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• Silverlight Cream for March 14, 2011 -- #1060

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Lazar Nikolov, Rudi Grobler, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Pete Brown, Jessica Foster, Chris Rouw, Andy Beaulieu, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things)" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Retrofitting the Trial API" Jessica Foster Shoutouts: Rudi Grobler has a post up that's not Silverlight, but it's cool stuff you may be interested in: WPF Themes now available on NuGet From SilverlightCream.com: Simulating rain in Silverlight Lazar Nikolov has a cool tutorial up at SilverlightShow... Simulating rain. Nice demo near to top, and source code plus a very nice tutorial on the entire process. Making the ApplicationBar bindable Rudi Grobler has a couple new posts up... first this one on making the WP7 AppBar bindable... he's created 2 simple wrappers that make it possible to bind to a method... with source as usual! All about Splash Screens in WP7 – Creating animated Splash Screen WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is about splash screens in WP7, but he goes one better with animated splash screens. Lots of good information including closing points in more of a FAQ-style listing. Testing Network Availability Jesse Liberty's latest is on testing for network availability in your WP7 app. This should be required reading for anyone building a WP7 app, since you never know when the network is going to be there or not. Lighting up on Windows 7 with Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight Pete Brown's latest post is about the Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight or NESL library. Pete describes what NESL is, a link to the library, installing it, and tons more information. If you wanna know or try NESL... this looks like the place to start. Retrofitting the Trial API Jessica Foster paused on the way to shipping her WP7 app to add in the trial API code. Check out what she went through to complete that task, as she explains the steps and directions she took. Good description, links, and code. WP7 Insights #2: Creating a Splash Screen in WP7 In the 2nd post in his series on WP7 development, Chris Rouw is discussing a WP7 splash screen. He gives some good external links for references then gets right into discussing his code. Air Hockey for Windows Phone 7 Andy Beaulieu shares a tutorial he wrote for the Expression Toolbox site, using the Physics Helper Library and Farseer Physics Engine -- an Air Hockey game for WP7. A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things) I think Michael Washington had the best comment about Colin Eberhardt's latest outing: "Another WOW example" ... drop this in the pretty darn cool category: an attached behavior that uses a Thumb control within a popup to adorn any UI element to allow the user to resize it! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed...

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Summit is coming up, and I thought I’d post a few things. Summit Old... At the PASS Summit, you will get the chance to hear presentations by the SQL Server establishment. Just about every big name in the SQL Server world is a regular at the PASS Summit, so you will get to hear and meet people like Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen) (who just recently got awarded MVP status for the 20th year running), and from all around the world such as the UK’s Chris Webb (@technitrain) or Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) from India. Almost all the household names in SQL Server will be there, including a large contingent from Microsoft. The PASS Summit is by far the best place to meet the legends of SQL Server. And they’re not all old. Some are, but most of them are younger than you might think. ...Summit New... The hottest topics are often about the newest technologies (such as SQL Server 2012). But you will almost certainly learn new stuff about older versions too. But that’s not what I wanted to pick on for this point. There are many new speakers at every PASS Summit, and content that has not been covered in other places. This year, for example, LobsterPot’s Roger Noble (@roger_noble) is giving a presentation for the first time. He’s a regular around the Australian circuit, but this is his first time presenting to a US audience. New Zealand’s Paul White (@sql_kiwi) is attending his first PASS Summit, and will be giving over four hours of incredibly deep stuff that has never been presented anywhere in the US before (I can’t say the world, because he did present similar material in Adelaide earlier in the year). ...Summit Borrowed... No, I’m not talking about plagiarism – the talks you’ll hear are all their own work. But you will get a lot of stuff you’ll be able to take back and apply at work. The PASS Summit sessions are not full of sales-pitches, telling you about how great things could be if only you’d buy some third-party vendor product. It’s simply not that kind of conference, and PASS doesn’t allow that kind of talk to take place. Instead, you’ll be taught techniques, and be able to download scripts and slides to let you perform that magic back at work when you get home. You will definitely find plenty of ideas to borrow at the PASS Summit. ...Summit Blue Yeah – and there’s karaoke. Blue - Jason - SQL Karaoke - YouTube

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• SQLOS and Cloud Infrastructure sessions at PASS Summit 2012

  - by SQLOS Team

  The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs... Also, catch Thursday's keynote with Quentin Clark which will feature a cool IaaS demo!   SQL Server in Windows Azure VM Sessions CLD-309-A SQLCAT: Best Practices and Lessons Learned on SQL Server in an Azure VM Steve Howard, Arvind Ranasaria - Wednesday 11/6 10:15 This session looked at some best practices to optimize Networking, Memory, Disk IO and high availability based on lessons learned during SQLCat work with customer deployments. Well worth catching the recording.   SQL Server in Azure VM patterns: Hybrid Disaster Recovery, data movement and BI Guy Bowerman, Peter Saddow, Michael Washam, Ross LoForte - Friday 11/9 9:45 Rm 613 [Note: In the guides this has an outdated title.] This session has a focus on SQL Server Azure VM solutions. Starting with the basics and then going deeper into: - New features in the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.0 to help plan and size SQL VM migrations.- A Look at a Windows Azure VM SQL Server app making use of load balancing and SQL Server high availability features.- A BI case study running SQL BI components in Azure VMs and making use of Windows 8 tiles.- A training class in a VM case study.   SQLOS Sessions DBA-500-HD Inside SQLOS 2012 (half-day session) Bob Ward - Wednesday 11/6 1:30pm Bob Ward from CSS applies his wealth of experience to look at the internals of SQLOS and what's changed in the various SQL 2012 components, including memory, resource governor, scheduler.   DBA-403-M: SQLCAT: Memory Manager Changes in SQL Server 2012 Gus Apostol, Jerome Halmans - 1:30pm Covers the redesigned SQLOS memory manager in SQL Server 2012 including the new page allocator for any size pages (and all that implies), DMVs, demo's. Not sure why this was placed at the same time as the SQLOS half-day session, but since it's recorded it's available for catch-up.   - Guy   Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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• Culture Shmulture?

  - by steve.diamond

  I've been thinking about "Customer Experience Management" lately. Here at Oracle, we arguably have the most complete suite of applications for managing the customer experience across and in the context of multiple channels -- from marketing to loyalty to contact center to self-service to analytics offerings, and more. And stay tuned, because in coming months let's just say we'll have even more to talk about on this front. But that said............ Last weekend my wife and I stayed at one of the premiere hotel chains on the planet. I won't name them, but we all know the short list. It could have been the St. Regis or the Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons or Hyatt Park or....This stay, at this particular hotel, was simply outstanding. Within a chain known for providing "above and beyond" levels of service, this particular hotel, under this particular manager, exceeded expectations on so many fronts. For example, at the Spa we mentioned to the two attendants that my wife is seven months pregnant and that we had previously had a lot of trouble conceiving. We then went to our room. Ten minutes later we heard a knock at the door and received a plate of chocolate covered strawberries with a heartfelt note and an inspiring quote, signed by the two spa attendees. The following day we arranged to have a bellhop drive us to the beach. Although they had a pre-arranged beach shuttle service with time limits, etc., he greeted us by saying, "I'm yours for the day until 4 p.m. Whatever you want to do is fine by me, as long as it's legal!" The morning that we left we arranged to have a taxi drive us to the airport--a nearly 40 mile drive. What showed up was a private coach complete with navy blue suited driver dude. And we were charged the taxi fare price. And there were many other awesome exchanges I won't mention here, although I did email the GM of this hotel two nights ago and expressed our effusive praise and gratitude. I'd submit that this hotel chain would have a definitive advantage using even more Oracle software to manage and optimize its customer interactions (yes, they are a customer). But WITHOUT the culture--that management team--and that instillation of aligned values across all employees of exemplifying 'the golden rule,' I wonder how much technology really matters in providing a distinctively positive and memorable customer experience. Lest you think I'm alone in these pontifications, have you read Paul Greenberg's blog lately? Have you seen one of his most recent posts? Now this SPECIFIC post is NOT about customer service per se. But it is about people. So yes, please think long and hard about the technology you seek to deploy. But never forget who will be interacting with your systems, and your customers.

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• The Politics of Junk Filtering

  - by mikef

  If the national postal service, such as the Royal Mail in the UK, were to go through your letters and throw away all the stuff it considered to be junk instead of delivering it to you, you might be rather pleased until you discovered that it took a too liberal decision about what was junk. Catalogs you'd asked for? Junk! Requests from charities? Who needs them! Parcels from competing carriers? Toss them away! The possibility for abuse for an agency that was in a monopolistic position is just too scary to tolerate. After all, the postal service could charge 'consultancy fees' to any sender who wanted to guarantee that his stuff got delivered, or they could even farm this out to other companies. Because Microsoft Outlook is just about the only email client used by the international business community in the west, its' SPAM filter is the final arbiter as to what gets read. My Outlook 2007, set to the default settings, junks all the perfectly innocent email newsletters that I subscribe to. Whereas Google Mail, Yahoo, and LIVE are all pretty accurate in detecting spam, Outlook makes all sorts of silly mistakes. The documentation speaks techno-babble about 'advanced heuristics', but the result boils down to an inaccurate mess. The more that Microsoft fiddles with it, the stickier the mess. To make matters worse, it still lets through obvious spam. The filter is occasionally updated along with other automatic 'security' updates you opt for automatic updates. As an editor for a popular online publication that provides a newsletter service, this is an obvious source of frustration. We follow all the best-practices we know about. We ensure that it is a trivial task to opt out of receiving it. We format the newsletter to the requirements of the Service Providers. We follow up, and resolve, every complaint. As a result, it gets delivered. It is galling to discover that, after all that effort, Outlook then often judges the contents to be junk on a whim, so you don't get to see it. A few days ago, Microsoft published the PST file format specification, under pressure from a European Union interoperability investigation by ECIS (the European Committee for Interoperable Systems). The objective was that other applications could then access existing PST files so as to migrate from existing Outlook installations to other solutions. Joaquín Almunia, the current competition commissioner, should now turn his attention to the more subtle problems of Microsoft Outlook. The Junk problem seems to have come from clumsy implementation of client-side spam filtering rather than from deliberate exploitation of a monopoly on the desktop email client for businesses, but it is a growing problem nonetheless. Cheers, Michael Francis

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• Silverlight Cream for June 19, 2011 -- #1109

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Oren Gal, Rudi Grobler, Stephen Price, Erno de Weerd, Joost van Schaik, WindowsPhoneGeek, Andrea Boschin, and Vikram Pendse. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Multiple Page Printing in Silverlight4 - Part 3 - Printing Driving Directions" Oren Gal WP7: "Prototyping Windows Phone 7 Applications using SketchFlow" Vikram Pendse Shoutouts: Not Silverlight, but darned cool... Michael Crump has just what you need to get going with Kinect: The busy developers guide to the Kinect SDK Beta Rudi Grobler replies to a few questions about how he gets great WP7 screenshots: Screenshot Tools for WP7 From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 14 - Detecting Network Information of the Device Squeaking in just under the posting wire with 2 more WP7.1 posts is Kunal Chowdhury ... first up is this one on grabbing the mobile operator and othe rnetwork info in WP7.1 Windows Phone 7 (Mango) Tutorial - 15 - Detecting Device Information Kunal Chowdhury's latest is on using the DeviceStatus class in WP7.1 to detect device information such as is there is a physical keyboard installed, Memory Usage, Total Memory, etc. Multiple Page Printing in Silverlight4 - Part 3 - Printing Driving Directions Oren Gal has the final episode in his Multiple Page Printing Tutorial Trilogy up... and this is *way* cool... Printing the driving directions. AgFx hidden gem - PhoneApplicationFrameEx Rudi Grobler continues his previous post about AgFX with this one talking about the PhoneApplicationFrameEx class inside AgFx.Controls.Phone.dll.. a RootFrame replacement. Binding to ActualHeight or ActualWidth Stephen Price's latest XAML snippet is about Binding to ActualHeight or ActualWidth... you've probably tried to without luck... check out the workaround. Windows Phone 7: Drawing graphics for your application with Inkscape – Part I: Tiles Erno de Weerd decided to try the 'free' route to Drawing graphics for his WP7 app, and has part 1 of a tutorial series on doing that with Inkscape. Mogade powered Live Tile high score service for Windows Phone 7 Joost van Schaik expounds on his "Catch 'em Birds" WP7 game in the Marketplace... specifically the online leaderboard using the services of Mogade. Building a Reusable ICommand implementation for Windows Phone Mango MVVM apps WindowsPhoneGeek's latest post is discussing the ICommand interface available in WP7.1, and he demontstrates how to implement a reusable ICommand Implementation and how to use it. A TCP Server with Reactive Extensions Andrea Boschin is back posting about Rx, and promises this post *will be* Silverlight related eventually :) First up though is a socket server using Rx. Prototyping Windows Phone 7 Applications using SketchFlow Vikram Pendse has a tutorial up for prototyping your WP7* apps in Sketchflow including a 5 minute video Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Mark Zuckerberg tops the list of 50 Highest Rated CEOs. 3 Indian CEOs feature in the list.

  - by Gopinath

  Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is rated as the best CEO according to a report released by the popular employee reviews website Glassdoor.com. 50,000 employees reviews submitted to Glassdoor in the past 1 year are considered for preparing the rating list and Zukerberg topped the list with 99 percent approval to the question “Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company?”. Wow! That’s an amazing support to Zukergerg from his employees though stock market and share holders are not with him. Coincidently Facebook is also rated as the best company to work by Glassdoor in a recent survey. Here is the list of top 10 CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook; 99.3% Approval Bill McDermott & Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP; 99% Approval Dominic Barton, McKinsey & Company; 97% Approval Jim Turley, Ernst & Young; 96% Approval John E. Schlifske, Northwestern Mutual; 96% Approval Frank D’Souza, Cognizant Technology Solutions; 96% Approval Joe Tucci, EMC; 96% Approval Paul E. Jacobs, QUALCOMM; 95% Approval Richard K. Davis, U.S. Bank; 95% Approval Pierre Nanterme, Accenture; 95% Approval 3 Indian CEOs in the top 50 list – TCS, Wipro & MindTree The list featured three Indian CEOs and all the three are leading Software IT Services organizations in India and creating thousands of IT jobs.  Natarajan Chandrasekaran – the CEO of TCS is at 25th position, Krishnakumar Natarajan – the CEO of MindTree is at 28th position and  Wipro’s T.K.Kurien is at 44th position. Glad to see Indian CEO joining the global ranks. Tech Heavy Weights Google, Apple, Amazon & Microsoft aren’t in top 10 Another thing to note from this report is that the CEO’s of technology heavy weights Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are not in the top10 list- looks like their employees are not really happy with their bosses. At least not as happy as their peers at Facebook. Google CEO’s Larry Page is at 11th position, Jeff Bezos of Amazon at 16th position and Tim Cook of Apple is at 18th position. Well the Microsoft CEO is not even in the list of top 50!! You can read the complete list of ratings at Glassdoor.com’s blog. Photo Credit: Andrew Feinberg

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• Java Spotlight Episode 78: Jasper Potts on the JavaFX Scene Builder

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet An interview with Jasper Potts about the new JavaFX Scene Builder. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JavaFX Scene Builder Developer Preview available for testing. Java EE Unlock the Java EE 6 Platform using NetBeans 7.1 Tuning GlassFish for Production JSF 2.2 Update from Ed Burns John Rose at Microsoft's Lang.NEXT summit Recording of John's Java 8 presentation Jeroen Frijters' presentation on IKVM.NET Martin Odersky's keynote JVM Language Summit 2012 July 30 – August 1; Oracle Santa Clara (same as last year) CFP coming in a few days JVM Language Summit 2011 Presentations & Recordings Proposed development schedule for JDK 8 Say hello to Mathias Axelsson Events April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewJasper Potts is the Developer Experience Architect for the Java Client Group at Oracle. Responsible for technical design for everything thats sis on the core platform including Controls, Tools, Samples and Blueprints. Formally a lead engineer on the JavaFX & Swing teams working on the new JavaFX UI Controls and Graphics frameworks. Also responsible for designing, developing and presenting demos during the keynotes at JavaOne and Devoxx. A JavaOne Rockstar presenter having presented many sessions on JavaFX and Swing at many conferences. Prior to Sun he founded Xerto a desktop applications company developing Imagery a Java professional photo management application. In this interview Jasper talks about the recently release JavaFX Scene Builder. Mail Bag What’s Cool Contribute to GlassFish in Five Different Ways Stephen Chin and James Weaver join Oracle Adam Bien - Building Java FX 2 Libraries From Source With Maven 3 Paul Sandoz - Java Boomerang Building Jigsaw on Mac OS X using VirtualBox Mandy Chung: Jigsaw for Mac OS X

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• Slides, Code, and Photos from SPTechCon San Francisco 2011

  - by Brian Jackett

  Note: Updated 2/12/11 with links to both presentation materials.     This past week I presented two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011.  The first session was “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which .  Thanks to all of my attendees for this session.  They had so many great questions that we ran out of time before covering all of the planned material.  Especially for them I’ve provided the slides and code samples to walk through them on their own.     The second session was “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions”.  In talking with attendees before the session many were looking for 2007 content.  At the conference SharePoint 2010 was represented much more heavily than 2007, so I was glad to fill a need in the community. Slides and Code   Click here for “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” materials   Click here for “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” materials Photos Pictures on FaceBook   Click here Pictures on Windows Live (higher res)     SPTechCon San Fran Feb 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL Side Trips     Aside from the conference itself I also got to take a few side trips during the nights.  A special thanks to Dux Raymond Sy (Twitter) for organizing a Mongolian Hot Pot dinner on Monday (see pictures) and Michael Noel (Twitter) for organizing a Korean bbq dinner on Tuesday (again see pictures).  These were both new experiences for me and I thoroughly enjoyed the time with friends and trying something new.  Another thanks to Mark Miller (Twitter) for giving a personal tour around various sites of San Fran to myself and a few others.  It was great hearing the backstory of different neighborhoods and buildings from someone who had lived in the area for years.  Overall a great addition to the conference itself. Conclusion     This is the 3rd SPTechCon I’ve attended and the conference is getting better with each iteration.  The fine folks at BZ Media should be proud of the effort they’ve put in.  The next SPTechCon will be in Boston in June.  As of right now I won’t be attending that one but I highly recommend anyone to go if you have the chance.         -Frog Out

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• Overload Avoidance

  - by mikef

  A little under a year ago, Matt Simmons wrote a rather reflective article about his terrifying brush with stress-induced ill health. SysAdmins and DBAs have always been prime victims of work-related stress, but I wonder if that predilection is perhaps getting worse, despite the best efforts of Matt and his trusty side-kick, HR. The constant pressure from share-holders and CFOs to 'streamline' the workforce is partially to blame, but the more recent culprit is technology itself. I can't deny that the rise of technologies like virtualization, PowerCLI, PowerShell, and a host of others has been a tremendous boon. As a result, individual IT professionals are now able to handle more and more tasks and manage increasingly large and complex environments. But, without a doubt, this is a two-edged sword; The reward for competence is invariably more work. Unfortunately, SysAdmins play such a pivotal role in modern business that it's easy to see how they can very quickly become swamped in conflicting demands coming from different directions. However, that doesn't justify the ridiculous hours many are asked (or volunteer) to devote to their work. Admirably though their commitment is, it isn't healthy for them, it sets a dangerous expectation, and eventually something will snap. There are times when everyone needs to step up to the plate outside of 'normal' work hours, but that time isn't all the time. Naturally, with all that lovely technology, you can automate more and more of those tricky tasks to keep on top of the workload, but you are still only human. Clever though you may be, there is a very real limit to how far technology can take you. I'm not suggesting that you avoid these technologies, or deliberately aim for mediocrity; I'm just saying that you need to be more than just technically skilled (and Wesley Nonapeptide riffs on and around this topic in his excellent 'Telepathic Robot Drones' blog post). You need to be able to manage expectations, not just Exchange. Specifically, that means your own expectations of what you are capable of, because those come before everyone else's. After all, how can you keep your work-life balance under control, if you're the one setting the bar way too high? Talking to your manager, or discussing issues with your users, is only going to be productive if you have some facts to work with. "Know Thyself" is the first law of managing work overload, and this is obviously a skill which people develop over time; the fact that veteran Sysadmins exist at all is testament to this. I'd just love to know how you get to that point. Personally, I'm using RescueTime to keep myself honest, but I'm open to recommendations for better methods. Do you track your own time, do you have an intuitive sense of what is possible, or do you just rely on someone else to handle that all for you? Cheers, Michael

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• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 1

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Portland Departure - Farewell Stumptown Off I go on a plane from Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas, Nevada for the MIX 2010 Conference.  Before I even boarded the plane I met Paul Gomes a Senior Software Engineer and Andrew Saylor the Director of Business Development.  Both of these SoftSource Employees were en route to MIX themselves.  Being stoked to already be bumping into some top tier people, I bid them adieu and headed for my seat on the plane. I boarded, and had before the boarding opted for an upgrade.  I have to advise that if you get a chance on Alaska to upgrade at the last minute, take it.  It is usually only about $50 bucks or so and the additional space makes working on the ole' laptop actually possible (even on my monstrous 17" laptop).  So take it from me, click that upgrade button and fork over that $50 bucks for anything over an hour flight, the comfort and ability to work is usually worth it! Las Vegas Arrival - Welcome to Sin City Got into Las Vegas and swung out of the airport.  I then, with my comrade Beth attempted to get Internet Access for the next 3 hours.  Las Vegas, is not the most friendly Internet Access town.  I will just say it, I am not sure why any Internet related company (ala Microsoft) would hold a conference here.  There are more than a dozen other cities that would be better. But I digress, I did manage to get Internet Access after checking into the Circus Circus.  Don't ask why I ended up staying here, if you run into me in person, ask then because there is a whole story to it. At this point I started checking out each session further on the MIX10 Site.  There are a number I deemed necessary to check out.  However, you'll have to read my pending entries to see which session I jumped into. With this juncture in time reached, I got a ton of work to wrap up, some code to write and some sleep to get.  Until tomorrow, adieu. For more of my writing, thoughts, and other topics check out my other blog, where the original entry is posted.

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• Hype and LINQ

  - by Tony Davis

  "Tired of querying in antiquated SQL?" I blinked in astonishment when I saw this headline on the LinqPad site. Warming to its theme, the site suggests that what we need is to "kiss goodbye to SSMS", and instead use LINQ, a modern query language! Elsewhere, there is an article entitled "Why LINQ beats SQL". The designers of LINQ, along with many DBAs, would, I'm sure, cringe with embarrassment at the suggestion that LINQ and SQL are, in any sense, competitive ways of doing the same thing. In fact what LINQ really is, at last, is an efficient, declarative language for C# and VB programmers to access or manipulate data in objects, local data stores, ORMs, web services, data repositories, and, yes, even relational databases. The fact is that LINQ is essentially declarative programming in a .NET language, and so in many ways encourages developers into a "SQL-like" mindset, even though they are not directly writing SQL. In place of imperative logic and loops, it uses various expressions, operators and declarative logic to build up an "expression tree" describing only what data is required, not the operations to be performed to get it. This expression tree is then parsed by the language compiler, and the result, when used against a relational database, is a SQL string that, while perhaps not always perfect, is often correctly parameterized and certainly no less "optimal" than what is achieved when a developer applies blunt, imperative logic to the SQL language. From a developer standpoint, it is a mistake to consider LINQ simply as a substitute means of querying SQL Server. The strength of LINQ is that that can be used to access any data source, for which a LINQ provider exists. Microsoft supplies built-in providers to access not just SQL Server, but also XML documents, .NET objects, ADO.NET datasets, and Entity Framework elements. LINQ-to-Objects is particularly interesting in that it allows a declarative means to access and manipulate arrays, collections and so on. Furthermore, as Michael Sorens points out in his excellent article on LINQ, there a whole host of third-party LINQ providers, that offers a simple way to get at data in Excel, Google, Flickr and much more, without having to learn a new interface or language. Of course, the need to be generic enough to deal with a range of data sources, from something as mundane as a text file to as esoteric as a relational database, means that LINQ is a compromise and so has inherent limitations. However, it is a powerful and beautifully compact language and one that, at least in its "query syntax" guise, is accessible to developers and DBAs alike. Perhaps there is still hope that LINQ can fulfill Phil Factor's lobster-induced fantasy of a language that will allow us to "treat all data objects, whether Word files, Excel files, XML, relational databases, text files, HTML files, registry files, LDAPs, Outlook and so on, in the same logical way, as linked databases, and extract the metadata, create the entities and relationships in the same way, and use the same SQL syntax to interrogate, create, read, write and update them." Cheers, Tony.

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• What Would a CyberWar Do To Your Business?

  - by [email protected]

  In mid-February the Bipartisan Policy Center in the United States hosted Cyber ShockWave, a simulation of how the country might respond to a catastrophic cyber event. An attack takes place, they can't isolate where it came from or who did it, simulated press reports and market impacts...and the participants in the exercise have to brief the President and advise him/her on what to do. Last week, Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff who participated in the exercise summarized his findings in Federal Computer Weekly. The article, given FCW's readership and the topic is obviously focused on the public sector and US Federal policies. However, it touches on some broader issues that impact the private sector as well--which are applicable to any government and country/region-- such as: · How would the US (or any) government collaborate to identify and defeat such an attack? Chertoff calls this out as a current gap. How do the public and private sector collaborate today? How would the massive and disparate collection of agencies and companies act together in a crunch? · What would the impact on industries and global economies be? Chertoff, and a companion article in Government Computer News, only touch briefly on the subject--focusing on the impact on capital markets. "There's no question this has a disastrous impact on the economy," said Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush who played the role of treasury secretary. "You have financial markets shut down at this point, ordinary transactions are dramatically depleted, there's no question that this has a major impact on consumer confidence." That Got Me Thinking · How would it impact Oracle's customers? I know they have business continuity plans--is this one of their scenarios? What if it's not? How would it impact manufacturing lines, ATM networks, customer call centers... · How would it impact me and the companies I rely on? The supermarket down the street, my Internet Service Provider, the service station where I bought gas last night. I sure don't have any answers, and neither do Chertoff or the participants in the exercise. "I have to tell you that ... we are operating in a bit of unchartered territory." said Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who played the role of attorney general in the exercise. But it is a good thing that governments and businesses are considering this scenario and doing what they can to prevent it from happening.

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• Launch 2010 Technical Readiness Unofficial Q&amp;A.

  - by mbcrump

  I had an email from one of my readers about the 2010 Technical Readiness Series. Please read below: Hi Michael, I noticed you blogged a while back that you were going to attend MS 2010 Launch event. I’m going to the session in Seattle on May 27, is it worth it to attend? Also, I’m wondering if they give any free software away like VS2010 Pro? Any decent vendors? Looking forward to hearing back from you. I decided this information would probably benefit several instead of just responding back to the reader. In case you are not aware, MS has a 2010 launch event showing VS2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008R2.  You can sign up for an event here: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Register2010/Content/Event_Selection.aspx I’ve answered the questions asked below. Q: Is it worth going? A: It is if you have had little or no exposure to the latest 2010 products. Most people are familiar with VS2010, but have not seen SharePoint 2010 Office 2010 or Windows Phone 7. It is designed to get you up to speed very quickly. If you have watched most of the MIX videos and keep up with .NET in general, you will benefit more by having the ability to ask questions.    Q: Did you get any free software? A: No, only demos including: VS2010/Office 2010 – They give you a link to the url where you can download the trial version. Windows 7 Enterprise – You get a DVD with the trial version loaded. Q: Do they give away any cool swag? A: Just a Microsoft T-Shirt (XL). Q: What about the vendor selection? A: At the event that I went to, most vendors were pushing SharePoint products. There wasn’t a lot of variety in the selection. Most vendors were giving away the typical pens, buttons and stickers and trial software. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me. I will answer and add to this un-official FAQ.

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• Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Next Meeting July 21, 2011

  - by csoto

  Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET (note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm) Where: Oracle Office, 475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map We will be providing snacks and beverages. Register! - Registration is required for building security. Presentation Line Up:? 5:10pm - Batch Processing Using Coherence in Oracle Group Policy Administration - Paul Cleary, Oracle Oracle Insurance Policy Administration (OIPA) is a flexible, rules-based policy administration solution that provides full record keeping for all policy lifecycle transactions. One component of OIPA is Cycle processing, which is the batch processing of pending insurance transactions. This presentation introduces OIPA and Cycle processing, describing the unique challenges of processing a high volume of transactions within strict time windows. It then reviews how OIPA uses Oracle Coherence and the Processing Pattern to meet these challenges, describing implementation specifics that highlight the simplicity and robustness of the Processing Pattern. 6:10pm - Secure, Optimize, and Load Balance Coherence with F5 - Chris Akker, F5 F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. Recently, F5 and Oracle partnered to deliver a novel solution that integrates Oracle Coherence 3.7 with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). This session will introduce F5 and how you can leverage BIG-IP LTM to secure, optimize, and load balance application traffic generated from Coherence*Extend clients across any number of servers in a cluster and to hardware-accelerate CPU-intensive SSL encryption. 7:10pm - Using Oracle Coherence to Enable Database Partitioning and DC Level Fault Tolerance - Alexei Ragozin, Independent Consultant and Brian Oliver, Oracle Partitioning is a very powerful technique for scaling database centric applications. One tricky part of partitioned architecture is routing of requests to the right database. The routing layer (routing table) should know the right database instance for each attribute which may be used for routing (e.g. account id, login, email, etc): it should be fast, it should fault tolerant and it should scale. All the above makes Oracle Coherence a natural choice for implementing such routing tables in partitioned architectures. This presentation will cover synchronization of the grid with multiple databases, conflict resolution, cross cluster replication and other aspects related to implementing robust partitioned architecture. Additional Info:?? - Download Past Presentations: The presentations from the previous meetings of the BACSIG are available for download here. Click on the presentation titles to download the PDF files. - Join the Coherence online community on our Oracle Coherence Users Group on LinkedIn. - Contact BACSIG with any comments, questions, presentation proposals and content suggestions.

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• BI&EPM in Focus April 2012

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  General News Oracle OpenWorld call for papers now open, now through April 9 (link) Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine (link) Oracle EPM and BI Support Newsletter Current Edition - Volume 3 : March 2012 (link) Customers Asiana Airlines Improves Passenger Management with Near-Real-Time Reservation and Ticketing Information  Centraal Boekhuis Delivers Faster with Oracle BI 11g Essatto Software Speeds Data Aggregation Tenfold; Integrates BI, Performance Management, and Data Warehousing for Midsize Businesses Grupo WTorre Supports Management's Decision-Making with OBIEE, Ensuring Uniform, Reliable, and Consistent Data Indian Overseas Bank Cuts Planning Schedule by 45 Worker Days per Year, Assesses Market Risk Instantly with Business Intelligence System Kentucky Community and Technical College System Enables Data-Driven Decision-Making Using Integrated System with Management Dashboards National Australia Bank Achieves 200% ROI, Improves Data Quality and Reporting Integrity with Oracle Hyperion DRM R.L. Polk & Co. Enhances Business Intelligence Capabilities, Optimizes System Performance with Extreme Analytics Machine Test ResCare, Inc. Transforms Reporting to Improve Healthcare Service Performance with Oracle Business Analytics  Rochester City School District Uses OBIEE to Track Student Achievement, Identify Areas for Improvement, Accelerate Reporting  Société Générale Standardizes, Accelerates, and Improves Budget Planning Accuracy across Global Enterprise The State Accounting Office of Georgia Integrates Financial Information, Shortens Financial Closings and Streamlines Reporting across 175 Organizations   Events 4-day Oracle Real-Time Decisions Hands-on Technical Workshop for Partners (PTS, Free) May 14-17, 2012: Colombes, Paris, France Nordic events : “Latest Release of Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI Suites Helps Organizations Plan through Uncertainty, Improve Decision-Making and Meet Regulatory Requirements” (April 17, Sweden | April 18, Norway | April 19, Denmark | April 24, Finland) Webcast Replay from Balaji Yelamanchili and Paul Rodwick: “Analytics Without Limits - The Latest on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and Oracle Business Intelligence”  (link)  Wednesday, April 04, 2012: Business Analytics launch webcast: Invite your customers to register (link) Big Data Online Forum now available on Demand (link)  Enterprise Performance Management Webcast Replay: Accurate Forecasting within the Business Planning Cycle (link) Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Master Support Note (link) Business  Intelligence Whitepaper: Driving Innovation Through Analytics (link) Gartner: CIOs Identify BI as the No. 1 Technology Priority for 2012 (link) Webcast Replay: Exalytics in Action: Airlines, US Census and Federal Spending Demo Applications  (link) NEWLY RELEASED Walk-in Video for Exalytics - Use This to Start Customer/Partner Meetings! (link) IDC Insight Paper: “Oracle's All-Out Assault on the Big Data Market: Offering Hadoop, R, Cubes, and Scalable IMDB in Familiar Packages” (link) System Requirements and Supported Platforms for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 11gR1 Certification Matrix now published to include OBIEE 11.1.1.6.0 (link) Maintenance Release Guide (List of Bugs Fixed) for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11.1.1.6.0  (link) OBIEE 11.1.1.6: Is OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Certified With OBI Apps 7.9.6.3?  (link) Information Center: Troubleshooting Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (support login req'd)  (link)      

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• Don't Miss At Devoxx!!!

  - by Yolande Poirier

  Come by IoT Hack Fest which starts with the session: kickstart your Raspberry Pi and/or Leap Motion project, part II on Tuesday from 9:30am to 12:00pm to learn how to start a project with the Raspberry Pi and Leap Motion. In the afternoon, you can still join a project and create your own project with the help of experts on Raspberry Pi, Leap Motion and other boards.  At the Oracle booth, Java experts will be available  to answer your  questions and demo the new features of the Java Platform, including Java Embedded, JavaFX, Java SE and Java EE. This year, the chess game that was first demoed at JavaOne keynotes last September will be showcased at Devoxx.  Duke is coming to Devoxx this year. You can get your picture taken with Duke on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (Nov. 12-14) from 12:00 to 18:00 Beer bash will be Tuesday from 17:30-19:30 and Wednesday/Thursday from 18:00 to 20:00 at the booth. Oracle is raffling off five Raspberry Pi's and a number of books every day. Make sure to stop by and get your badge scanned to enter the raffle. Raffles are Tuesday at 19:15 and Wednesday/Thursday at 19:45 at the Oracle booth.  The main conference sessions from Oracle Java experts are:  Wednesday 13 November Beyond Beauty: JavaFX, Parallax, Touch, Raspberry Pi, Gyroscopes, and Much More Angela Caicedo, Senior Member, Technical Staff, Oracle Room 7, 12:00–13:00 Lambda: A Peek Under the Hood, Brian Goetz, Software Architect, Oracle Room 8, 12:00–13:00 In Full Flow: Java 8 Lambdas in the Stream, Paul Sandoz, Software Developer, Oracle Room 8, 14:00–15:00 The Modular Java Platform and Project Jigsaw, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, Oracle, Room 8, 15:10–16:10 The Curious Case of JavaScript on the JVM, Attila Szegedi, Principal Member, Technical Staff, Oracle, Room 5, 16:40–17:40 Is It a Car? Is It a Computer? No, It’s a Raspberry Pi JavaFX Informatics System. Simon Ritter, Principal Technology Evangelist, Oracle Room 7, 16:40–17:40 Thursday 14 November Java EE 7: What’s New in the Java EE Platform Linda DeMichiel, Consulting Member, Technical Staff, Oracle, Room 8, 10:50–11:50 Java Microbenchmark Harness: The Lesser of the Two Evils, Aleksey Shipilev, Principal Member, Technical Staff, Oracle. Room 6, 14:00–15:00 Practical Restful Persistence, Shaun Smith, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Room 8, 17:50–18:50 Friday 15 November Avatar.js, Server-Side JavaScript on the Java Platform, Jean-Francois Denise, Software Developer, Oracle Room 8, 11:50–12:50

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• ArchBeat Facebook Friday: Top 10 Posts - August 15-21, 2014

  - by Bob Rhubart-Oracle

  As hot as molten rock? Not quite. But among the 5,313 fans of the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page these Top 10 items were the hottest over the past seven days, August 15-21, 2014. Oracle BPM 12c Gateways (Part 1 of 5): Exclusive Gateway | Antonis Antoniou Oracle ACE Associate Antonis Antoniou begins a five-part series with a look at In the gateway control flow components in Oracle BPM and how they can be used to process flow. Slicing the EDG: Different SOA Domain Configurations | Antony Reynolda Antony Reynolds introduces three different configurations for a SOA environment and identifies some of the advantages for each. How to introduce DevOps into a moribund corporate culture | ZDNet Confused about DevOPs? This post from ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- which includes insight from Phil Whelan -- just might clear some of the fog. Oracle Identity Manager Role Management With API | Mustafa Kaya Mustafa Kaya shares some examples of role management using the Oracle Identity Management API. Podcast: Redefining Information Management Architecture Oracle Enterprise Architect Andrew Bond joins Oracle ACE Directors Mark Rittman and Stewart Bryson for a conversation about their collaboration on a new Oracle Information Management Reference Architecture. WebCenter Sites Demo Integration with Endeca Guided Search | Micheal Sullivan A-Team solution architect Michael Sullivan shares the details on a demo that illustrates the viability of integrating WebCenter Sites with Oracle Endeca. Wearables in the world of enterprise applications? Yep. Oh yeah, wearables are a THING. Here's a look at how the Oracle Applications User Experience team has been researching wearables for inclusion in your future enterprise applications. Getting Started With The Coherence Memcached Adaptor | David Felcey Let David Felcey show you how to configure the Coherence Memcached Adaptor, and take advantage of his simple PHP example that demonstrates how Memecached clients can connect to a Coherence cluster. OTN Architect Community Newsletter - August Edition A month's worth of hot stuff, all in one spot. Featuring articles on Java, Coherence, WebLogic, Mobile and much more. 8,853 Conversations About Oracle WebLogic Do you have a question about WebLogic? Do you have an answer to a question about WebLogic? You need to be here.

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• June 23, 1983: First Successful Test of the Domain Name System [Geek History]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Nearly 30 years ago the first Domain Name System (DNS) was tested and it changed the way we interacted with the internet. Nearly impossible to remember number addresses became easy to remember names. Without DNS you’d be browsing a web where numbered addresses pointed to numbered addresses. Google, for example, would look like http://209.85.148.105/ in your browser window. That’s assuming, of course, that a numbers-based web every gained enough traction to be popular enough to spawn a search giant like Google. How did this shift occur and what did we have before DNS? From Wikipedia: The practice of using a name as a simpler, more memorable abstraction of a host’s numerical address on a network dates back to the ARPANET era. Before the DNS was invented in 1983, each computer on the network retrieved a file called HOSTS.TXT from a computer at SRI. The HOSTS.TXT file mapped names to numerical addresses. A hosts file still exists on most modern operating systems by default and generally contains a mapping of the IP address 127.0.0.1 to “localhost”. Many operating systems use name resolution logic that allows the administrator to configure selection priorities for available name resolution methods. The rapid growth of the network made a centrally maintained, hand-crafted HOSTS.TXT file unsustainable; it became necessary to implement a more scalable system capable of automatically disseminating the requisite information. At the request of Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System in 1983 and wrote the first implementation. The original specifications were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 882 and RFC 883, which were superseded in November 1987 by RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.Several additional Request for Comments have proposed various extensions to the core DNS protocols. Over the years it has been refined but the core of the system is essentially the same. When you type “google.com” into your web browser a DNS server is used to resolve that host name to the IP address of 209.85.148.105–making the web human-friendly in the process. Domain Name System History [Wikipedia via Wired] What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNSHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

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• Purple Cows, Copernicus, and Shampoo – Lessons in Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  What makes a great customer experience? And, why should you or your organization care? These are the questions that set the stage for the Oracle Customer Experience Summit, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco. Day 1: The first day was filled with demos and insights from customer experience experts and Oracle customers sharing what it takes to deliver great customer experiences. Author Seth Godin delivered an entertaining presentation that included an in-depth exploration of the always-connected, always-sharing experience revolution that we are witnessing and yes, talked about the purple cow. It turns out that customer experience is your way to be the purple cow. Before everyone headed out to see Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon at the Oracle customer appreciation event, the day wrapped up with a discussion around building a customer-centric culture. Where do you start? Whom does it involve? What are some pitfalls to avoid? Day 2: The second day addressed the details behind all the questions brought up at the end of Day 1. Before you start on a customer experience initiative, Paul Hagen noted that you must understand you will forge a path similar to Copernicus. You will be proposing ideas and approaches that challenge current thinking in your organization. Just as Copernicus' heliocentric theory started a scientific revolution, your customer-centric efforts will start an experience revolution. If you think customer experience is like a traditional marketing approach, think again. It’s not about controlling your customers and leading them where you want them to go. It might sound like heresy to some, but your customers are already in control, whether or not your company realizes and acknowledges it. And, to survive and thrive, you'll have to focus on customers by thinking outside-in and working towards a brand that is better and more authentic. We learned how Vail Resorts takes this customer-centric approach. Employees must experience the mountain themselves and understand the experience from the guest’s standpoint. This has created a culture where employees do things for guests that are not expected. We also learned a valuable lesson in designing and innovating customer-centered experiences from Kerry Bodine. First you make the thing, and then you make the thing right. In this case, the thing is customer experience. Getting customer experience right means iterative prototyping and testing of your ideas. This is where shampoo comes in—think lather, rinse, repeat. Be prepared to keep repeating until the customer experience is right. Many of these sessions will be posted to YouTube in the coming weeks so be sure to subscribe to our CX channel.

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• Please Stop Voting Against a Candidate

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER:  This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”.  This is not a post for whom I am voting.  This is simply a post to address an issue that I cannot ignore any longer.  This two-party system that we have allowed to establish a foothold is killing this country.    More than 2 Options I was recently asked, “If you had to choose Romney or Obama who would you pick?”  I replied “Non sequiter.  The founders of this nation ensured that I never have to pick from only two candidates.”  But somehow that is the way this country’s citizens think.  I told someone last week that there are around 20 candidates for president and she was genuinely surprised.  (There are actually 25 candidates.)  She had no idea there were that many and, even though she knew there are more, she didn’t know any names beyond Romney and Obama.  Well, I am going to try and educate people like her on other options. Vote for a Candidate, not against another Candidate So this post is the first in a series with a little bit of information about each candidate for president.  I implore you…I beg you, please do your civic duty and conduct a little bit of investigation and research on your own to find the right candidate for you.  Hey, if your candidate is Romney or Obama, that’s fine.  As long as it’s an educated decision.  But please…stop voting against a candidate.  Start voting for a candidate. A List of CandidatesAs I mentioned, I am going to write a little something about each candidate and I’m going to go by alphabetical order by PARTY, then by CANDIDATE LAST NAME so as to not show any bias. P.S. – If you want to know the candidate I selected I am happy to tell you.  But that’s not what this series is about.PARTYCANDIDATEAmerica's Party   Tom HoeflingAmerican Third Position PartyMerlin MillerAmericans Elect PartyNo candidates met the requirement to enter into the online caucus.Constitution PartyVirgil GoodeDemocratic Party   Barack ObamaGrassroots Party   Jim CarlsonGreen Party   Jill SteinIndependent American Party   Will ChristensenJustice PartyRocky AndersonLibertarian Party   Gary JohnsonObjectivist PartyTom StevensPeace and Freedom Party   Roseanne BarrReform PartyAndre BarnettRepublican PartyMitt RomneySocialism and Liberation PartyPeta LindsaySocialist Equality PartyJerry WhiteSocialist Party USAStewart AlexanderSocialist Workers PartyJames HarrisIndependent Candidates Jeff BossRichard DuncanJerry Litzel Dean Morstad Jill Reed Randall TerrySheila Tittle Michael Vargo

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• TalkTalk Business Succeeds with Engaging Conversations on an Eloqua platform

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “Everybody from online, CRM and data, channel management, communications, and content had to pull together to deliver one campaign and Eloqua was the glue that held it all together.” says Paul Higgins, Marketing Director, TalkTalk Business (UK, telco) in this 2'23 video. Challenges Nurturing multiple sales channels with very diverse customers. Generating leads qualified to a very high standard. Engaging a fatigued and apathetic target audience. Positioning the brand as industry thought leaders. Solutions “What’s Your Business Grade?” campaign Eloqua automated email nurture strategy Eloqua Partner Network – Stein IAS Results ROI of 20:1. 40% uplift in sales opportunities in the smaller end with a 25% reduction in costs. 20–25% increase in sales qualified leads for mid-market, corporate, and enterprise customer sets. Open rate highs of 61.84% and click to open highs of 15.97%. /* 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:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• links for 2011-01-12

  - by Bob Rhubart

  WebCenter Spaces 11g PS2 Template Customization (Javier Ductor's Blog) "Recently, we have been involved in a WebCenter Spaces customization project. A customer sent us a prototype website in HTML, and we had to transform Spaces to set the same look and feel as in the prototype..." Javier Ductor (tags: oracle otn webcenter enteprise2.0) Matt Carter: Risky Business "Incorporating risk detection and mitigation capabilities into apps is becoming all the rage. There are plenty of real-life examples of cases where prevention of cyber-security threats and fraudsters might have kept governments and companies out of the news, and with more money in their accounts." (tags: oracle otn security middleware) John Brunswick: 5 Surprisingly Good Benefits of Corporate Blogs "Some may still propose that not all corporations are going to be able to provide the five benefits above and are more focused around shameless self promotion of products and services.  If that is the case, that corporation is most likely not producing something of high value." - John Brunswick (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 blogging) InfoQ: IT And Architecture: Inside-Out Perspectives The software industry is in disarray, costs are escalating, and quality is diminishing. Promises of newer technologies and processes and methodologies in IT are still far from materializing on any significant scale. Bruce Laidlaw and Michael Poulin - each with more than 30 years of experience compared notes on the past and present of IT and provide insights on what IT needs to make progress. (tags: ping.fm) SOA & Middleware: Canceling a running composite instance - example Useful tips from Niall Commiskey. (tags: soa middleware oracle) BPEL 11.1.1.2 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations (Oracle E-Business Suite Technology) "A new certification was released simultaneously with the E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Maintenance Pack late last year: the use of BPEL 11g Version 11.1.1.2 with E-Business Suite 12.1.3." -- Steven Chan (tags: oracle bpel) Marc Kelderman: OSB: Deploy Service Level Agreement (SLA), aka Alert Rule "The big issue with these SLAs is the deployment. If you have dozens of services, with multiple operations, and you have a lot of environments it takes a while to create them...[But] I have a nice workaround." - Mark Kelderman  (tags: oracle otn soa osb sla) @myfear: Java EE 7 - what's coming up for 2012? First hints. "Even if the actual Java EE 6 version is still not too widespread, we already have seen the first signs of the next EE 7 version written to the sky." -- Markus "myfear" Eisele (tags: oracle otn oracleace java)

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• Alert: It is No Longer 1982, So Why is CRM Still There?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Hot off the heels of Oracle’s recent LinkedIn integration announcement and Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014, the Oracle Social Cloud is preparing for another big event, the CRM Evolution conference and exhibition in NYC. The role of social channels in customer engagement continues to grow, and social customer engagement will be a significant theme at the conference. According to Paul Greenberg, CRM Evolution Conference Chair, author, and Managing Principal at The 56 Group, social channels have become so pervasive that there is no longer a clear reason to make a distinction between “social CRM” and traditional CRM systems. Why not? Because social is a communication hub every bit as vital and used as the phone or email. What makes social different is that if you think of it as a phone, it’s a party line. That means customer interactions are far from secret, and social connections are listening in by the hundreds, hearing whether their friend is having a positive or negative experience with your brand. According to a Mention.com study, 76% of brand mentions are neutral, neither positive nor negative. These mentions fail to get much notice. So think what that means about the remaining 24% of mentions. They’re standing out, because a verdict, about you, is being rendered in them, usually with emotion. Suddenly, where the R of CRM has been lip service and somewhat expendable in the past, “relationship” takes on new meaning, seriousness, and urgency. Remarkably, legions of brands still approach CRM as if it were 1982. Today, brands must provide customer experiences the customer actually likes (how dare they expect such things). They must intimately know not only their customers, but each customer, because technology now makes personalized experiences possible. That’s why the Oracle Social Cloud has been so mission-oriented about seamlessly integrating social with sales, marketing and customer service interactions so the enterprise can have an actionable 360-degree view of the customer. It’s the key to that customer-centricity we hear so much about these days. If you’re attending CRM Evolution, Chris Moody, Director of Product Marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, will show you how unified customer experiences and enhanced customer centricity will help you attract and keep ideal customers and brand advocates (“The Pursuit of Customer-Centricity” Aug 19 at 2:45p ET) And Meg Bear, Group Vice President for the Oracle Social Cloud, will sit on a panel talking about “terms of engagement” and the ways tech can now enhance your interactions with customers (Aug 20 at 10a ET). If you can’t be there, we’ll be doing our live-tweeting thing from the @oraclesocial handle, so make sure you’re a faithful follower. You’ll notice NOBODY is writing about the wisdom of “company-centricity.” Now is the time to bring your customer relationship management into the socially connected age. @mikestilesPhoto: Sue Pizarro, freeimages.com

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• Some Problems Can't Be Outsourced

  - by mikef

  More and more companies are becoming attracted to the idea of Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS). It would seem that you can outsource the provisioning and management of your services, encompassing everything from Email, through to your servers, workstations and software, all the way down to your LAN and internet services. This type of outsourcing can be a very attractive option for companies who have tight budgets who are short of technical skills or don't have the means to provide long-term IT support. Essentially, they can outsource your services at low short-term costs that are knowable and controllable, are quickly and easily scalable, and generate a minimum of hassle for your internal staff. If you want to get a sophisticated IT infrastructure set up in a hurry without the usual high buy-in costs, or the task of finding and hiring the right specialists. It would seem the way to go, particularly when their salesmen are hypnotizing you with oleaginous phrases such as "we are closely aligned with our client organization's core business requirements, providing agile services". It sounds too good to be true, and so it is. Whereas the costs will have initially been calculated on the annual renewal fees and service fees for ongoing support, there are other charges too which aren't so obvious. It can end up costing far more than the conventional solution once you take into account the extra costs, the fees for customization and upgrades. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) only becomes apparent when it is too late to extract the company easily from the arrangement. After a few years, these annual fees can add up to more than the initial cost of implementing a traditional in-house system. Worse than that is that you can then lose your power to determine your priorities: When you become reliant on this company, with its own schedule of priorities, to implement every change, however simple, you have effectively lost control of your technical infrastructure. This will make senior management very nervous. There is definitely a requirement for this sort of service. If you urgently need an exceptionally high class of service or more expertise than you currently possess, then outsourcing is probably for you. You and your IT colleagues will always have something to do, be it user assistance, smoothing out integrations with an external provider, or working on something entirely new. Heck, if you outsource to IBM, the SysAdmins can go along for the ride and polish their expertise. What you need to figure out is how much your time is worth, because time is ultimately all that outsourcing will buy you and your organization. Now you just need to convince your nervous CEO. Cheers, Michael

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