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• Rails Authlogic authentication method

  - by Rabbott

  Within Authlogic, is there a way that I can add conditions to the authentication method? I know by using the find_by_login_method I can specify another method to use, but when I use this I need to pass another parameter since the find_by_login_method method only passes the parameter that is deemed the 'login_field'. What I need to do is check something that is an association of the authentic model.. Here is the method I want to use # make sure that the user has access to the subdomain that they are # attempting to login to, subdomains are company names def self.find_by_email_and_company(email, company) user = User.find_by_email(email) companies = [] user.brands.each do |b| companies << b.company.id end user && companies.include?(company) end But this fails due to the fact that only one parameter is sent to the find_by_email_and_company method. The company is actually the subdomain, so in order to get it here I am just placing it in a hidden field in the form (only way I could think to get it to the model) Is there a method I can override somehow..?

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• Oracle Unveils Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  New Service Enables Companies to Listen, Engage, Create, Market and Analyze Interactions across Multiple Social Platforms in Real-Time During his keynote presentation, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) Suite.   Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite is an integrated enterprise service that enables companies to listen, engage, create, market, and analyze interactions across multiple social platforms in real-time providing a holistic view of the consumer.   Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite is integrated with Oracle’s enterprise applications, including Oracle Fusion Marketing, Oracle Fusion Sales Catalog, Oracle ATG Web Commerce, and Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), allowing organizations to use social to transform their corporate business processes and systems.   Additionally, Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite is integrated with Oracle Platform Services, including Oracle Java Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud Service, enabling marketing teams to integrate social with their custom Web pages, landing pages and marketing tools. Unleashing the Power of Social • Providing a holistic view of consumer interactions, Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite includes: Oracle Social Network (OSN): Provides a secure collaboration platform that supports real-time collaboration and networking for users inside and outside the organization. Oracle Social Marketing: Enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report across multiple social campaigns and platforms. It also helps marketers publish social content, engage fans and customize their brand's look and feel. Oracle Social Engagement & Monitoring Cloud Service: Enables organizations to analyze social media interactions while also empowering customer service and sales teams to effectively engage with customers and prospects. It gives organizations the tools they need to understand customers and take the appropriate actions by monitoring, listening, learning, and responding to signals and trends across the social web. Oracle Social Sites: provides brands and agencies a powerful and rich editing experience that end users can leverage to dynamically develop and launch social sites. Oracle Data and Insights. A service that caters to a growing enterprise need for externally information by providing information, directory and insights about common business entities. Supporting Quote “By fundamentally changing the way organizations connect with their different stakeholders, social is changing the rules of business,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Product Development. “With the Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite we are empowering our customers to embrace this change by integrating the tools required to listen, engage, create, market and analyze social interactions into existing applications and services.”

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• AxCMS.net 10 with Microsoft Silverlight 4 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

  - by Axinom

  Axinom, European WCM vendor, today announced the next version of its WCM solution AxCMS.net 10, which streamlines the processes involved in creating, managing and distributing corporate content on the internet. The new solution helps reducing ongoing costs for managing and distributing to large audiences, while at the same time drastically reducing time-to-market and one-time setup costs. http://www.AxCMS.net Axinom’s WCM portfolio, based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Silverlight 4, allows enterprises to increase process efficiency, reduce operating costs and more effectively manage delivery of rich media assets on the Web and mobile devices. Axinom solutions are widely used by major European online brands in IT, telco, retail, media and entertainment industries such as Siemens, American Express, Microsoft Corp., ZDF, Pro7Sat1 Media, and Deutsche Post. Brand New User Interface built with Silverlight 4By using Silverlight 4, Axinom’s team created a new user interface for AxCMS.net 10 that is optimized for improved usability and speed. WYSIWYG mode, integrated image editor, extended list views, and detail views of objects allow a substantial acceleration of typical editor tasks. Axinom’s team worked with Silverlight Rough Cut Editor for video management and Silverlight Analytics Framework for extended reporting to complete the wide range of capabilities included in the new release. “Axinom’s release of AxCMS.net 10 enables developers to take advantage of the latest features in Silverlight 4,” said Brian Goldfarb, director of the developer platform group at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is excited about the opportunity this creates for Web developers to streamline the creating, managing and distributing of online corporate content using AxCMS.net 10 and Silverlight.” Rapid Web Development with Visual Studio 2010AxCMS.net 10 is extended by additional products that enable developers to get productive quickly and help solve typical customer scenarios. AxCMS.net template projects come with documented source code that help kick-start projects and learn best practices in all aspects of Web application development. AxCMS.net overcomes many hard-to-solve technical obstacles in an out-of-the-box manner by providing a set of ready-to-use vertical solutions such as corporate Web site, Web shop, Web campaign management, email marketing, multi-channel distribution, management of rich Internet applications, and Web business intelligence. Extended Multi-Site ManagementAxCMS.net has been supporting the management of an unlimited number of Web sites for a long time. The new version 10 of AxCMS.net will further improve multi-site management and provide features to editors and developers that will simplify and accelerate multi-site and multi-language management. Extended publication workflow will take into account additional dependencies of dynamic objects, pages, and documents. “The customer requests evolved from static html pages to dynamic Web applications content with the emergence of rich media assets seamlessly combined across many channels including Web, mobile and IPTV. With the.NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4, we’re on the fast track to making the three screen strategy a reality for our customers,” said Damir Tomicic, CEO of Axinom Group. “Our customers enjoy substantial competitive advantages of using latest Microsoft technologies. We have a long-standing, relationship with Microsoft and are committed to continued development using Microsoft tools and technologies to deliver innovative Web solutions in the future.”  

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• Oracle Customer Hub - Directions, Roadmap and Customer Success

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

   By Gurinder Bahl With less than a week from OOW 2012, I would like to introduce you all to the core Oracle Customer MDM Strategy sessions. Fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prohibits companies from achieving a complete and accurate view of their customers. Oracle Customer Hub provide a comprehensive set of services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted master customer system of record across the enterprise. Customer Hub centralizes customer data from disparate systems across your enterprise into a master repository. Existing systems are integrated in real-time or via batch with the Hub, allowing you to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity. Don’t miss out on two sessions geared towards Oracle Customer Hub:   1) Attend session CON9747 - Turn Customer Data into an Enterprise Asset with Oracle Fusion Customer Hub Applications at Oracle Open World 2012 on Monday, Oct 1st, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM @ Moscone West – 2008. Manouj Tahiliani, Sr. Director MDM Product Management will provide insight into the vision of Oracle Fusion Customer Hub solutions, and review the roadmap. You will discover how Fusion Customer MDM can help your enterprise improve data quality, create accurate and complete customer information,  manage governance and help create great customer experiences. You will also understand how to leverage data quality capabilities and create a sophisticated customer foundation within Oracle Fusion Applications. You will also hear Danette Patterson, Group Lead, Church Pension Group talk about how Oracle Fusion Customer Hub applications provide a modern, next-generation, multi-domain foundation for managing customer information in a private cloud. 2)  Don't miss session  CON9692 - Customer MDM is key to Strategic Business Success and Customer Experience Management at Oracle Open World 2012 on Wednesday, October 3rd 2012 from 3:30-4:30pm @ Westin San Francisco Metropolitan 1. JP Hurtado, Director, Customer Systems, will provide insight on how RCCL overcame challenges of data quality, guest recognition & centralized customer view to provide consolidated customer view to multiple reservation, CRM, marketing, service, sales, data warehouse and loyalty systems. You will learn how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), which has over 30 million customer and maintain multiple brands, leveraged Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) as backbone to customer data management strategy for past 5 years. Gurinder Bahl from MDM Product Management will provide an update on Oracle Customer Hub strategy, what we have achieved since last Open World and our future plans for the Oracle Customer Hub. You will learn about Customer Hub Data Quality capabilities around data analysis, cleansing, matching, address validation as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, and Conference sessions. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  Looking forward to see you at Open World, the perfect opportunity to learn about cutting edge Oracle technologies. 

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• Customer Experience Online Forum

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Missed Oracle’s Customer Experience Online Forum?  Don’t worry. You can still catch the sessions at your convenience. Watch the Customer Experience Online Forum on demand to hear from Bruce Tempkin, a leading expert in customer experience, as well as other thought leaders and they delve into topics such as the ROI of customer experience and strategies for winning over customers.  Simply register to gain access to these sessions and more: The Customer Experience RevolutionCustomer experience has become the most important and defensible differentiator for your business. The customer experience is a journey that transcends all customer touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. Discover where you are in the journey, identify how to begin optimizing the experience you deliver your customers, and join the Revolution.The ROI of Customer ExperienceBruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin GroupResearch of US and UK customers demonstrates a high correlation between a positive customer experience and loyalty. A successful customer interaction increases the willingness to buy more and to recommend your company. US companies can gain $380 million over three years by providing an optimized customer experience. This session will help companies determine the business impact that customer experience has on their specific business. Integrating Marketing and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesNew devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. Learn how leading brands are using Oracle's marketing solutions to harness big data and better understand their customers, extend their marketing reach into social channels, and retain their high value customers through more rewarding customer experience.Where to Start Your Organization's RevolutionThe process of crafting a great customer experience starts with understanding customers and their goals. This session helps you to begin mapping a sound customer experience strategy, describing the intended experience and kinds of processes that create differentiation. The ROI of Customer Experience: A Tempkin Group Insight Report Did you know that customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend? Did you know that even a modest increase in customer experience can translate into millions of dollars gained? Learn more about the ROI of customer experience in this free report.

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• Oracle and Eloqua Welcome Compendium’s Content Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Yesterday, Oracle announced its acquisition of Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers' lifecycle. Why? Because every part of the above paragraph speaks to where modern marketing is and where it’s headed. Customers have now been empowered, thanks to the Internet and particularly social, with access to almost limitless amounts of information about companies and products. This includes the especially influential voices of friends and objective acquaintances that have experience with the product or brand. With mobile, this info is available instantly in the palm of their hand. All of this research and influence mind you, is taking place long before a prospect will ever engage with the brand itself or one of its sales reps. So how does a brand effectively insert itself into these conversations and this flow of the customer journey? Now, more than ever, marketers must deliver relevant and engaging content across multiple channels and throughout the entire customer journey to be useful, helpful, and influential. Compendium has a data-driven content marketing platform that lines up relevant content with customer data and personas so brands can accelerate the conversion of prospects. Now think about combining that with the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud, part of Oracle's comprehensive CX solution. Marketers will be able to automate content delivery across channels by aligning persona-based content with customers' digital body language. Better customer engagement, improved sales lead quality, better return on marketing investment, and higher customer loyalty. Now we’re talking. Does data-driven content marketing have an impact? Compendium customer CVENT is a SaaS company specializing in meetings management tech. They wanted to increase leads & ad performance on their blog and dramatically increase their content. They also wanted to manage the creation, workflow, promotion and distribution of that content. With Compendium, CVENT created over 9,000 content elements, and sales-ready leads grew 325%. So Oracle Eloqua helps you target audiences, know buyers, and automate multi-channel marketing campaigns. Compendium lets you plan, publish, manage and measure content across content types and channels. Now kick it up yet another notch with Oracle’s Analytics, Big Data and Social solutions, and you’re using your marketing dollars to reach the right people in the right place at the right time with the right content. And as if that weren’t enough, your customers will love you for it. @mikestiles

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• Post Crosstalk 2012

  - by David Dorf

  This year the Oracle Retail users conference, Crosstalk, had a 20% increase in attendees, which was driven by both new customers and those acquired via Endeca.  As the product assets of Oracle have grown, so has the completeness of the solution set.  This year was marked by the breadth of omni-channel stories. Rose Spicer and her marketing team (see photo on left) always strive for an equal balance of retailer presentations, networking opportunities, and unique experiences -- this year was no exception.  We had 41 different retailers from China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, US, Canada and the UK sharing their insights with one another. In all there were 251 executives from 120 iconic brands such as Daphne, Kohl's, Morrisons, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic, Talbots, Petco, Deckers, Sportmaster, Mr. Price, Falabella, and Disney to name a few. From a product perspective, there were a few new developments from Oracle Retail: Endeca's search engine has been integrated into the ATG commerce platform. The latest Retail Analytics application, Oracle Retail Customer Analytics, is generally available. Oracle Retail previewed a new fully-integrated mobile POS. But the real benefit of attending Crosstalk was hearing about the experiences of retailers and partners.  Here are are a few interesting facts I picked up: At Kohl's, the most popular website accessed by customers within their stores is Facebook.  With all the buzz about showrooming, I was really expecting it to be Amazon. Daphne, a Chinese shoe retailer, is opening 3 new stores per day.  Being located near the factories allows them to have a very agile supply chain as well. Disney Stores have increased sales by 25% at stores upgraded to include Mobile POS.  They continue to lead the pack with excellent customer experiences. Quicksilver reported that 1 in 5 visits to their website comes from a tablet.  More evidence that tablets are replacing traditional PCs in households. By tagging shoes with RFID, Saks is able to ensure all shoe models are on display.  If a model is not being displayed, it has no chance of being sold. Additionally, there were awards, store tours on Michigan Avenue, fireworks at Navy Pier, and the Oracle Retail house band, Bolo313, performing at Solider Field.  Speaking of which, a few retailers got on stage and jammed with band -- possible rival to Rock & Roll Retail? You can always find the latest info from us at the Retail Rack. The next events on tap are the Partner Summit followed by OpenWorld.

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• BigData and Customer Experience: Happy Together

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  The two big buzzes of the year may lay closer than it appears. Both concepts intersect at various points: BigData and Return of Investment of Marketing Campaigns On a recent post Big Data Is The Future Of Marketing Jeff Dachis explains very clearly how “Big data analytics finally allows marketers to identify, measure, and manage what is positively impacting their Brand”. Regression analysis applied to big data volumes coming from social media will substitute the failed attempts to justify marketing investments on social media in terms of followers and likes, he continues, “the measurement models applied by marketers on TV Campaigns don´t work on social”, we need to study the data with fresh eyes and maybe then we will start understanding and measuring brand engagemet. Social CRM and BigData The real value of Social CRM start by analyzing mass of big data from social media in order of applying social intelligence techniques that allow us to classify new customer niches and communities and define appropriated strategies to contact potential customers. Gartner Says that the Market for Social CRM is on pace to surpass $1 Billion in Revenue by Year-End 2012 but in words of Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst at Forrester Research “Social customer relationship management is hard” (The Social CRM Arms Race Heats ). To succeed brands need three things: Investing in new social tools, investing in consultancy and investing in infrastructure for massive data storage and analysis. Neither CeX or BigData are easy and cheap wins. But what are the customer benefits of such investments? Big Data and Brand Engagement Time is the most valuable asset of todays consumers: tired of information overload, exhausted by the terabytes of offering, anxious because of not having the same fast multichannel experience with their services’ marketers or preferred goods providers than the one they found on their social media. Yes, I know you have read this before- me too. But is real. The motto of the Customer Experience philosophy of providing a consistent experience through multiple touchpoints that makes the relationship customer/brand easier and valuable finds it basis on understanding customer/s preferences and context for which BigData analysis is another imperative. In summary, I believe that using BigData Analysis in combination with appropriated CeX strategies and technologies is a promising direction for achieving: efficiency and marketing cost-savings; growing the customer base; and increasing customer conversion and retention. In a world: The Direction of Future Marketing.

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• Correcting Grammar for Microsoft Products and Technology

  I see book authors, editors, bloggers, press, team members, and occasionally even a VP misspell our products, technologies, and features that I thought I would build and maintain a list of the correct capitalization and spelling of the most commonly misspelled Microsoft products and technologies. Sources: Internal site (brandtools) and the Microsoft Trademarks Web site. Last updated: April 27, 2010   Incorrect Correct .net or .Net .NET .Net framework 4.0, .NET framework 4.0 .NET Framework AdCenter, Ad Center, Adcenter adCenter Ado.net, ADO.Net ADO.NET Asp.net, ASP.Net ASP.NET Asp.Net ajax, Asp.NET Ajax ASP.NET AJAX Asp.Net Mvc ASP.NET MVC Biz Spark, Bizspark BizSpark Clear Type, Clear type, Cleartype ClearType Directaccess, Direct Access DirectAccess Direct Show, Directshow DirectShow Direct X DirectX Dream Spark, Dreamspark DreamSpark Home Group, Home group HomeGroup HotMail, Hot Mail Hotmail Info Path, Infopath InfoPath Intellisense, Intellisense IntelliSense Iron Ruby IronRuby Kin KIN Linq LINQ MSN Messenger Windows Live Messenger One Note, Onenote OneNote Open type, Opentype OpenType PlayTo, Play to Play To Power Point, Powerpoint PowerPoint Powershell, Power Shell PowerShell Sea Dragon, Seadragon SeaDragon Sharepoint, Share Point SharePoint Silver Light, SilverLight Silverlight Skydrive, Sky Drive SkyDrive Sql Server SQL Server Visual Basic .net (the .net was removed in the 2005 version) Visual Basic  Visual C# Express 2010 or Visual Basic Express 2010 or Visual C++ Express 2010 Visual version 2010 Express as in Visual C# 2010 Express, Visual Basic 2010 Express Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 or Visual Studio Professional 2010 Visual Studio 2010 version, as in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Professional WebSite Spark, Website spark Website Spark Win 32 Win32 Windows Mobile (except when referring to previous versions like 5.0 or 6), Windows phone 7 Series Windows Phone Xaml XAML XBOX, xbox Xbox Xbox Live, XBOX Live Xbox LIVE   Caveats These guidelines dont apply to URLs (ex: www.asp.net) or to code namespaces, variables, and classes should follow the .NET Framework naming guidelines. This list only covers capitalization/spacing rules, it doesnt cover the correct usage of (tm) or symbols or the correct word usage rules. For those, refer to the trademark Web site. Also note that I have no idea why we are so inconsistent say on keeping features/brands two words versus one word or the order of product/version/year.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Social Analytics and the Customer

  - by David Dorf

  Many successful retailers put the customer at the center of everything they do, so its important that the customer is modeled correctly across all their systems.  The path to omni-channel starts and ends with the customer so at ARTS, our next big project is focused on ensuring a consistent representation of customers across our transactional data model, datawarehouse model, and XML schemas.  Further, we've started a new whitepaper that describes how Big Data and Social Media Analytics should be leveraged by retailers to add and additional level of customer insight. Let's start by taking a closer look at the meaning of social analytics.  Here's my definition: Social Analytics, in the retail context, describes the analysis of data obtained from social media sources in an effort to better comprehend and interact with the community of consumers.  This discipline seeks to understand what’s being said by the community about brands and products (“monitoring”), as well as understand the behaviors of those in the community (“profiling”).  The results are used to enforce the brand image, improve product decisions, and better focus marketing, all of which lead to increased sales. To help illustrate the facets of social analytics, I drew the diagram below which was originally published by Retail Touchpoints. There are lots of tools on the market that allow retailers to monitor social media for brand and product mentions.  These include analysis of sentiment, reach, share of voice, engagement, etc.  When your brand is mentioned, good or bad, its an opportunity to engage with the customer and possibly lead to a sale.  Because products are not always unique, its much more difficult to monitor product mentions, but detecting product trends early can help a retailer make better merchandising decisions, especially in fashion. Once a retailer understands what's being said, the next step is learn more about who's saying it.  That involves profiling customers beyond simple demographics to understand their motivations.  Much can be learned from patterns, and even more when customers voluntarily share their data.  Knowing that a customer is passionate about, for example, mountain biking allows the retailer to make relevant offers on helmets, ask for opinions on hydration, and help spread marketing messages. Social analytics has many facets that benefit retailers, some of which are easy but many of which are hard.  Its important for the CMO and CIO to work closely together to plan for these capabilities and monitor the maturity of tools on the market.  This is an area that will separate winners from losers.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-05-31

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA wiki.eclipse.org Oracle HQ 10 Twin Dolphin Dr. Redwood Shores, CA Presentations: The evolution of Java persistence, Doug Clarke, EclipseLink Project Lead, Oracle Eclipse Project Sapphire, Konstantin Komissarchik, Sapphire Project Lead, Oracle Developing Rich ADF Applications with Java EE, Greg Stachnick, Oracle Leveraging OSGi In The Enterprise, Kamal Muralidharan, Lead Engineer, eBay NVIDIA Nsight Eclipse Edition, Goodwin (Tech lead - Visual tools), Eugene Ostroukhov (Senior engineer – Visual tools)   BI Architecture Master Class for Partners - Oracle Architecture Unplugged blogs.oracle.com June 21, 2012 This workshop will be highly interactive and is aimed at Oracle OPN member partners who are IT Architects and BI+W specialists. This will be a highly interactive session and does not involve slide presentations or product feature details, it addresses IT-Architectural issues and considerations for the IT-Architect Community. 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in SF www.oracle.com Share your use of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions and how they help your organization drive business innovation. You just might win a free pass to Oracle Openworld 2012 in San Francisco. Deadline for submissions in July 17, 2012. IT professionals: Very much the time to change our approach | Andy Mulholland www.capgemini.com This final post by retiring Capgemini CTO blogger Andy Mulholland is a must-read for anyone in IT. 10 Great WebCenter Sites Resources (FatWire) | John Brunswick www.johnbrunswick.com John Brunswick shares "some good resources that span the WebCenter Sites and FatWire brands, to get a consolidated list of helpful destinations for ongoing education." Cloning a WebCenter Portal Managed Server | Maiko Rocha blogs.oracle.com WebCenter and ADF A-Team blogger Maiko Rocha shows how to easily add a new managed server to a single-node domain to make it a cluster. Sorting and Filtering By Model-Based LOV Display Value | Steven Davelaar blogs.oracle.com How-to by WebCenter and ADF A-Team blogger Steven Davelaar. Designing and Developing Cross-Cutting Features | Stephen Rylander www.infoq.com Architects are often tasked with a business feature that must span systems. This article by will provide strategies to handle the change and guide your thinking about separating system boundaries and what that means for your technical design. Thought for the Day "A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done." — Fred Allen (5/31/1894 – 3/17/1956) Source: Brainy Quote

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• Stop Saying "Multi-Channel!"

  - by David Dorf

  I keep hearing the term "multi-channel" in our industry, but its time to move on. It kinda reminds me of the term "ECR" or electronic cash register. Long ago ECR was a leading-edge term, but nowadays its rarely used because its table-stakes. After all, what cash register today isn't electronic? The same logic applies to multi-channel, at least when we're talking about tier-1 and tier-2 retailers. If you're still talking about multi-channel retailing, you're in big trouble. Some have switched over to the term "cross-channel," and that's a step in the right direction but still falls short. Its kinda like saying, "I upgraded my ECR to accept debit cards!" Yawn. Who hasn't? Today's retailers need to focus on omni-channel, which I first heard from my friends over at RSR but was originally coined at IDC. First retailers added e-commerce to their store and catalog channels yielding multi-channel retailing. Consumers could use the channel that worked best for them. Then some consumers wanted to combine channels with features like buy-on-the-Web, pickup-in-the-store. Thus began the cross-channel initiatives to breakdown the silos and enable the channels to communicate with each other. But the multi-channel architecture is full of duplication that thwarts efforts of providing a consistent experience. Each has its own cart, its own pricing, and often its own CRM. This was an outcrop of trying to bring the independent channels to market quickly. Rather than reusing and rebuilding existing components to meet the new demands, silos were created that continue to exist today. Today's consumers want omni-channel retailing. They want to interact with brands in a consistent manner that is channel transparent, yet optimized for that particular interaction. The diagram below, from the soon-to-be-released NRF Mobile Blueprint v2, shows this progression. For retailers to provide an omni-channel experience, there needs to be one logical representation of products, prices, promotions, and customers across all channels. The only thing that varies is the presentation of the content based on the delivery mechanism (e.g. shelf labels, mobile phone, web site, print, etc.) and often these mechanisms can be combined in various ways. I'm looking forward to the day in which I can use my phone to scan QR-codes in a catalog to create a shopping cart of items. Then do some further research on the retailer's Web site and be told about related items that might interest me. Be able to easily solicit opinions and reviews from social sites, and finally enter the store to pickup my items, knowing that any applicable coupons have been applied. In this scenario, I the consumer are dealing with a single brand that is aware of me and my needs throughout the entire transaction. Nirvana.

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• Commerce Anywhere...Where the Web, Store, Mobile, Social and Call Center Come Together

  - by divya.malik

  I am pleased to introduce guest blogger, Bill Zujewski today. Bill has just joined the Oracle CRM Product Marketing team as part of our recent ATG acquisition. Based in Cambridge, MA Bill was the VP of Product Marketing for ATG and collaborated on eCommerce strategy with some of the best brands in the world. Welcome Bill!! BY BILL ZUJEWSKI "Times are a changing"...or so the song goes. Not long ago, eCommerce just meant having a cool brand and a slick website. Today, customers expect much more... what I think they really want...Commerce Anywhere...a seamless, consistent and personal way to interact or transact business with you and your products, whether they start on the web, go into a store, talk over the phone, access products via their mobile device or on their favorite social media site. They want one more thing... for you to remember them and their history with you... so they can be treated more intelligently and not have to repeat previous interactions. It makes sense to me, I want it too... it saves me time and money. I work with many companies that are trying to understand how to evolve their business structure and technology solutions to meet the challenges of Commerce Anywhere. My advice ... think differently and take a more holistic approach to the customer experience and the cross-channel selling solution. Stop integrating siloed legacy systems and start thinking about a single platform as your new foundation... the e-Commerce platform. I recently wrote a new white paper, Commerce Anywhere - A Business and Technology ! Strategy to Maximize Cross- channel Commerce Growth to help our customers better understand how to create that "Commerce Anywhere" customer experience that customers really want. The paper offers practical insights into an IT transformation that can help you leverage a commerce platform to go beyond the web store front and instead use it to enable rapid expansion into mobile apps, new in-store apps, and interact with your customers through social commerce. Let me know what you think by posting a comment on this blog.

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• The Numbers of Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  This week, we’ll be continuing our conversations about Customer Experience (CX) on the Oracle WebCenter blog.  While we all know that customer experience is critically important for acquiring new customers and engendering long term brand loyalty, I thought we could kick this week off by taking a look at the numbers of customer experience.   I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing quite puts things into perspective like numbers and figures. A whopping 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  But many companies are failing to step up to the challenge.  And when companies fail deliver on customer experience expectations, they leave money on the table. A huge percentage of customers, 89%, begin doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. Breaking up isn’t hard to do and today’s empowered customers have no qualms about taking their business elsewhere when their expectations for customer experience are not met. Over a quarter of consumers, 26%, posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter following a poor customer experience. Today, individual customer service failures have the ability to easily snowball.  An unsatisfied customer has the ability to easily share their rancor with their entire social network and chip away at your brand’s reputation. A large number of consumers, 79%,  who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.  Companies ignore customer complaints at their own peril.  And unsatisfied customers, when handled effectively, have the potential to become advocates for your brand.  Of the 21% of consumers who did get responses to complaints, more than half had positive reactions to the same company about which they were previously complaining. Half of consumers will give a brand only a week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.  The clock is ticking when customers have questions about your brand and a week is an eternity in the realm of customer experience.  The source for these stats is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, which explores the relationship between consumers and brands.  The report is based on a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive. If you’re interested in seeing more facts and figures about customer experience, download the full report.

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• Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties on a Corporate/Franchise website

  - by heath

  My question is really an extension of a previous question that was ported from stackoverflow and closed so I cannot edit it. The basic gist is a regional franchise company has decided to force all independent stores into one website look; they currently all have their own domains and completely different websites. After reading the helpful answers and looking over some links provided, I think my solution is to put a 301 on each franchise store site (acme-store1.com, acme-store2.com, etc) back to the main corporate site (acme.com). All of the company history, product info, etc (about 90% of the entire site) applies to all stores. However, each store should have some exclusive content such as staff, location pictures, exclusive events and promotions, etc. I originally thought that I would simply do something like acme.com/store1/staff, acme.com/store2/staff, etc for the store exclusive content and then acme.com/our-company, for example, would cover all stores. However, I now see two issues that I don't know how to solve. They want to see site stats based on what store site they came from. If a user comes from acme-store1.com, is redirected to acme.com and hits several pages, don't I need to somehow keep that original site in the new url to track each page in that user's session and show they originally came from acme-store1.com? Each store is still independently owned and is essentially still in competition with the other stores, albeit, in less competition than they are with other brands. This is important because each store would like THEIR contact info, links to their social media pages, their mailing list sign-up and customer requests on EVERY page. So if a user originally goes to acme-store1.com and is redirected to acme.com, it still should look to the user that it's all about store 1, even though 90% of the content will be exactly the same as it is in the store 2, store 3 and corporate site. For example, acme.com/our-company would have the same company history, same header/footer/navigation, BUT depending on the original site the user came from, it would display contact and links to THAT store. If someone came directly to the corporate site, it would display their contact and links (they have their own as well). I was considering that all redirects would be to store1.acme.com, store2.acme.com, etc (or acme.com/store1) and then I can dynamically add the contact info and appropriate links based on the subdomain or subfolder. But, then I have to worry about duplicate content penalties because, again, about 90% of the text in these "subdomains" are all the same. For reference, this is a PHP5 site. I've already written a compact framework utilizing templates and mod-rewrite that I've used for other sites. Is this an easy fix that I'm just not grasping? Any suggestions?

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Marvel

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryMarvel Entertainment, LLC (Marvel) is one of the world's most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of over 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media over seventy years. The customer wanted to optimize their brand licensing process, so Marvel worked with Oracle WebCenter partner Fishbowl Solutions and implemented a centralized Content Hub based on Oracle WebCenter Content. The 100% web based secure Intranet/Partner Extranet solution is now managing the entire life cycle of the brand licensing process. Marvel and their brand licensees have  now complete visibility of brand license operations including the history of approval request and related content.  Company OverviewMarvel Entertainment, LLC (Marvel) a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is one of the world's most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of over 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media over seventy years.  Marvel utilizes its character franchises in entertainment, licensing and publishing.   Sample  characters:    - Spider-Man    - Iron Man    - Captain America    - X-MEN    - Thor    - Avengers    - And a host of others  Business ChallengesMarvel wanted to optimize their brand licensing process for their characters and had following business requirements : Facilitating content worldwide Scalable and flexible infrastructure to manage multiple content types and huge file sizes Optimize the licensing process workflow trough automatic notifications, tracking reviews, issuing approvals, etc. Solution DeployedMarvel worked with Oracle WebCenter partner Fishbowl Solutions and implemented a centralized Content Hub based on Oracle WebCenter Content. The 100% web based secure Intranet/Partner Extranet solution is now managing the entire life cycle of the brand licensing process. The internal users can now manage all digital assets related to a character trough proper categorization of all items, workflow based review and approval of branding styles and a powerful search and retrieval service. The licensees of Marvel brands can now online develop and submit  concepts and prototypes which are reviewed and approved using a collaborative process. Business ResultMarvel and their brand licensees have now complete visibility of brand license operations including the history of approval request and related content. The character brand related content is now in the right place, at the right time at the user's fingertips with highly improved quality. Additional Information Marvel Open World Presentation Oracle WebCenter Content

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• ITT Corporation Goes Live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM)!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Back in Q2 of FY12, a division of ITT invited Oracle to demo our CRM On Demand product while the group was considering Salesforce.com. Chris Porter, our Oracle Direct sales representative learned the players and their needs and began to develop relationships. We lost that deal, but not Chris's persistence. A few months passed and Chris called on the ITT Shape Cutting Division's Director of Sales to see how things were going. Chris was told that the plan was for the division to buy more Salesforce.com. In fact, he informed Chris that he had just sent his team to Salesforce.com training. During the conversation, Chris mentioned that our new Oracle Sales Cloud Service could run with Outlook. This caused the ITT Sales Director to reconsider the plan to move forward with our competition. Oracle was invited back to demo the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) and after it concluded, the Director stated, "That just blew your competition away." The deal closed on June 5th , 2012 Our Oracle Platinum Partner, Intelenex, began the implementation with ITT on July 30th. We are happy to report that on September 18th, the ITT Shape Cutting Division successfully went live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM). About: ITT is a diversified leading manufacturer of highly engineered critical components and customized technology solutions for growing industrial end-markets in energy infrastructure, electronics, aerospace and transportation. Building on its heritage of innovation, ITT partners with its customers to deliver enduring solutions to the key industries that underpin our modern way of life. Founded in 1920, ITT is headquartered in White Plains, NY, with 8,500 employees in more than 30 countries and sales in more than 125 countries. The ITT Shape Cutting Division provides plasma lasers and controls with the Burny, Kaliburn, and AMC brands. Oracle Fusion Products: Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) including: • Fusion CRM Base • Fusion Sales Cloud • Fusion Mobile and Desktop Integration • Automated Forecasting Adoption Model: SaaS Partner: Intelenex Business Drivers: The ITT Shape Cutting Division wanted to: better enable its Sales Force with email and mobile CRM capabilities simplify and automate its complex sales processes centrally manage and maintain customer contact information Why We Won: ITT was impressed with the feature-rich capabilities of Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM), including sales performance management and integration. The company also liked the product's flexibility and scalability for future growth. Expected Benefits: Streamlined accurate forecasting Increased customer manageability Improved sales performance Better visibility to customer information

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• Impatient Customers Make Flawless Service Mission Critical for Midsize Companies

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  At times, I can be an impatient customer. But I’m not alone. Research by The Social Habit shows that among customers who contact a brand, product, or company through social media for support, 32% expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% expect a response within 60 minutes! 70% of respondents to another study expected their complaints to be addressed within 24 hours, irrespective of how they contacted the company. I was intrigued when I read a recent blog post by David Vap, Group Vice President of Product Development for Oracle Service Cloud. It’s about “Three Secrets to Innovation” in customer service. In David’s words: 1) Focus on making what’s hard simple 2) Solve real problems for real people 3) Don’t just spin a good vision. Do something about it  I believe midsize companies have a leg up in delivering on these three points, mainly because they have no other choice. How can you grow a business without listening to your customers and providing flawless service? Big companies are often weighed down by customer service practices that have been churning in bureaucracy for years or even decades. When the all-in-one printer/fax/scanner I bought my wife for Christmas (call me a romantic) failed after sixty days, I wasted hours of my time navigating the big brand manufacturer’s complex support and contact policies only to be offered a refurbished replacement after I shipped mine back to them. There was not a happy ending. Let's just say my wife still doesn't have a printer.  Young midsize companies need to innovate to grow. Established midsize company brands need to innovate to survive and reach the next level. Midsize Customer Case Study: The Boston Globe The Boston Globe, established in 1872 and the winner of 22 Pulitzer Prizes, is fighting the prevailing decline in the newspaper industry. Businessman John Henry invested in the Globe in 2013 because he, “…believes deeply in the future of this great community, and the Globe should play a vital role in determining that future”. How well the paper executes on its bold new strategy is truly mission critical—a matter of life or death for an industry icon. This customer case study tells how Oracle’s Service Cloud is helping The Boston Globe “do something about” and not just “spin” it’s strategy and vision via improved customer service. For example, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is now the preferred support channel for its online environments. The average e-mail or phone call can take three to four minutes to complete while the average chat is only 30 to 40 seconds. It’s a great example of one company leveraging technology to make things simpler to solve real problems for real people. Related: Oracle Cloud Service a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions For Small And Midsize Teams, Q2 2014

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• Moms on Mobile: Are They Way Ahead of You?

  - by Mike Stiles

  You may have no idea how much and how fast moms are embracing mobile. Of all the demographics that can be targeted by marketers, moms have always been at or near the top of the list. And why not? They’re running households, they’re all over town, they’re making buying decisions, and they’re influencing family and friends. They, out of necessity, become masters of efficiency and time management. So when a technology tool, like mobile, comes along that assists with that efficiency and time management, we would obviously expect them to take advantage of it. So if it’s obvious, why are so many big, sophisticated brands left choking on the dust of moms who have zoomed past them in the adoption of mobile, and social on mobile? Let’s break down some hard truths as presented by a Mojiava report: -Moms spend 6.1 hours per day on average on their smartphones – more than magazines, TV or radio. -46% took action after seeing a mobile ad. -51% self-identify as “addicted” to their smartphone. -Households with an income of $25K-$50K have about the same mobile penetration among moms as those with incomes of $50K-$75K. So mobile is regarded as a necessity for middle-class moms. -Even moms without smartphones spend 2.5 hours on average per day on some connected mobile device. -Of moms with such devices, 9.8% have an iPad, 9.5% a Kindle and 5.7% an iPod Touch. -Of tablet-owning moms, 97% bought something using their tablet in the last month. -31% spend over 10 hours per week on their tablet, but less than 2 hours per week on their PCs. -62% of connected moms use shopping apps. -46% want to get info on their mobile while in a store. -Half of connected moms use social on their mobile. And they’re engaged. 81% are brand fans, 86% post updates, and 84% comment. If women and moms are one of your primary targets and you find yourself with no strong social channels where content is driving engagement and relationship-building, with sites not optimized for mobile, or with no tablet or smartphone apps, you have been solidly left behind by your customers and prospects. And their adoption of mobile and social on mobile is only exponentially speeding up, not slowing down. How much sense does it make when your customer is ready to act on your mobile ad, wants to user your iPad app to buy something from you, wants to be your fan on Facebook, wants to get messages and deals from you while they’re in your store…but you’re completely absent? I’ll help you cheat on the test by giving you the answer…no sense at all. Catch up to momma.

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• Are You Meeting Social Customer Service Expectations?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Whether it’s B2B or B2C, one sure path to repeat business is making sure your buyer has a memorably pleasant and successful customer service experience with you. If they get that kind of treatment consistently, that’s called a relationship. And those aren’t broken easily. Social customer service, driven by integrated SRM (social relationship management) technology, is the venue that can effectively connect customers not only to the brand, but to other customers. Positive experiences, once administered, don’t just rest with the recipient. They’re published in the form of public raves and peer-to-peer recommendation, a force far more actionable than push advertising. What’s more, your customers have come to expect access to you and satisfaction from you using social. An NM Incite study shows 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect to get an answer from brands the same day they post to them on their social assets. To make sure you’re responding, you’ve got to have a tech platform that’s set up to moderate and alert so you’ll know ASAP a customer needs help. The more integrated your social enterprise is, the faster you can not only respond, but respond with the answer they’re looking for, because your system is connected to the internal resources that can surface the answer or put wheels in motion to rectify the situation in the shortest amount of time possible. But if you go to the necessary lengths to make sure your customers feel valued and important, will they really reward you? The study says 71% of consumers who got quick and effective responses from companies they contacted via social were more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers. So yes, sweeping people off their feet pays big dividends in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. But you should be keenly aware of the reverse side of that coin. Give people a negative experience, either in real world or virtual customer service, and that message is highly likely to get amplified through social channels faster and louder. Only 36% of the NM Incite study’s respondents reported that their problems were solved quickly and effectively. 36%? That’s hardly an impressive number. It gets worse. 10% never got so much as a response - at all. Going back to the relationship analogy, companies that are this deep in the ditch where customer service is concerned are making their girl or boyfriends really easy for a competitor to steal. Given the technology tools and data available right now for having an intimate knowledge of the customer, what products they’ve purchased, likely problems with those products, effective resolutions to those problems, and follow-up communication to gauge satisfaction, there are fewer excuses than ever for making the lifeblood of your business feel like you couldn’t care less. @mikestiles

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• The difference

  So with the CTP tools available, weve been building a few apps, just to get a feel for the tools and whats supported in the framework.  Whats been great is that everything is fairly familiar and consistent, largely to do with the .net framework and Microsofts focus on providing good tools.  Weve produced mobile applications, mostly in concept form, for Windows Phone Classic, iPhone and Android but never so quickly and not of such high quality and visual impression.  I attribute some of this obviously to our familiarity to the Microsoft platform and tools.  Though when you look at the designs our team has produced, it becomes clear that this is not just another mobile application container.                                                            The Metro design language implores content prominence with fluid motion and transitions, with a crisp font and easily organized features and services placement.  In addition to a purposeful right edge tease, where the intent is for users to discover new premium content and services.   The concept that enables this is called hubs, building application with hubs changes your thinking from a single mobile application task, to thinking creatively about a mobile experience. Its engaging to think of the other brands and industry verticals that will take advantage of this core feature.  Combine this with Windows Phone 7 live tiles, more on that later, and you have a recipe for a solid mobile services platform.                                                              This so much more fun and liberating than my icon on a gridDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Server configuration advice for new site that could get lots of traffic within 6m

  - by alchemical

  We're setting up a new web2.0 type site with elements of e-commerce. Budget is kind of tight. Due to the nature of the site and promotions, etc., we expect traffic could ramp up fairly quickly. Looking for advice for a good configuration to start with, we' looking to co-lo with CalPop in downtown LA. We've looked at Dell, ABMX.com, and got a quote from CalPop (they make their own servers as they also do managed hosting). Price range has been anywhere from about $1200-$3300 per server. We're thinking to start with a web server and db server, both with mirrored drives. It would be nice to stay under about 2k per server if possible. Min configuration for each would probably be a quad-core with 8GB Ram. Thinking to run Windows Server 2008 R2 (Web Edition?) and SQL Server 2008. Looking for advice on the best server configurations and/or brands that fit the budget, yet will allow us to smoothly scale as traffic increases. Reliability is also pretty important. Also wondering if a switch/router is necessary or useful to connect the two servers.

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• What is the advantage of not running as root? [closed]

  - by Shmuel Brill

  Possible Duplicate: What's wrong with always being root? All modern brands of Linux highly discourage (or disable) one from running as root instead of a normal user. I do not understand why. As a "normal" user, one could Download a rouge program from the internet. Run it (After all, one isn't root, what can it do). It installs itself in .bashrc or .xinitrc It writes a rouge "sudo" and "su" and adds . to the path Not noticing that . is in path, one runs sudo. The rouge program now has root password and can do anything it wants in the system. Even if 3-6 doesn't happen, the program could still Be part of a botnet. Read all files in the home directory and send them back (mine for SS#, Credit Card numbers, bank account numbers, etc). Send spam. Run a backdoor server to allow an attacker a chance to connect to the machine to determine vulnerabilities. It seems that the whole "permissions" thing (root/non-root) is just to prevent amateur crackers from getting into the system, so the question is: Is there a point in avoiding running as root, and is there a way to protect oneself if one wants to run unsafe code?

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• MAC addresses on dual-NIC mainboards

  - by Tom O'Connor

  Here's a weird problem. We've got a number of devices with dual-NIC mainboards. Some are Realtek NICs, which suck. Some are Intel e1000s, which don't. I've just noticed on 2 machines, one is an Intel NIC, one is a Realtek, that when I put the MAC address of one machine into the dhcpd.conf file on our DHCP server to get it to PXE boot the machine into a rebuild environment, initially everything is fine. The server gets a DHCP allocation, and PXE boots into the Ubuntu preseed enviroment. On one or two machines, it gets as far as Ubuntu's DHCP network configuration, and fails. If i pull up a busybox shell (on tty2 on the installing machine), and run ip link, I can see that the UP flag is set on the other NIC. Here's some stuff. host xeon16-ghz240-gb48-node1 { hardware ethernet BC:AE:C5:07:1F:18; filename "pxelinux.0"; next-server 192.168.123.80; } That's what's in dhcpd.conf This is what ip link on the evil machine looks like. Only one NIC is actually connected (deliberately). As you can see, the NIC that's in the dhcpd config, is not marked as UP, and the link that is UP, isn't the one in DHCP. So far I've seen this on two brands of dual-NIC configuration. Does anyone know 1) what's causing it, and b) What we can do about it?

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• Alternate way to connect a vpn through a MIFI

  - by questor

  This has gotten to be a major problem at our company and depending on who I ask, the problem either does not really exist (mfr. and vendor) or is insoluble ( according to most users including techs who know how to prove their point). The problem involves getting a normal Windows 7 system to connect to a normal Server 2008 R2 Server over a cellular router (usually called a Mifi). A very few brands/models appear to work but the majority cannot make the connection. Since it is a cellular device, there are many variables that come into play and I wondered if anyone had ever found a consistent way to either make one work or else prove to the providers that their equipment was at fault. They all specifically state “VPN use” on the sales brochures. But few if any work. And those that do are not reliable. From a standpoint of pure knowledge, I just wondered if anyone knew the real reason why they fail? Pptp, L2tp, IPsec doesn’t matter. I have not tried Shrew or OpenVPN and am using strictly MS Windows protocols. Plenty of Google Searches back up my complaints but none seem to be any closer to knowing "why" they fail, just that they do. This is a "quest for knowledge"question. I don't expect a solution. Just a reason for the problem if anyone has any ideas.

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