDate] [datetime] NULL, [QuoteAmt] [decimal](6, 2) NOT NULL, [QuoteApproved] [bit] NOT NULL, [fkOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_Bids] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [pkQuoteID] ASC)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY] ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Quotes] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [fkCustomerID] FOREIGN KEY([fkCustomerID]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Customers] ([pkCustID]) GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Quotes] CHECK CONSTRAINT [fkCustomerID] QuoteDetail: USE [Diel_inventory] GO /****** Object: Table [dbo].[QuoteDetail] Script Date: 05/08/2010 03:31:58 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [fkQuoteID] [int] NOT NULL, [fkCustomerID] [int] NOT NULL, [fkPartID] [int] NULL, [PartNumber1] [float] NOT NULL, [Qty1] [int] NOT NULL, [PartNumber2] [float] NULL, [Qty2] [int] NULL, [PartNumber3] [float] NULL, [Qty3] [int] NULL, [PartNumber4] [float] NULL, [Qty4] [int] NULL, [PartNumber5] [float] NULL, [Qty5] [int] NULL, [PartNumber6] [float] NULL, [Qty6] [int] NULL, [PartNumber7] [float] NULL, [Qty7] [int] NULL, [PartNumber8] [float] NULL, [Qty8] [int] NULL, [PartNumber9] [float] NULL, [Qty9] [int] NULL, [PartNumber10] [float] NULL, [Qty10] [int] NULL, [PartNumber11] [float] NULL, [Qty11] [int] NULL, [PartNumber12] [float] NULL, [Qty12] [int] NULL, [PartNumber13] [float] NULL, [Qty13] [int] NULL, [PartNumber14] [float] NULL, [Qty14] [int] NULL, [PartNumber15] [float] NULL, [Qty15] [int] NULL, [PartNumber16] [float] NULL, [Qty16] [int] NULL, [PartNumber17] [float] NULL, [Qty17] [int] NULL, [PartNumber18] [float] NULL, [Qty18] [int] NULL, [PartNumber19] [float] NULL, [Qty19] [int] NULL, [PartNumber20] [float] NULL, [Qty20] [int] NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_QuoteDetail] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [ID] ASC )WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY] ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_Customers] FOREIGN KEY ([fkCustomerID]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Customers] ([pkCustID]) GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] CHECK CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_Customers] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_PartList] FOREIGN KEY ([fkPartID]) REFERENCES [dbo].[PartList] ([RecID]) GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] CHECK CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_PartList] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] WITH CHECK ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_Quotes] FOREIGN KEY([fkQuoteID]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Quotes] ([pkQuoteID]) GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[QuoteDetail] CHECK CONSTRAINT [FK_QuoteDetail_Quotes] Your advice/guidance on how to set these up so that customer ID in Customers is the same as in Quotes (referential integrity) and that CustomerID is inserted on Quotes and Customers when an insert is made to QuoteDetial would be much appreciated. Thanks, Sid

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• Sending email from various domains

  - by IMHO

  We are building hosted software service that is used by multiple customers. These customers want to communicate with their customers (end customer). So, today we send it from our domain: example.com However, we would like to send email to come from their specific domains. When we put their customer emails in Reply-To - it shows up as "on behalf" in clients like outlook. What are the ways to send email from their domain without installing software on their network?

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• .htm pages working but .aspx pages throwing errors

  - by Mike

  Our site has thousands of visitors per day but we've been receiving reports from some of our members that they are able to hit our main page, presumably because it's a .htm page, but when they click off to a .aspx page, they get an error. I've done as much research as I know how and here is what I have come up with: - We have not made any changes to IIS on our server in months. - We have a couple of customers that have been willing to work with us and provide information about their system. One customer is running Vista, the other is running XP. - We had one of the customers test both Firefox and MSIE. She gets same error in both. - One customer said, "We were able to post the profile and searched on available jobs and it worked w/ Firefox for a day, then it just quit working...we did not change any settings to Firefox after we posted the profile." - We asked the customer to clear their cache and try again. They responded with, "We just cleared the cache and got the same error; btw, I periodically clear the cache -- almost every day." Summary We have thousands of customers that hit our site with no problem. We can't reproduce these errors. These customers are getting the same error in different browsers. They are only getting the error on .aspx pages. They still get the error after clearing their cache. We would appreciate any thoughts on what other questions we could ask these customers or thoughts on how we can further troubleshoot this problem.

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• How to publish internal data to the internet - as simple as possible

  - by mlarsen

  I Asked this at Staock Overflow, but I would like your oppinion too as it has as much to do with administration as it does with coding. We have a .net 2-tier application where a desktop program is talking to a database. We support MS SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008 and Oracle 9, 10 and 11. The application is sold, not as shrink-wrap, but pretty close. It is quite important for us that the installation and configuration is as easy as possible as installation instructions are usually supplied in written form to the customers internal IT-department. Our application is usually not seen as mission critical for the IT-department, so we need to keep their work down to a minimum. Now we are starting to get wishes for a web application build on top of the same data. The web application will be hosted by us and delivered as a SaaS application. Now the challenge is how to move data back and forth between the web application and the customers internal database. as I see it we have some requirements: We must be ready to handle the situation where the customers database is not accessible from the DMZ. I guess the easiest solution is that all communication is initiated from inside the customers lan. As little firewall configuration as possible. The best is if we can run without any special configuration as long as outgoing traffic from the customers lan are not blocked. If we need something changed in the firewall, we must be able to document that the change is secure. It doesn't have to be real time. Moving data in batches every ten minutes or so is OK. Data moves both ways, but not the same tables, so we don't have to support merges. It would be nice if we don't have to roll our own framework completely. Looking forward to hear your suggestions.

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• Issue 15: Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld

  - by rituchhibber

       ORACLE FOCUS Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange@ ORACLE OpenWorld Sylvie MichouSenior DirectorPartner Marketing & Communications and Strategic Programs RESOURCES -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Registration Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange SpecializationTest Fest Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder Oracle OpenWorld Promotional Toolkit for Partners Oracle Partner Events Oracle Partner Webcasts Oracle EMEA Partner News SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES If you are attending our forthcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco from 30 September to 4 October, you will discover a new dedicated programme of keynotes and sessions tailored especially for you, our valued partners. Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld has been created to enhance the opportunities for you to learn from and network with Oracle executives and experts. The programme also provides more informal opportunities than ever throughout the week to meet up with the people who are most important to your business: customers, prospects, colleagues and the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels management team. Oracle remains fully focused on building the industry's most admired partner ecosystem—which today spans over 25,000 partners. This new OPN Exchange programme offers an exciting change of pace for partners throughout the conference. Now it will be possible to enjoy a fully-integrated, partner-dedicated session schedule throughout the week, as well as key social events such as the Sunday night Welcome Reception, networking lunches from Monday to Thursday at the Howard Street Tent, and a fantastic closing event on the last Thursday afternoon. In addition to the regular Oracle OpenWorld conference schedule, if you have registered for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld programme, you will be invited to attend a much anticipated global partner keynote presentation, plus more than 40 conference sessions aimed squarely at what's most important to you, as partners. Prominent topics for discussion will include: Oracle technologies and roadmaps and how they fit with partners' business plans; business development; regional distinctions in business practices; and much more. Each session will provide plenty of food for thought ahead of the numerous networking opportunities throughout the week, encouraging the knowledge exchange with Oracle executives, customers, prospects, and colleagues that will make this conference of even greater value for you. At Oracle we always work closely with our partners to deliver solution offerings that improve business value, simplify the IT experience and drive innovation and efficiencies for joint customers. The most important element of our new OPN Exchange is content that helps you get more from technology investments, more from your peer-to-peer connections, and more from your interactions with customers. To this end we've created some partner-specific tools which can be used by OPN members ahead of the conference itself. Crucially, a comprehensive Content Catalog already lists and organises details of every OPN Exchange session, speaker, exhibitor, demonstration and related materials. This Content Catalog can be used by all our partners to identify interesting content that you can add to your own personalised Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder, allowing more effective planning and pre-enrolment for vital sessions. There are numerous highlights that you will definitely want to include in those personal schedules. On Sunday morning, 30 September we will start the week with partner dedicated OPN Exchange sessions, following our Global Partner Keynote at 13:00 with Judson Althoff, SVP, Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales and senior executives, giving insight into Oracle's partner vision, strategy, and resources—all designed to help build and strengthen market opportunities for you. This will be followed by a number of OPN Exchange general sessions, the Oracle OpenWorld Opening Keynote with Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle and concluded with the OPN Exchange AfterDark Welcome Reception, starting at 19:30 at the Metreon. From Monday 1 to Thursday 4 October, you can attend the OPN Exchange sessions that are most relevant to your business today and over the coming year. Oracle's top product and sales leaders will be on hand to discuss Oracle's strategic direction in 40+ targeted and in-depth sessions focussing on critical success factors to develop your business. Oracle's dedication to innovation, specialization, enablement and engineering provides Oracle partners with a huge opportunity to create new services and solutions, differentiate themselves and deliver extreme value to joint customers across the globe. Oracle will even be helping over 1000 partners to earn OPN Specialization certification during the Oracle OpenWorld OPN Exchange Test Fest, which will be providing all the study materials and exams required to drive Specialization for free at the conference. You simply need to check the list of current certification tracks available, and make sure you pre-register to reserve a seat in one of the ten sessions being offered free to OPN Exchange registered attendees. And finally, let's not forget those all-important networking opportunities, which can so often provide partners with valuable long-term alliances as well as exciting new business leads. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Lounge, located at Moscone South, exhibition hall, room 100 is the place where partners can meet formally or informally with colleagues, customers, prospects, and other industry professionals. OPN Specialized partners with OPN Exchange passes can also visit the OPN Video Blogging room to record and share ideas, and at the OPN Information Station you will find consultants available to answer your questions. "For the first time ever we will have a full partner conference within OpenWorld. OPN Exchange @ OpenWorld will kick-off on the first Sunday and run the entire week. We'll have over 40 sessions throughout that time and partners will hear from our top development executives, with special sessions dedicated to partnering throughout. It's going to be a phenomenal event, and we look forward to seeing our partners there." Judson Althoff, SVP, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales So if you haven't done so already, please register for Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld today or add OPN Exchange to your existing registration for just $100 through My Account. And if you have any further questions regarding partner activities at Oracle OpenWorld, please don't hesitate to contact the Oracle PartnerNetwork team at [email protected] will be on hand to share the very latest information about: Oracle's SPARC Superclusters: the latest Engineered Systems from Oracle, delivering radically improved performance, faster deployment and greatly reduced operational costs for mixed database and enterprise application consolidation Oracle's SPARC T4 servers: with the newly developed T4 processor and Oracle Solaris providing up to five times the single threaded performance and better overall system throughput for expanded application versatility Oracle Database Appliance: a new way to take advantage of the world's most popular database, Oracle Database 11g, in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It's a complete package engineered to deliver simple, reliable and affordable database services to small and medium size businesses and departmental systems. All hardware and software components are supported together and offer customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from two to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades Oracle Exalogic: the world's only integrated cloud machine, featuring server hardware and middleware software engineered together for maximum performance with minimum set-up and operational cost Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking and software that is massively scalable, secure and redundant Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances: providing enterprise-class NAS performance, price-performance, manageability and TCO by combining third-generation software with high-performance controllers, flash-based caches and disks Oracle Pillar Axiom Quality-of-Service: confidently consolidate storage for multiple applications into a single datacentre storage solution Oracle Solaris 11: delivering secure enterprise cloud deployments with the ability to run hundreds of virtual application with no overhead and co-engineered with other Oracle software products to provide the highest levels of security, manageability and performance Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle's integrated enterprise IT management product, providing the industry's only complete, integrated and business-driven enterprise cloud management solution Oracle VM 3.0: the latest release of Oracle's server virtualisation and management solution, helping to move datacentres beyond server consolidation to improve application deployment and management. Register today and ensure your place at the Extreme Performance Tour! Extreme Performance Tour events are free to attend, but places are limited. To make sure that you don't miss out, please visit Oracle's Extreme Performance Tour website, select the city that you'd be interest in attending an event in, and then click on the 'Register Now' button for that city to secure your interest. Each individual city page also contains more in-depth information about your local event, including logistics, agenda and maybe even a preview of VIP guest speakers. -- Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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• I'm Not Bi-Polar, I'm Bi-Winning

  - by David Dorf

  On March 1st, Charlie Sheen joined Twitter and was able to amass 1M followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes, setting an official world record.  So why does it take your brand so long to collect followers?  Easy: you're brand isn't a train wreck.Wouldn't it be great if your customers we chatting about your products as much as they're talking about Charlie #winning?  There are a couple things retailers can do.  First, you can offer check-ins to your customers, which can occasionally get a "ooh, what are you buying there?" in the social network. Another methods is to allow customer to "like" particular products on your Web site.  Companies like Wet Seal excel at that.We've been experimenting with automatic posting from the POS, assuming a customer has opted-in.  When you buy something in a store, the POS can automatically post "Dave just bought something at Wet Seal" to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare simultaneously.  We stopped short of mentioning the specific product so we don't pull a Beacon.  The idea is the same: get the conversation started.  Give customers a virtual water-cooler where they can discuss products and influence buying decisions.The guys over at ShopSocially have done something very similar.  On the Facebook page for Cafe Press, customers can claim purchases, effectively bragging on their walls.  Each posting goes through the Facebook newsfeed and gets friends interested.  They are seeing over 1,000 purchases being shared daily, and that's generating over 300,000 brand impressions.Sounds like a winning idea.

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• Agile PLM Partners and OCS offer valuable services

  - by Shane Goodwin

  One of the amazing benefits of using Agile is the ability to tap into a broad number of Partners and Oracle Consulting Services to leverage very talented people. Many of these people respond to postings on the Agile PLM Yahoo usergroups (WRAU and IAUG) as well as in the Oracle Support Community. As you are managing your Agile PLM project, either a new implementation or an upgrade, these Partners and OCS can jumpstart your internal resources with information and experience which takes years to develop. They can also offer other capabilities which add to your Agile experience. As an example, GoEngineer recently announced a new offering to host Agile PLM databases for companies who do not want to run their own Agile PLM system. This offering provides our smaller customers with more options on how to implement Agile PLM. The Oracle Consulting Services group has two new offerings, one for Rapid Deployments of new customers and another for Process and Technical Diagnostics of existing customers in order to better leverage the PLM investment. Contact your Oracle Sales representative to learn more. In addition, there are many other partners who are helping our customers get the most from Agile PLM. Some examples are below. In the coming months, the Oracle Partner Network will be working with partners to certify them as specialists in Agile PLM. Some of our other current partners working on Agile PLM are: Kalypso J Squared Domain Systems Sierra Atlantic Minerva

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• Using RIA DomainServices with ASP.NET and MVC 2

  - by Bobby Diaz

  Recently, I started working on a new ASP.NET MVC 2 project and I wanted to reuse the data access (LINQ to SQL) and business logic methods (WCF RIA Services) that had been developed for a previous project that used Silverlight for the front-end.  I figured that I would be able to instantiate the various DomainService classes from within my controller’s action methods, because after all, the code for those services didn’t look very complicated.  WRONG!  I didn’t realize at first that some of the functionality is handled automatically by the framework when the domain services are hosted as WCF services.  After some initial searching, I came across an invaluable post by Joe McBride, which described how to get RIA Service .svc files to work in an MVC 2 Web Application, and another by Brad Abrams.  Unfortunately, Brad’s solution was for an earlier preview release of RIA Services and no longer works with the version that I am running (PDC Preview). I have not tried the RC version of WCF RIA Services, so I am not sure if any of the issues I am having have been resolved, but I wanted to come up with a way to reuse the shared libraries so I wouldn’t have to write a non-RIA version that basically did the same thing.  The classes I came up with work with the scenarios I have encountered so far, but I wanted to go ahead and post the code in case someone else is having the same trouble I had.  Hopefully this will save you a few headaches! 1. Querying When I first tried to use a DomainService class to perform a query inside one of my controller’s action methods, I got an error stating that “This DomainService has not been initialized.”  To solve this issue, I created an extension method for all DomainServices that creates the required DomainServiceContext and passes it to the service’s Initialize() method.  Here is the code for the extension method; notice that I am creating a sort of mock HttpContext for those cases when the service is running outside of IIS, such as during unit testing!     public static class ServiceExtensions     {         /// <summary>         /// Initializes the domain service by creating a new <see cref="DomainServiceContext"/>         /// and calling the base DomainService.Initialize(DomainServiceContext) method.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TService">The type of the service.</typeparam>         /// <param name="service">The service.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public static TService Initialize<TService>(this TService service)             where TService : DomainService         {             var context = CreateDomainServiceContext();             service.Initialize(context);             return service;         }           private static DomainServiceContext CreateDomainServiceContext()         {             var provider = new ServiceProvider(new HttpContextWrapper(GetHttpContext()));             return new DomainServiceContext(provider, DomainOperationType.Query);         }           private static HttpContext GetHttpContext()         {             var context = HttpContext.Current;   #if DEBUG             // create a mock HttpContext to use during unit testing...             if ( context == null )             {                 var writer = new StringWriter();                 var request = new SimpleWorkerRequest("/", "/",                     String.Empty, String.Empty, writer);                   context = new HttpContext(request)                 {                     User = new GenericPrincipal(new GenericIdentity("debug"), null)                 };             } #endif               return context;         }     }   With that in place, I can use it almost as normally as my first attempt, except with a call to Initialize():     public ActionResult Index()     {         var service = new NorthwindService().Initialize();         var customers = service.GetCustomers();           return View(customers);     } 2. Insert / Update / Delete Once I got the records showing up, I was trying to insert new records or update existing data when I ran into the next issue.  I say issue because I wasn’t getting any kind of error, which made it a little difficult to track down.  But once I realized that that the DataContext.SubmitChanges() method gets called automatically at the end of each domain service submit operation, I could start working on a way to mimic the behavior of a hosted domain service.  What I came up with, was a base class called LinqToSqlRepository<T> that basically sits between your implementation and the default LinqToSqlDomainService<T> class.     [EnableClientAccess()]     public class NorthwindService : LinqToSqlRepository<NorthwindDataContext>     {         public IQueryable<Customer> GetCustomers()         {             return this.DataContext.Customers;         }           public void InsertCustomer(Customer customer)         {             this.DataContext.Customers.InsertOnSubmit(customer);         }           public void UpdateCustomer(Customer currentCustomer)         {             this.DataContext.Customers.TryAttach(currentCustomer,                 this.ChangeSet.GetOriginal(currentCustomer));         }           public void DeleteCustomer(Customer customer)         {             this.DataContext.Customers.TryAttach(customer);             this.DataContext.Customers.DeleteOnSubmit(customer);         }     } Notice the new base class name (just change LinqToSqlDomainService to LinqToSqlRepository).  I also added a couple of DataContext (for Table<T>) extension methods called TryAttach that will check to see if the supplied entity is already attached before attempting to attach it, which would cause an error! 3. LinqToSqlRepository<T> Below is the code for the LinqToSqlRepository class.  The comments are pretty self explanatory, but be aware of the [IgnoreOperation] attributes on the generic repository methods, which ensures that they will be ignored by the code generator and not available in the Silverlight client application.     /// <summary>     /// Provides generic repository methods on top of the standard     /// <see cref="LinqToSqlDomainService&lt;TContext&gt;"/> functionality.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="TContext">The type of the context.</typeparam>     public abstract class LinqToSqlRepository<TContext> : LinqToSqlDomainService<TContext>         where TContext : System.Data.Linq.DataContext, new()     {         /// <summary>         /// Retrieves an instance of an entity using it's unique identifier.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <param name="keyValues">The key values.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual TEntity GetById<TEntity>(params object[] keyValues) where TEntity : class         {             var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>();             var mapping = this.DataContext.Mapping.GetTable(typeof(TEntity));               var keys = mapping.RowType.IdentityMembers                 .Select((m, i) => m.Name + " = @" + i)                 .ToArray();               return table.Where(String.Join(" && ", keys), keyValues).FirstOrDefault();         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates a new query that can be executed to retrieve a collection         /// of entities from the <see cref="DataContext"/>.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual IQueryable<TEntity> GetEntityQuery<TEntity>() where TEntity : class         {             return this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>();         }           /// <summary>         /// Inserts the specified entity.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual bool Insert<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class         {             //var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>();             //table.InsertOnSubmit(entity);               return this.Submit(entity, null, DomainOperation.Insert);         }           /// <summary>         /// Updates the specified entity.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual bool Update<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class         {             return this.Update(entity, null);         }           /// <summary>         /// Updates the specified entity.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param>         /// <param name="original">The original.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual bool Update<TEntity>(TEntity entity, TEntity original)             where TEntity : class         {             if ( original == null )             {                 original = GetOriginal(entity);             }               var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>();             table.TryAttach(entity, original);               return this.Submit(entity, original, DomainOperation.Update);         }           /// <summary>         /// Deletes the specified entity.         /// </summary>         /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam>         /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         [IgnoreOperation]         public virtual bool Delete<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class         {             //var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>();             //table.TryAttach(entity);             //table.DeleteOnSubmit(entity);               return this.Submit(entity, null, DomainOperation.Delete);         }           protected virtual bool Submit(Object entity, Object original, DomainOperation operation)         {             var entry = new ChangeSetEntry(0, entity, original, operation);             var changes = new ChangeSet(new ChangeSetEntry[] { entry });             return base.Submit(changes);         }           private TEntity GetOriginal<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class         {             var context = CreateDataContext();             var table = context.GetTable<TEntity>();             return table.FirstOrDefault(e => e == entity);         }     } 4. Conclusion So there you have it, a fully functional Repository implementation for your RIA Domain Services that can be consumed by your ASP.NET and MVC applications.  I have uploaded the source code along with unit tests and a sample web application that queries the Customers table from inside a Controller, as well as a Silverlight usage example. As always, I welcome any comments or suggestions on the approach I have taken.  If there is enough interest, I plan on contacting Colin Blair or maybe even the man himself, Brad Abrams, to see if this is something worthy of inclusion in the WCF RIA Services Contrib project.  What do you think? Enjoy!

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• Ajax Control Toolkit November 2011 Release

  - by Stephen Walther

  I’m happy to announce the November 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This release introduces a new Balloon Popup control and several enhancements to the existing Tabs control including support for on-demand loading of tab content, support for vertical tabs, and support for keyboard tab navigation. We also fixed the top-voted bugs associated with the Tabs control reported at CodePlex.com. You can download the new release by visiting the CodePlex website: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Alternatively, the fast and easy way to get the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit is to use NuGet. Open your Library Package Manager console in Visual Studio 2010 and type: After you install the Ajax Control Toolkit through NuGet, please do a Rebuild of your project (the menu option Build, Rebuild). After you do a Rebuild, the ajaxToolkit prefix will appear in Intellisense: Using the Balloon Popup Control Why a new Balloon Popup control? The Balloon Popup control is the second most requested new feature for the Ajax Control Toolkit according to CodePlex votes: The Balloon Popup displays a message in a balloon when you shift focus to a control, click a control, or hover over a control. You can use the Balloon Popup, for example, to display instructions for TextBoxes which appear in a form: Here’s the code used to create the Balloon Popup: <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm1" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtFirstName" Runat="server" /> <asp:Panel ID="pnlFirstNameHelp" runat="server"> Please enter your first name </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:BalloonPopupExtender TargetControlID="txtFirstName" BalloonPopupControlID="pnlFirstNameHelp" BalloonSize="Small" UseShadow="true" runat="server" /> You also can use the Balloon Popup to explain hard to understand words in a text document: Here’s how you display the Balloon Popup when you hover over the link: The point of the conversation was <asp:HyperLink ID="lnkObfuscate" Text="obfuscated" CssClass="hardWord" runat="server" /> by his incessant coughing. <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm1" runat="server" /> <asp:Panel id="pnlObfuscate" Runat="server"> To bewilder or render something obscure </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:BalloonPopupExtender TargetControlID="lnkObfuscate" BalloonPopupControlID="pnlObfuscate" BalloonStyle="Cloud" UseShadow="true" DisplayOnMouseOver="true" Runat="server" />   There are four important properties which you need to know about when using the Balloon Popup control: BalloonSize – The three balloon sizes are Small, Medium, and Large. BalloonStyle -- The two built-in styles are Rectangle and Cloud. UseShadow – When true, a drop shadow appears behind the popup. Position – Can have the values Auto, BottomLeft, BottomRight, TopLeft, TopRight. When set to Auto, which is the default, the Balloon Popup will appear where it has the most screen real estate. The following screenshots illustrates how these settings affect the appearance of the Balloon Popup: Customizing the Balloon Popup You can customize the appearance of the Balloon Popup by creating your own Cascading Style Sheet and Sprite. The Ajax Control Toolkit sample site includes a sample of a custom Oval Balloon Popup style: This custom style was created by using a custom Cascading Style Sheet and image. You point the Balloon Popup at a custom Cascading Style Sheet and Cascading Style Sheet class by using the CustomCssUrl and CustomClassName properties like this: <asp:TextBox ID="txtCustom" autocomplete="off" runat="server" /> <br /> <asp:Panel ID="Panel3" runat="server"> This is a custom BalloonPopupExtender style created with a custom Cascading Style Sheet. </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:BalloonPopupExtender ID="bpe1" TargetControlID="txtCustom" BalloonPopupControlID="Panel3" BalloonStyle="Custom" CustomCssUrl="CustomStyle/BalloonPopupOvalStyle.css" CustomClassName="oval" UseShadow="true" runat="server" />   Learn More about the Balloon Popup To learn more about the Balloon Popup control, visit the sample page for the Balloon Popup at the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/BalloonPopup/BalloonPopupExtender.aspx Improvements to the Tabs Control In this release, we introduced several important new features for the existing Tabs control. We also fixed all of the top-voted bugs for the Tabs control. On-Demand Loading of Tab Content Here is the scenario. Imagine that you are using the Tabs control in a Web Forms page. The Tabs control displays two tabs: Customers and Products. When you click the Customers tab then you want to see a list of customers and when you click on the Products tab then you want to see a list of products. In this scenario, you don’t want the list of customers and products to be retrieved from the database when the page is initially opened. The user might never click on the Products tab and all of the work to load the list of products from the database would be wasted. In this scenario, you want the content of a tab panel to be loaded on demand. The products should only be loaded from the database and rendered to the browser when you click the Products tab and not before. The Tabs control in the November 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes a new property named OnDemand. When OnDemand is set to the value True, a tab panel won’t be loaded until you click its associated tab. Here is the code for the aspx page: <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm1" runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:TabContainer ID="tabs" OnDemand="false" runat="server"> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel HeaderText="Customers" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <h2>Customers</h2> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomers" DataSourceID="srcCustomers" runat="server" /> <asp:SqlDataSource ID="srcCustomers" SelectCommand="SELECT * FROM Customers" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:StoreDB %>" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel HeaderText="Products" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <h2>Products</h2> <asp:GridView ID="grdProducts" DataSourceID="srcProducts" runat="server" /> <asp:SqlDataSource ID="srcProducts" SelectCommand="SELECT * FROM Products" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:StoreDB %>" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> </ajaxToolkit:TabContainer> Notice that the TabContainer includes an OnDemand=”True” property. The Tabs control contains two Tab Panels. The first tab panel uses a DataGrid and SqlDataSource to display a list of customers and the second tab panel uses a DataGrid and SqlDataSource to display a list of products. And here is the code-behind for the page: using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace ACTSamples { public partial class TabsOnDemand : System.Web.UI.Page { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { srcProducts.Selecting += new SqlDataSourceSelectingEventHandler(srcProducts_Selecting); } void srcProducts_Selecting(object sender, SqlDataSourceSelectingEventArgs e) { Debugger.Break(); } } } The code-behind file includes an event handler for the Products SqlDataSource Selecting event. The handler breaks into the debugger by calling the Debugger.Break() method. That way, we can know when the Products SqlDataSource actually retrieves the list of products. When the OnDemand property has the value False then the Selecting event handler is called immediately when the page is first loaded. The contents of all of the tabs are loaded (and the contents of the unselected tabs are hidden) when the page is first loaded. When the OnDemand property has the value True then the Selecting event handler is not called when the page is first loaded. The event handler is not called until you click on the Products tab. If you never click on the Products tab then the list of products is never retrieved from the database. If you want even more control over when the contents of a tab panel gets loaded then you can use the TabPanel OnDemandMode property. This property accepts the following three values: None – Never load the contents of the tab panel again after the page is first loaded. Once – Wait until the tab is selected to load the contents of the tab panel Always – Load the contents of the tab panel each and every time you select the tab. There is a live demonstration of the OnDemandMode property here in the sample page for the Tabs control: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Tabs/Tabs.aspx Displaying Vertical Tabs With the November 2011 Release, the Tabs control now supports vertical tabs. To create vertical tabs, just set the TabContainer UserVerticalStripPlacement property to the value True like this: <ajaxToolkit:TabContainer ID="tabs" OnDemand="false" UseVerticalStripPlacement="true" runat="server"> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel ID="TabPanel1" HeaderText="First Tab" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </p> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> <ajaxToolkit:TabPanel ID="TabPanel2" HeaderText="Second Tab" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </p> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:TabPanel> </ajaxToolkit:TabContainer> In addition, you can use the TabStripPlacement property to control whether the tab strip appears at the left or right or top or bottom of the tab panels: Tab Keyboard Navigation Another highly requested feature for the Tabs control is support for keyboard navigation. The Tabs control now supports the arrow keys and the Home and End keys. In order for the arrow keys to work, you must first move focus to the tab control on the page by either clicking on a tab with your mouse or repeatedly hitting the Tab key. You can try out the new keyboard navigation support by trying any of the demos included in the Tabs sample page: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Tabs/Tabs.aspx Summary I hope that you take advantage of the new Balloon Popup control and the new features which we introduced for the Tabs control. We added a lot of new features to the Tabs control in this release including support for on-demand tabs, support for vertical tabs, and support for tab keyboard navigation. I want to thank the developers on the Superexpert team for all of the hard work which they put into this release.

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• Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Oracle WebCenter Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The beginning of Oracle OpenWorld is only a few short days away. This week on the WebCenter blog, we’ll focus in on the sessions you definitely don’t want to miss while you’re in San Francisco next week.  Monday, October 1 will be a day focused on strategy.  Here are the sessions you want to add to your calendar: CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West – 3001 Start things off with Oracle WebCenter’s Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism and Roel Stalman, VP of Product Management to learn more about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and to understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage, customers, empower employees, and enable partners. This session will also feature Richard Backx, Business IT Architect/Consultant, for the Dutch telecom, KPN. Richard has played a key role in the roll-out of WebCenter products for KPN’s multibrand portals with a specific focus on creating the best customer journey platform for all the company’s digital channels. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! Dig deeper into WebCenter’s strategy for its ECM, portal, web experience management and social collaboration in the following sessions: CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West – 3001 Oracle WebCenter Content provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM - Moscone West - 3009 Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001 To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, extend the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001 One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.Attention WebCenter Customers: Last Day to RSVP for WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream invite Oracle WebCenter customers to a private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco's finest hotels. Please join us and fellow Oracle WebCenter customers for hors d'oeuvres and cocktails at this exclusive reception. Don't miss this opportunity to meet and talk with executives from Oracle WebCenter product management and product marketing, and premier Oracle WebCenter partners. We look forward to seeing you! RSVP today.

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• Borrow Harry Potter’s eBooks from Amazon Kindle Owner’s Lending Library

  - by Rekha

  From June 19, 2012, Amazon.com customers can borrow All 7 Harry Potter books from Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (KOLL). The books are available in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Prime Members of Amazon owning Kindle, can choose from 145,000 titles. US customers can borrow for free with no due dates and also as frequently as a month. There are no limits on the number of copies available for the customers. Anyone can read the books simultaneously by borrowing them. The bookmarks in the borrowed books are saved, for the customers to continue reading where they stopped even when they re-borrow the book. Prime members also have the opportunity to enjoy free two day shipping on millions of items and  unlimited streaming of over 18,000 movies and TV episodes. Amazon has got an exclusive license from J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore. The series cost between $7.99 and $9.99 for the individual books. Pottermore’s investment on these books are compensated by Amazon’s large payment. Via Amazon. CC Image Credit Amazon KOLL.

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• Oracle buys Secerno

  - by Paulo Folgado

  Adds Heterogeneous Database Firewall to Oracle's Industry-leading Database Security SolutionsRedwood Shores, CA - May 20, 2010News FactsOracle has agreed to acquire Secerno, a provider of database firewall solutions for Oracle and non-Oracle databases.Organizations require a comprehensive security solution which includes database firewall functionality to prevent sophisticated attacks from reaching databases.Secerno's solution adds a critical defensive layer of security around databases, which blocks unauthorized activity in real-time.Secerno's products are expected to augment Oracle's industry-leading portfolio of database security solutions, including Oracle Advanced Security, Oracle Database Vault and Oracle Audit Vault to further ensure data privacy, protect against threats, and enable regulatory compliance.The combination of Oracle and Secerno underscores Oracle's commitment to provide customers with the most comprehensive and advanced security offering that helps reduce the costs and complexity of securing their information throughout the enterprise.The transaction is expected to close before end of June 2010. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.Supporting Quote:"The Secerno acquisition is in direct response to increasing customer challenges around mitigating database security risk," said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies. "Secerno's database firewall product acts as a first line of defense against external threats and unauthorized internal access with a protective perimeter around Oracle and non-Oracle databases. Together, Oracle's complete set of database security solutions and Secerno's technology will provide customers with the ability to safeguard their critical business information.""As a provider of database firewall solutions that help customers safeguard their enterprise databases, Secerno is a natural addition to Oracle's industry-leading database security solutions," said Steve Hurn, CEO Secerno. "Secerno has been providing enterprises and their IT Security departments strong assurance that their databases are protected from attacks and breaches. We are excited to bring Secerno's domain expertise to Oracle, and ensure continuity and success for our current customers, partners and prospects."Support Resources:About Oracle and SecernoGeneral PresentationFAQCustomer LetterPartner Letter

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• Large invoice database structure and rendering

  - by user132624

  Our client has a MS SQL database that has 1 million customer invoice records in it. Using the database, our client wants its customers to be able to log into a frontend web site and then be able to view, modify and download their company’s invoices. Given the size of the database and the large number of customers who may log into the web site at any time, we are concerned about data base engine performance and web page invoice rendering performance. The 1 million invoice database is for just 90 days sales, so we will remove invoices over 90 days old from the database. Most of the invoices have multiple line items. We can easily convert our invoices into various data formats so for example it is easy for us to convert to and from SQL to XML with related schema and XSLT. Any data conversion would be done on another server so as not to burden the web interface server. We have tentatively decided to run the web site on a .NET Framework IIS web server using MS SQL on MS Azure. How would you suggest we structure our database for best performance? For example, should we put all the invoices of all customers located within the same 5 digit or 6 digit zip codes into the same table? Or could we set up a separate home directory for each customer on IIS and place each customer’s invoices in each customer’s home directory in XML format? And secondly what would you suggest would be the best method to render customer invoices on a web page and allow customers to modify for best performance? The ADO.net XML Data Set looks intriguing to us as a method, but we have never used it.

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• Introducing the BizTalk Maturity Assessment

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/22/153208.aspxIn the past I have had a number of customer engagements where Ive been called in because there are problems. There were often common themes to these issues faced by customers and I had a few processes, tools and ideas about how I helped these customers.Over time I learned developed a way of analysing the customers position and this has evolved into the BizTalk Maturity Assessment which I wanted to share.  The idea is that you complete a survey which asks various things related to BizTalk in your organisation.  You are then presented with a visualization of where you sit in terms of maturity in different areas of your BizTalk capability.You should be able to see the areas you need to improve and by retaking the survey at regular intervals you should be able to demonstrate improvement.I have taken the original idea and then been joined by some of my good friends in the community and included ideas from their experience and I think we have something which will help a lot of customers and something which could be a key community asset in the future.The site for this project is on the following link:http://www.biztalkmaturity.com/There is also a case study where I have used the original assessment which demonstrated how I originally used this to help one customer get from a place where they had lots of problems to a place where they were doing BizTalk really well.

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• UPK and the Oracle Unified Method can be used to deploy Oracle-Based Business Solutions

  - by Emily Chorba

  Originally developed to support Oracle's acquisition strategy, the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) defines a common implementation language across all of Oracle's products and technologies. OUM is a flexible, scalable, and evolving body of knowledge that combines existing best practices and field experience with an industry standard framework that includes the latest thinking around agile implementation and cloud computing.    Strong, proven methods are essential to ensuring successful enterprise IT projects both within Oracle and for our customers and partners. OUM provides a collection of repeatable processes that are the basis for agile implementations of Oracle enterprise business solutions. OUM also provides a structure for tracking progress and managing cost and risks. OUM is applicable to any size or type of IT project. While OUM is a plan-based method—including overview material, task and artifact descriptions, and templates—the method is intended to be tailored to support the appropriate level of ceremony (or agility) required for each project. Guidance is provided for identifying the minimum subset of tasks, tailoring the approach, executing iterative and incremental planning, and applying agile techniques, including support for managing projects using Scrum. Supplemental guidance provides specific support for Oracle products, such as UPK. OUM is available to Oracle employees, partners, and customers. Internal Use at Oracle: Employees can download OUM from MyDesktop. OUM Partner Program: OUM is available free of charge to Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Diamond, Platinum, and Gold partners as a benefit of membership. These partners may download OUM from the Oracle Unified Method Knowledge Zone on OPN. OUM Customer Program: The OUM Customer Program allows customers to obtain copies of the method for their internal use by contracting with Oracle for a services engagement of two weeks or longer. Customers who have a signed contract with Oracle and meet the engagement qualification criteria as published on Customer tab of the OUM Website, are permitted to download the current release of OUM for their perpetual use. They may obtain subsequent releases published during a renewable, three-year access period To learn more about OUM, visit OUM Blog OUM on LinkedIn OUM on Twitter Emily Chorba, Principle Product Manager, Oracle User Productivity Kit

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• Security vulnerability and nda's [closed]

  - by Chris

  I want to propose a situation and gain insight from the communities thoughts. A customer, call them Customer X has a contract with a vendor, Vendor Y to provide an application and services. Customer X discovers a serious authentication vulnerability in Vendor Y's software. Vendor Y and Customer X has a discussion. Vendor Y acknowledges/confirms flaw. Vendor Y confirms they will put effort to fix. Customer X requests Vendor Y to inform all customers impacted by this. Vendor agrees. Fast forward 2 months, and the flaw has not been fixed. Patches were applied to mitigate but the flaw still exists. However, no customers were informed of issue. At this point customer X contacts Vendor Y to determine the status and understand why customer's were not informed. The vendor nicely reminds the customer they are under an NDA and are still working on the issue. A few questions/discussion pieces out of this. By discussing a software flaw with a vendor, does this imply you have agreed to any type of NDA disclosure? Additionally, what rights as does Customer X have to inform other customers of this vulnerability if vendor does not appear willing to comply? I (the op) am under the impression that when this situation occurs, you are supposed to notify vendor of issue, provide them with ample time to respond and if no response you are able to do what you wish with the information. I am thinking back to the MIT/subway incident where they contacted transit authorities, transit authorities didn't respond in a timely fashion so the students disclosed the information publicly on their own. Few things to note about this: I am not the customer in above situation, also lets assume for purposes of keeping discussion inline that customer X has no intentions of disclosing information, they are merely concerned and interested in making sure other customers are aware until it is fixed so they do not expierence a major security breach. (More information can be supplied if needed to add context to question. )

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• Oracle Buys Compendium - Adds Leading Content Marketing Platform to Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  News Facts Oracle today announced that it has acquired Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers’ lifecycle. Compendium’s data-driven approach aligns relevant content with customer data and profiles to help companies more effectively attract prospects, engage buyers, accelerate conversion of prospects to opportunities, increase adoption, and drive revenue growth. Compendium’s innovative solution complements Oracle’s industry leading Eloqua Marketing Cloud which is a part of Oracle’s comprehensive Customer Experience solution. The combination of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud with Compendium is expected to enable modern marketers to align persona-based content to customers’ digital body language to increase “top-of-funnel” customer engagement, improve the quality of sales leads, realize the highest return on their marketing investment, and increase customer loyalty. More information on this announcement can be found at http://www.oracle.com/compendium. Supporting Quotes “As customers increasingly access information through online and mobile channels, the buying process is shifting from sales-driven to marketing-driven. Now, more than ever, marketers are challenged to deliver relevant and engaging content across multiple channels and throughout the customer lifecycle,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “By adding Compendium’s content marketing platform to Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud, customers will be able to capture more prospects, improve the customer experience and drive top line revenue.” “Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud is uniquely positioned to capture a prospect’s digital body language to help companies know each buyer’s demographics, behaviors and influencers,” said Chris Baggott, Compendium CEO. “By combining this buyer profile with Compendium’s data-driven content marketing platform, marketers will be able to deliver the right content, to the right individual across the right channel at the right time. We are very excited to now be a part of the industry’s most complete marketing cloud solution, giving us a global stage to deliver innovative content marketing solutions.” Supporting Resources About Oracle and Compendium General Presentation Customer and Partner Letter FAQ

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• Guest Blog: Secure your applications based on your business model, not your application architecture, by Yaldah Hakim

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Today’s businesses are looking for new ways to engage their customers, embrace mobile applications, while staying in compliance, improving security and driving down costs.  For many, the solution to that problem is to host their applications with a Cloud Services provider, but concerns that a hosted application will be less secure continue to cause doubt. Oracle is recognized by Gartner as a leader in the User Provisioning and Identity and Access Governance magic quadrants, and has helped thousands of companies worldwide to secure their enterprise applications and identities.  Now those same world class IDM capabilities are available as a managed service, both for enterprise applications, as well has Oracle hosted applications. --- Listen to our IDM in the cloud podcast to hear Yvonne Wilson, Director of the IDM Practice in Cloud Service, explain how Oracle Managed Services provides IDM as a service ---Selecting OracleManaged Cloud Services to deploy and manage Oracle Identity Management Services is a smart business decision for a variety of reasons. Oracle hosted Identity Management infrastructure is deployed securely, resilient to failures, and supported by Oracle experts. In addition, Oracle  Managed Cloud Services monitors customer solutions from several perspectives to ensure they continue to work smoothly over time. Customers gain the benefit of Oracle Identity Management expertise to achieve predictable and effective results for their organization.Customers can select Oracle to host and manage any number of Oracle IDM products as a service as well as other Oracle’s security products, providing a flexible, cost effective alternative to onsite hardware and software costs.Security is a major concern for all organizations- making it increasingly important to partner with a company like Oracle to ensure consistency and a layered approach to security and compliance when selecting a cloud provider.  Oracle Cloud Service makes this possible for our customers by taking away the headache and complexity of managing Identity management infrastructure and other security solutions. For more information:http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/managed-cloud-services/overview/index.htmlTwitter-https://twitter.com/OracleCloudZoneFacebook - http://www.facebook.com/OracleCloudComputing

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• Oracle and Microsoft Expand Choice and Flexibility in Deploying Oracle Software in the Cloud

  - by Gene Eun

  Oracle and Microsoft have entered into a new partnership that will help customers embrace cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility in how to deploy Oracle software.  Here are the key elements of the partnership: Effective today, our customers can run supported Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure Effective today, Oracle provides license mobility for customers who want to run Oracle software on Windows Azure Microsoft will add Infrastructure Services instances with popular configurations of Oracle software including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server to the Windows Azure image gallery Microsoft will offer fully licensed and supported Java in Windows Azure Oracle will offer Oracle Linux, with a variety of Oracle software, as preconfigured instances on Windows Azure Oracle’s strategy and commitment is to support multiple platforms, and Microsoft Windows has long been an important supported platform.  Oracle is now extending that support to Windows Server Hyper-V and Window Azure by providing certification and support for Oracle applications, middleware, database, Java and Oracle Linux on Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure. As of today, customers can deploy Oracle software on Microsoft private clouds and Windows Azure, as well as Oracle private and public clouds and other supported cloud environments. For information related to software licensing in Windows Azure, see Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment. Also, Oracle Support policies as they apply to Oracle software running in Windows Azure or on Windows Server Hyper-V are covered in two My Oracle Support (MOS) notes which are shown below: MOS Note 1563794.1 Certified Software on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V - NEW MOS Note 417770.1 Oracle Linux Support Policies for Virtualization and Emulation - UPDATED

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• A Multi-Channel Contact Center Can Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

  - by Tom Floodeen

  In order to remain competitive in today’s market, CRM customers need to provide feature-rich superior call center experience to their customers across all communication channels while improving their service agent productivity. They also require their call center to be deeply integrated with their CRM system; and they need to implement all this quickly, seamlessly, and without breaking the bank. Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the world’s leading application suite for automated customer-facing operations for Sales and Marketing and for managing all aspects of providing service to customers. Oracle’s Contact On Demand (COD) is a world-class carrier grade hosted multi-channel contact center solution that can be deployed in days without up-front capital expenditures or integration costs. Agents can work efficiently from anywhere in the world with 360-degree views into customer interactions and real-time business intelligence. Customers gain from rapid and personalized sales and service, while organizations can dramatically reduce costs and increase revenues Oracle’s latest update of Siebel CRM now comes pre-integrated with Oracle’s Contact On Demand. This solution seamlessly runs fully-functional contact center provided by a single vendor, significantly reducing your total cost of ownership. This solution supports Siebel 7.8 and higher for Voice and Siebel 8.1 and higher for Voice and Siebel CRM Chat.  The impressive feature list of Oracle’s COD solution includes full-control CTI toolbar with Voice, Chat, and Click to Dial features.  It also includes context-sensitive screens, automated desktops, built-in IVR, Multidimensional routing, Supervisor and Quality monitoring, and Instant Provisioning. The solution also ships with Extensible Web Services interface for implementing more complex business processes. Click here to learn how to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership of your contact center. Contact Ann Singh at [email protected] for additional information.

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• Oracle(R) Buys Pre-Paid Software Assets From eServGlobal

  - by Paulo Folgado

  Oracle to Deliver Scalable Carrier-Grade Pre-Paid Solution Based on Open, Flexible IT-Based Platform News Facts ·        Oracle has agreed to acquire certain pre-paid assets of eServGlobal, a provider of advanced IT-based, pre-paid charging solutions for the communications industry. ·        eServGlobal's Universal Service Platform (USP) includes a pre-paid charging application, a network-services platform and a messaging gateway. The ChargingMax, NumberMax, uVOMS, MessageMax, PromoMax Express and Social Relationship Management software currently supports more than 25 tier-one customers including the world's largest IT-based installation of pre-paid services. ·        The combination of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management and the USP applications is expected to accelerate the shift from network- to IT-based pre-paid systems by providing the first convergent, open IT-based platform from a leading business software and hardware systems company. ·        Customers are expected to benefit from traditional carrier-grade, pre-paid service authorization with IT-grade flexibility that supports any service or network, is easier to deploy and maintain and delivers an overall lower total cost of ownership. ·        The transaction is expected to close in the second half of this year. Supporting Quote ·        "The majority of mobile phone users worldwide use pre-paid plans, and that number is growing exponentially. Oracle Communications applications combined with the pre-paid software assets from eServGlobal will provide our customers with highly available and scalable carrier-grade, pre-paid software on an open, convergent platform. This will enable our customers to deliver traditional pre-paid voice services and easily introduce hybrid pre-paid and post-paid plans with targeted pricing, promotions and service bundles that include voice, data and network services," said Liam Maxwell, vice president of products, Oracle Communications. Supporting Resources About Oracle and eServGlobal USP General Presentation FAQ

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• Sync Google Contacts with QuickBooks

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus ADO.NET Providers offer an easy way to integrate with different data sources. In this article, we include a fully functional application that can be used to synchronize contacts between Google and QuickBooks. Like our QuickBooks ADO.NET Provider, the included application supports both the desktop versions of QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online Edition. Getting the Contacts Step 1: Google accounts include a number of contacts. To obtain a list of a user's Google Contacts, issue a query to the Contacts table. For example: SELECT * FROM Contacts. Step 2: QuickBooks stores contact information in multiple tables. Depending on your use case, you may want to synchronize your Google Contacts with QuickBooks Customers, Employees, Vendors, or a combination of the three. To get data from a specific table, issue a SELECT query to that table. For example: SELECT * FROM Customers Step 3: Retrieving all results from QuickBooks may take some time, depending on the size of your company file. To narrow your results, you may want to use a filter by including a WHERE clause in your query. For example: SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE (Name LIKE '%James%') AND IncludeJobs = 'FALSE' Synchronizing the Contacts Synchronizing the contacts is a simple process. Once the contacts from Google and the customers from QuickBooks are available, they can be compared and synchronized based on user preference. The sample application does this based on user input, but it is easy to create one that does the synchronization automatically. The INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements available in both data providers makes it easy to create, update, or delete contacts in either data source as needed. Pre-Built Demo Application The executable for the demo application can be downloaded here. Note that this demo is built using BETA builds of the ADO.NET Provider for Google V2 and ADO.NET Provider for QuickBooks V3, and will expire in 2013. Source Code You can download the full source of the demo application here. You will need the Google ADO.NET Data Provider V2 and the QuickBooks ADO.NET Data Provider V3, which can be obtained here.

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