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top Tweets SOA Partner Community – August 2012

- by JuergenKress

Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Lucas Jellema ?Published an article about organizing Fusion Middleware Administration: http://technology.amis.nl/2012/07/31/organizing-fusion-middleware-administration-in-a-smart-and-frugal-way … - many organizations are struggling with this. ServiceTechSymposium Countdown to the Early Bird Registration Discount deadline. Only 4 days left! http://ow.ly/cBCiv demed ?Good chatting w Bob Rhubart, Thomas Erl & Tim Hall on SOA & Cloud Symposium https://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/podcast_show_notes_thomas_erl … @soaschool @OTNArchBeat -- CU in London! SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-july-2012/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Are You a facebook member - do You follow http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity ? #soacommunity #soa SOA Community ?SOA 24/7 - Home Page: http://soa247.com/#.UBJsN8n3kyk.twitter … #soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Handling Large Payloads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1lFAih OracleBlogs ?SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://ow.ly/1lFx6s OTNArchBeat Podcast Show Notes: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology http://bit.ly/OOHTUJ SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter July 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-s7 OTNArchBeat ?OTN ArchBeat Podcast: Thomas Erl on SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology - Part 1 http://pub.vitrue.com/fMti OProcessAccel ?Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 1 of 4 - A conversation with SOA, Cloud, and Service Technology Symposiu... http://ow.ly/1lDyAK OracleBlogs ?SOA Suite 11g PS5 Bundled Patch 3 (11.1.1.6.3) http://ow.ly/1lCW1S Simon Haslam My write-up of the virtues of the #ukoug App Server & Middleware SIG http://bit.ly/LMWdfY What's important to you for our next meeting? SOA Community SOA Partner Community Survey 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-qY Simone Geib ?RT @jswaroop: #Oracle positioned in the Leader's quadrant - Gartner Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure (SOA & SOA Gov)... ServiceTechSymposium New Supporting Organization, IBTI has joined the Symposium! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lA7XS OTNArchBeat Oracle content at SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium (and discount code!) http://pub.vitrue.com/FPcW OracleBlogs ?BPM 11g Task Form Version Considerations http://ow.ly/1lzOrX OTNArchBeat BPM 11g #ADF Task Form Versioning | Christopher Karl Chan #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/0qP2 OTNArchBeat Lightweight ADF Task Flow for BPM Human Tasks Overview | @AndrejusB #fusionmiddleware http://pub.vitrue.com/z7x9 SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon report by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/oracle-fusion-middleware-summer-camps-in-lisbon/ … #ofmsummercamps #soa #bpm SOA Community ?Clemens Utschig-Utschig & Manas Deb The Successful Execution of the SOA and BPM Vision Using a Business Capability Framework: Concepts… Simone Geib ?RT @oprocessaccel: Just released! White Paper: Oracle Process Accelerators Best Practices http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/processaccelbestpracticeswhitepaper-1708910.pdf … jornica ?Report from Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Munich: SOA Suite 11g advanced training experiences @soacommunity http://bit.ly/Mw3btE Simone Geib ?Bruce Tierney: Update - SOA & BPM Customer Insights Webcast Series: | https://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/update_soa_bpm_customer_insights … OTNArchBeat Business SOA: Thinking is Dead | @mosesjones http://pub.vitrue.com/k8mw esentri ?had 3 great days in Munich at #Oracle #soacommunity Summercamp! Special thanks to Geoffroy de Lamalle from eProseed! Danilo Schmiedel ?Used my time in train to setup the ps5 soa/bpm vbox-image.Works like a dream. Setup-Readme is perfect! Saves a lot of time!!! @soacommunity 18 Jul SOA Community ?THANKS for the excellent OFM summer camps - save trip home - share your pictures at http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity doors BBQ-party with Oracle @soacommunity. 5Star! #lovemunich #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/ztfcGn2S leonsmiers ?New #Capgemini blog post "Continuous Improvement of Business Agility" http://bit.ly/Lr0EwG #bpm #yam Eric Elzinga ?MDS Explorer utility, http://see.sc/4qdb43 #soasuite ServiceTechSymposium ?@techsymp New speaker Demed L’Her from Oracle has been added to the symposium calendar. http://ow.ly/cjnyw SOA Community ?Last day of the Fusion Middleware summer camps - we continue at 9.00 am. send us your barbecue pictures! #ofmsummercamps #soacommunity SOA Community ?Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository by Link Consulting http://middlewarebylink.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/delivering-soa-governance-with-eams-and-oracle-enterprise-repository/ … #soacommunity #soa #oer OracleBlogs ?Process Accelerator Kit http://ow.ly/1loaCw 15 Jul SOA Community ?Sun is back in Munich! Send your pictures Middleware summer camps! #ofmsummercamps We start tomorrow 11.00 at Oracle pic.twitter.com/6FStxomk Walter Montantes ?Gracias, Obrigado, Thank you, Danke a Lisboa y a @soacommunity @wlscommunity. From the Mexican guys!! cc @mikeintoch #ofmsummercamps Andrejus Baranovskis Tips & Tricks How to Run Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Workspace from Custom ADF 11g Application http://fb.me/1zOf3h2K8 JDeveloper & ADF ?Fusion Apps Enterprise Repository - Explained http://dlvr.it/1rpjWd Steve Walker ?Oracle #Exalogic is the logical choice for running business applications. Exalogic Software 2.0 launches 7/25. Reg at http://bit.ly/NedQ9L A. Chatziantoniou ?Landed in rainy Amsterdam after a great week in Lisbon for the #ofmsummercamps - multo obrigado for Jürgen for another fantastic event SOA Community ?Teams present #BPM11g POC results at #ofmsummercamps - great job! #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/0d4txkWF Sabine Leitner ?#DOAG SIG Middleware 29.08.2012 Köln über MW, Administration, Monitoring http://bit.ly/P47w82 @soacommunity @OracleMW @OracleFMW 12 Jul philmulhall ?Thanks @soacommunity for a great week at the #ofmsummercamps. Hard work done so time for a few cold ones in Lisboa. pic.twitter.com/LVUUuwTh peter230769 ?RT: andrea_rocco_31: RT @soacommunity: Enjoy the networking event at #ofmsummercamps want to attend next time ... pic.twitter.com/D1HRndi4 Niels Gorter ?#ofmsummercamps dinner in Lisbon. Great weather, scenery, training, people, on and on. Big THANKS @soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF ?Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Domain http://dlvr.it/1r0c2j Andrea Rocco ?RT @soacommunity: Jamy pastry at cafe Belem - who is the ghost there?!? http://via.me/-2x33uk6 Simon Haslam ?Sounds great - sorry I couldn't make it. RT @soacommunity: 6pm BPM advanced training hard work to build the POC #ofmsummercamps philmulhall ?A well earned rest after a hard days work @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/LKK7VOVS philmulhall ?Some more hard working delegates @soacommunity #summercamps pic.twitter.com/gWpk1HZh SOA Community ?Error message at the BPM POC - will The #ace director understand the message and solve it? #ofmsummercamps pic.twitter.com/LFTEzNck Daniel Kleine-Albers ?posted on the #thecattlecrew blog: Assigning more memory to JDeveloper http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/jdeveloper-quicktip-assigning-more-memory/ … OTNArchBeat ?BAM design pointers | Kavitha Srinivasan http://pub.vitrue.com/TOhP SOA Community ?Did you receive the July SOA community newsletter? read it! Want to become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity #soa #opn OracleBlogs ?Markus Zirn, Big Data with CEP and SOA @ SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012 http://ow.ly/1lcSkb Andrejus Baranovskis Running Oracle BPM 11g PS5 Worklist Task Flow and Human Task Form on Non-SOA Eric Elzinga ?Service Facade design pattern in OSB, http://bit.ly/NnOExN Eric Elzinga ?New BPEL Thread Pool in SOA 11g for Non-Blocking Invoke Activities from 11.1.1.6 (PS5), http://bit.ly/NnOc2G Gilberto Holms New Post: Siebel Connection Pool in Oracle Service Bus 11g http://wp.me/pRE8V-2z Oracle UPK & Tutor ?UPK Pre-Built Content Update: UPK pre-built content development efforts are always underway and growing. Ove... http://bit.ly/R2HeTj JDeveloper & ADF ?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove... http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA Community BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 … #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic –Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koser http://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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Skanska Builds Global Workforce Insight with Cloud-Based HCM System

- by HCM-Oracle

By David Baum - Originally posted on Profit Peter Bjork grew up building things. He started his work life learning all sorts of trades at his father’s construction company in the northern part of Sweden. So in college, it was natural for him to pursue a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering—but he broke new ground when he added a master’s degree in finance to his curriculum vitae. Written on a traditional résumé, Bjork’s current title (vice president of information systems strategies) doesn’t reveal the diversity of his experience—that he’s adept with hammer and nails as well as rows and columns. But a big part of his current job is to work with his counterparts in human resources (HR) designing, building, and deploying the systems needed to get a complete view of the skills and potential of Skanska’s 22,000-strong white-collar workforce. And Bjork believes that complete view is essential to Skanska’s success. “Our business is really all about people,” says Bjork, who has worked with Skanska for 16 years. “You can have equipment and financial resources, but to truly succeed in a business like ours you need to have the right people in the right places. That’s what this system is helping us accomplish.” In a global HR environment that suffers from a paradox of high unemployment and a scarcity of skilled labor, managers need to have a complete understanding of workforce capabilities to develop management skills, recruit for open positions, ensure that staff is getting the training they need, and reduce attrition. Skanska’s human capital management (HCM) systems, based on Oracle Talent Management Cloud, play a critical role delivering that understanding. “Skanska’s philosophy of having great people, encouraging their development, and giving them the chance to move across business units has nurtured a culture of collaboration, but managing a diverse workforce spread across the globe is a monumental challenge,” says Annika Lindholm, global human resources system owner in the HR department at Skanska’s headquarters just outside of Stockholm, Sweden. “We depend heavily on Oracle’s cloud technology to support our HCM function.” Construction, Workers For Skanska’s more than 60,000 employees and contractors, managing huge construction projects is an everyday job. Beyond erecting signature buildings, management’s goal is to build a corporate culture where valuable talent can be sought out and developed, bringing in the right mix of people to support and grow the business. “Of all the companies in our space, Skanska is probably one of the strongest ones, with a laser focus on people and people development,” notes Tom Crane, chief HR and communications officer for Skanska in the United States. “Our business looks like equipment and material, but all we really have at the end of the day are people and their intellectual capital. Without them, second only to clients, of course, you really can’t achieve great things in the high-profile environment in which we work.” During the 1990s, Skanska entered an expansive growth phase. A string of successful acquisitions paved the way for the company’s transformation into a global enterprise. “Today the company’s focus is on profitable growth,” continues Crane. “But you can’t really achieve growth unless you are doing a very good job of developing your people and having the right people in the right places and driving a culture of growth.” In the United States alone, Skanska has more than 8,000 employees in four distinct business units: Skanska USA Building, also known as the Construction Manager, builds everything at ground level and above—hospitals, educational facilities, stadiums, airport terminals, and other massive projects. Skanska USA Civil does everything at ground level and below, such as light rail, water treatment facilities, power plants or power industry facilities, highways, and bridges. Skanska Infrastructure Development develops public-private partnerships—projects in which Skanska adds equity and also arranges for outside financing. Skanska Commercial Development acts like a commercial real estate developer, acquiring land and building offices on spec or build-to-suit for its clients. Skanska's international portfolio includes construction of the new Meadowlands Stadium. Getting the various units to operate collaboratatively helps Skanska deliver high value to clients and shareholders. “When we have this collaboration among units, it allows us to enrich each of the business units and, at the same time, develop our future leaders to be more facile in operating across business units—more accepting of a ‘one Skanska’ approach,” explains Crane. Workforce Worldwide But HR needs processes and tools to support managers who face such business dynamics. Oracle Talent Management Cloud is helping Skanska implement world-class recruiting strategies and generate the insights needed to drive quality hiring practices, internal mobility, and a proactive approach to building talent pipelines. With their new cloud system in place, Skanska HR leaders can manage everything from recruiting, compensation, and goal and performance management to employee learning and talent review—all as part of a single, cohesive software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. Skanska has successfully implemented two modules from Oracle Talent Management Cloud—the recruiting and performance management modules—and is in the process of implementing the learn module. Internally, they call the systems Skanska Recruit, Skanska Talent, and Skanska Learn. The timing is apropos. With high rates of unemployment in recent years, there have been many job candidates on the market. However, talent scarcity continues to frustrate recruiters. Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service, one of the applications in the Oracle Talent Management cloud portfolio, enables Skanska managers to create more-intelligent recruiting strategies, pulling high-performer profile statistics to create new candidate profiles and using multitiered screening and assessments to ensure that only the best-suited candidate applications make it to the recruiter’s desk. Tools such as applicant tracking, interview management, and requisition management help recruiters and hiring managers streamline the hiring process. Oracle’s cloud-based software system automates and streamlines many other HR processes for Skanska’s multinational organization and delivers insight into the success of recruiting and talent-management efforts. “The Oracle system is definitely helping us to construct global HR processes,” adds Bjork. “It is really important that we have a business model that is decentralized, so we can effectively serve our local markets, and interact with our global ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems as well. We would not be able to do this without a really good, well-integrated HCM system that could support these efforts.” A key piece of this effort is something Skanska has developed internally called the Skanska Leadership Profile. Core competencies, on which all employees are measured, are used in performance reviews to determine weak areas but also to discover talent, such as those who will be promoted or need succession plans. This global profiling system brings consistency to the way HR professionals evaluate and review talent across the company, with a consistent set of ratings and a consistent definition of competencies. All salaried employees in Skanska are tied to a talent management process that gives opportunity for midyear and year-end reviews. Using the performance management module, managers can align individual goals with corporate goals; provide clear visibility into how each employee contributes to the success of the organization; and drive a strategic, end-to-end talent management strategy with a single, integrated system for all talent-related activities. This is critical to a company that is highly focused on ensuring that every employee has a development plan linked to his or her succession potential. “Our approach all along has been to deploy software applications that are seamless to end users,” says Crane. “The beauty of a cloud-based system is that much of the functionality takes place behind the scenes so we can focus on making sure users can access the data when they need it. This model greatly improves their efficiency.” The employee profile not only sets a competency baseline for new employees but is also integrated with Skanska’s other back-office Oracle systems to ensure consistency in the way information is used to support other business functions. “Since we have about a dozen different HR systems that are providing us with information, we built a master database that collects all the information,” explains Lindholm. “That data is sent not only to Oracle Talent Management Cloud, but also to other systems that are dependent on this information.” Collaboration to Scale Skanska is poised to launch a new Oracle module to link employee learning plans to the review process and recruitment assessments. According to Crane, connecting these processes allows Skanska managers to see employees’ progress and produce an updated learning program. For example, as employees take classes, supervisors can consult the Oracle Talent Management Cloud portal to monitor progress and align it to each individual’s training and development plan. “That’s a pretty compelling solution for an organization that wants to manage its talent on a real-time basis and see how the training is working,” Crane says. Rolling out Oracle Talent Management Cloud was a joint effort among HR, IT, and a global group that oversaw the worldwide implementation. Skanska deployed the solution quickly across all markets at once. In the United States, for example, more than 35 offices quickly got up to speed on the new system via webinars for employees and face-to-face training for the HR group. “With any migration, there are moments when you hold your breath, but in this case, we had very few problems getting the system up and running,” says Crane. Lindholm adds, “There has been very little resistance to the system as users recognize its potential. Customizations are easy, and a lasting partnership has developed between Skanska and Oracle when help is needed. They listen to us.” Bjork elaborates on the implementation process from an IT perspective. “Deploying a SaaS system removes a lot of the complexity,” he says. “You can downsize the IT part and focus on the business part, which increases the probability of a successful implementation. If you want to scale the system, you make a quick phone call. That’s all it took recently when we added 4,000 users. We didn’t have to think about resizing the servers or hiring more IT people. Oracle does that for us, and they have provided very good support.” As a result, Skanska has been able to implement a single, cost-effective talent management solution across the organization to support its strategy to recruit and develop a world-class staff. Stakeholders are confident that they are providing the most efficient recruitment system possible for competent personnel at all levels within the company—from skilled workers at construction sites to top management at headquarters. And Skanska can retain skilled employees and ensure that they receive the development opportunities they need to grow and advance.

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Using a "local" S3 emulation layer as a replacement for HDFS?

- by user183394

I have been testing out the most recent Cloudera CDH4 hadoop-conf-pseudo (i.e. MRv2 or YARN) on a notebook, which has 4 cores, 8GB RAM, an Intel X25MG2 SSD, and runs a S3 emulation layer my colleagues and I wrote in C++. The OS is Ubuntu 12.04LTS 64bit. So far so good. Looking at Setting up hadoop to use S3 as a replacement for HDFS, I would like to do it on my notebook. Nevertheless, I can't find where I can change the jets3t.properties for setting the end point to localhost. I downloaded the hadoop-2.0.1-alpha.tar.gz and searched the source without finding out a clue. There is a similar Q on SO Using s3 as fs.default.name or HDFS?, but I want to use our own lightweight and fast S3 emulation layer, instead of AWS S3, for our experiments. I would appreciate a hint as to how I can change the end point to a different hostname. Regards, --Zack

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Where Next for Google Translate? And What of Information Quality?

- by ultan o'broin

Fascinating article in the UK Guardian newspaper called Can Google break the computer language barrier? In it, Andreas Zollman, who works on Google Translate, comments that the quality of Google Translate's output relative to the amount of data required to create that output is clearly now falling foul of the law of diminishing returns. He says: "Each doubling of the amount of translated data input led to about a 0.5% improvement in the quality of the output," he suggests, but the doublings are not infinite. "We are now at this limit where there isn't that much more data in the world that we can use," he admits. "So now it is much more important again to add on different approaches and rules-based models." The Translation Guy has a further discussion on this, called Google Translate is Finished. He says: "And there aren't that many doublings left, if any. I can't say how much text Google has assimilated into their machine translation databases, but it's been reported that they have scanned about 11% of all printed content ever published. So double that, and double it again, and once more, shoveling all that into the translation hopper, and pretty soon you get the sum of all human knowledge, which means a whopping 1.5% improvement in the quality of the engines when everything has been analyzed. That's what we've got to look forward to, at best, since Google spiders regularly surf the Web, which in its vastness dwarfs all previously published content. So to all intents and purposes, the statistical machine translation tools of Google are done. Outstanding job, Googlers. Thanks." Surprisingly, all this analysis hasn't raised that much comment from the fans of machine translation, or its detractors either for that matter. Perhaps, it's the season of goodwill? What is clear to me, however, of course is that Google Translate isn't really finished (in any sense of the word). I am sure Google will investigate and come up with new rule-based translation models to enhance what they have already and that will also scale effectively where others didn't. So too, will they harness human input, which really is the way to go to train MT in the quality direction. But that aside, what does it say about the quality of the data that is being used for statistical machine translation in the first place? From the Guardian article it's clear that a huge humanly translated corpus drove the gains for Google Translate and now what's left is the dregs of badly translated and poorly created source materials that just can't deliver quality translations. There's a message about information quality there, surely. In the enterprise applications space, where we have some control over content this whole debate reinforces the relationship between information quality at source and translation efficiency, regardless of the technology used to do the translation. But as more automation comes to the fore, that information quality is even more critical if you want anything approaching a scalable solution. This is important for user experience professionals. Issues like user generated content translation, multilingual personalization, and scalable language quality are central to a superior global UX; it's a competitive issue we cannot ignore.

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Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

- by Divya Malik

A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

- by Divya Malik

A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

- by steve.diamond

Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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What’s the Difference Between Succession Management and Talent Reviews?

- by HCM-Oracle

By Marcie Van Houten Is there a difference or are they pieces of one holistic strategic talent process? And can you have one without the other? First, let me give a quick definition of each. Succession planning (or management) is about creating succession slates or talent pools in support of a critical job or position or sets thereof. And then using those plans to help mitigate risk and plan talent needs for the organization. Talent reviews (known by other names often) are sets of meetings where managers and executives come together to review, discuss and often heatedly debate the merits and potential of their employees, and then place and sometimes calibrate that talent on a performance to potential matrix. These are some of the most strategic conversations happening in conference rooms across the globe. I speak with a lot of organizations about their practices in this area and the answers to these questions are as varied and nuanced as there are organizations thinking about them. Some are passionate about their talent review processes and have a very evolved and thoughtful approach. They really know their people, where their talent is, and the opportunities they plan to offer them. And to them that is their succession process. They may never create a slate of named candidates for a job or assign employees to formal talent pools. On the flip side there are other organizations that create slates and slates and often multiple talent pools to support their strategic positions. Through these, they are able to mitigate the risk associated with having a key player leave their organization. And for them, that is their succession process. Some will start from the lower levels of their organization and roll up their succession plans, while other organizations only cover their top 200 executives and key positions with plans. And then there are organizations that leverage some of all of these. Ultimately, the goals are to increase employee engagement, reduce talent-related risk, ensure the right talent is aligned to the strategic initiatives and to drive business value. The approaches are as unique as the organizations they represent and the business opportunities they are looking to seize upon. And that's ok. It's great in fact. Because one thing that is common is the recognition that the need to know your people and align your top talent to the future needs of the organization is mission critical. Sure, there are a set of commonly recognized best practices and guiding principles for all of this. There is no one right or perfect answer. And that is what makes this all so much darn fun. With Talent Review and Succession Management from Oracle HCM Cloud, we’ve blended the ability to support your strategic talent review conversations with both succession plans and talent pools allowing for one very seamless and interactive process. So whether you create a lot of succession plans, only focus on talent pools, have a robust talent review process, or all of the above, Oracle has you covered. I’m looking forward to spending time with our customers at the upcoming OHUG Global Conference 2014 happening June 9-13 in Las Vegas. It’s an opportunity for me to talk to customers about their business and how they are doing strategic talent processes like talent reviews and succession. I hope to see you there. Marcie Van Houten brings over 20 years of management consulting, information systems and human capital management experience to her role as director of product strategy at Oracle. Ms. Van Houten has spent the past several years at Oracle working closely with customers to help drive the direction of the company's talent and succession management applications. Additionally, she spent nine years at PeopleSoft as Director of Information Systems leading human capital management implementation projects. Marcie Van Houten lives in Walnut Creek, California, and holds a MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. You can follow her on Twitter: @MarcieVH

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Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

- by user462779

Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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2 eventos, 2 países, 1 jornada.

- by Noelia Gomez

Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} El pasado Martes 23 de Octubre fue un día de gran actividad tanto en España como en Portugal. El Dialogo CxO , organizado por Econique, y en el que participó Oracle, tuvo lugar en Madrid en el Hotel Puerta de Ámerica. Este encuentro tenía como objetivo intercambiar opiniones sobre todos los aspectos relacionados con la gestión estratégica de clientes y el Contact Centre. En este marco, los asistentes tuvieron la oportunidad de realizar reuniones “one to one” con nuestros mejores expertos. Además Oracle presentó dos coloquios relacionados con la visión de las "Nuevas necesidades, estrategias y tendencias en la gestión del Marketing", de la mano de Gema Sebastian, Principal Sales Consultant de Oracle. En dichos coloquios los participantes de empresas, como Caprabo, Carrefour, Endesa, Jaguar Land Rover y Repsol (entre otros) trataron temas de máxima actualidad para los directivos de Marketing. Esta mesa redonda se centró sobre todo en el Marketing en redes sociales, compartiendo entre todos nuestra percepción de que es algo necesario pero que todavía el mercado no sabe muy bien cómo tratar. La escucha activa dentro de las redes y la posibilidad de reaccionar ante determinados factores se veía como un claro punto donde comenzar a trabajar de manera activa y donde Oracle puede ayudar. La experiencia de cliente fue otro de los puntos tratados en esta mesa, donde se dejó claro que ahora es el consumidor el que manda, el que quiere ver las cosas donde quiere y como quiere y que un mensaje de marketing ha de darse en el momento adecuado y aportando un valor real para que el consumidor lo acepte como algo interesante. Igualmente Oracle dispone de herramientas para hacer que esto sea posible. Por otro lado, en Lisboa, tenía lugar el Total Training 2012, una conferencia organizada por el Grupo IFE. En ella participaron más de 100 profesionales de los recursos humanos de las empresas más importantes de Portugal y tuvo como base de partida los conocimientos y experiencias, el intercambio de ideas y la discusión de oportunidades a las que actualmente se enfrentan los profesionales de este área. En este marco Oracle realizó una ponencia sobre “Los nuevos conceptos en RRHH”, de la mano de Julio Rodriguez, Principal Sales Consultant de Oracle, y que puso de manifiesto algunos conceptos tecnológicos relevantes para la gestión del talento que por su novedad, no eran muy conocidos por los profesionales de los RRHH cómo: · Saas (Software as a service) · BI (Business Intelligence) para RRHH · Social Networking y cómo integrarla dentro de la empresa · El mapa del talento, por fin fuera del Excel y en una aplicación · La movilidad en las aplicaciones de RRHH. Sin duda, esta fue una jornada cargada de intercambio de experiencias y de conocimientos para dos grandes áreas: los Recursos Humanos y la Gestión Estratégica del cliente. Si quieres saber más sobre la experiencia del cliente: Customer Concepts Magazine Customer Concepts Exchange in LinkedIn Customer Concepts Web TV Customer Experience @ Oracle.com Customer Experience Facebook Hub Customer Experience YouTube Channel Customer Experience Twitter Puede conocer más sobre HCM (Gestión de RRHH): Oracle Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management Oracle PartnerNetwork Oracle Consulting Services Oracle Human Capital Management Blog Oracle HCM on Twitter Oracle HCM on Facebook

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Use Case Actors - Primary versus Secondary

- by Dave Burke

The Unified Modeling Language (UML1) defines an Actor (from UseCases) as: An actor specifies a role played by a user or any other system that interacts with the subject. In Alistair Cockburn’s book “Writing Effective Use Cases” (2) Actors are further defined as follows: Primary Actor: The primary actor of a use case is the stakeholder that calls on the system to deliver one of its services. It has a goal with respect to the system – one that can be satisfied by its operation. The primary actor is often, but not always, the actor who triggers the use case. Supporting Actors: A supporting actor in a use case in an external actor that provides a service to the system under design. It might be a high-speed printer, a web service, or humans that have to do some research and get back to us. In a 2006 article (3) Cockburn refined the definitions slightly to read: Primary Actors: The Actor(s) using the system to achieve a goal. The Use Case documents the interactions between the system and the actors to achieve the goal of the primary actor. Secondary Actors: Actors that the system needs assistance from to achieve the primary actor’s goal. Finally, the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) concurs with the UML definition of Actors, along with Cockburn’s refinement, but OUM also includes the following: Secondary actors may or may not have goals that they expect to be satisfied by the use case, the primary actor always has a goal, and the use case exists to satisfy the primary actor. Now that we are on the same “page”, let’s consider two examples: A bank loan officer wants to review a loan application from a customer, and part of the process involves a real-time credit rating check. Use Case Name: Review Loan Application Primary Actor: Loan Officer Secondary Actors: Credit Rating System A Human Resources manager wants to change the job code of an employee, and as part of the process, automatically notify several other departments within the company of the change. Use Case Name: Maintain Job Code Primary Actor: Human Resources Manager Secondary Actors: None The first example is quite straight forward; we need to define the Secondary Actor because without the “Credit Rating System” we cannot successfully complete the Use Case. In other words, the goal of the Primary Actor is to successfully complete the Loan Application, but they need the explicit “help” of the Secondary Actor (Credit Rating System) to achieve this goal. The second example is where people sometimes get confused. Within OUM we would not include the “other departments” as Secondary Actors and therefore not include them on the Use Case diagram for the following reasons: The other departments are not required for the successful completion of the Use Case We are not expecting any response from the other departments (at least within the bounds of the Use Case under discussion) Having said that, within the detail of the Use Case Specification Main Success Scenario, we would include something like: “The system sends a notification to the related department heads (ref. Business Rule BR101)” Now let’s consider one final example. A Procurement Manager wants to place a “bid” for some goods using an On-Line Trading Community (B2B version of eBay) Use Case Name: Create Bid Primary Actor: Procurement Manager Secondary Actors: On-Line Trading Community You might wonder why the Trading Community is listed as a Secondary Actor, i.e. if all we are going to do is place a bid for a specific quantity of goods at a given price and send that off to the Trading Community, then why would the Trading Community need to “assist” in that Use Case? Well, once again, it comes back to the “User Experience” and how we want to optimize that when we think about our Use Case, and ultimately, when the developer comes to assembling some code. In this final example, the Procurement Manager cannot successfully complete the “Create Bid” Use Case until they receive an affirmative confirmation back from the Trading Community that the Bid has been accepted. Therefore, the Trading Community must become a Secondary Actor and be referenced both on the Use Case diagram and Use Case Specification. Any astute readers who are wondering about the “single sitting” rule will have to wait for a follow-up Blog entry to find out how that consideration can be factored in!!! Happy Use Case writing! (1) OMG Unified Modeling LanguageTM (OMG UML), Superstructure Version 2.4.1 (2) Cockburn, A, 2000, Writing Effective Use Case, Addison-Wesley Professional; Edition 1 (3) Cockburn, A, 2006 “Use Case fundamentals” viewed 20th March 2012, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Use+case+fundamentals

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Attachments in Oracle BPM 11g – Create a BPM Process Instance by passing an Attachment

- by Venugopal Mangipudi

Problem Statement: On a recent engagement I had a requirement where we needed to create BPM instances using a message start event. The challenge was that the instance needed to be created after polling a file location and attaching the picked up file (pdf) as an attachment to the instance. Proposed Solution: I was contemplating using process API to accomplish this,but came up with a solution which involves a BPEL process to pickup the file and send a notification to the BPM process by passing the attachment as a payload. The following are some of the brief steps that were used to build the solution: BPM Process to receive an attachment as part of the payload: The BPM Process is a very simple process which has a Message Start event that accepts the attachment as an argument and a Simple User Task that the user can use to view the attachment (as part of the OOTB attachment panel). The Input payload is based on AttachmentPayload.xsd. The 3 key elements of the the payload are: <xsd:element name="filename" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="mimetype" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="content" type="xsd:base64Binary"/> A screenshot of the Human task data assignment that need to performed to attach the file is provided here. Once the process and the UI project (default generated UI) are deployed to the SOA server, copy the wsdl location of the process service (from EM). This WSDL would be used in the BPEL project to create the Instances in the BPM process after a file is polled. BPEL Process to Poll for File and create instances in the BPM process: For the BPEL process a File adapter was configured as a Read service (File Streaming option and keeping the Schema as Opaque). Once a location and the file pattern to poll are provided the Readservice Partner Link was wired to Invoke the BPEL Process. Also, using the BPM Process WSDL, we can create the Webservice reference and can invoke the start operation. Before we do the assignment for the Invoke operation, a global variable should be created to hold the value of the fileName of the file. The mapping to the global variable can be done on the Receive activity properties (jca.file.FileName). So for the assign operation before we invoke the BPM process service, we can get the content of the file from the receive input variable and the fileName from the jca.file.FileName property. The mimetype needs to be hard coded to the mime-type of the file: application/pdf (I am still researching ways to derive the mime type as it is not available as part of the jca.file properties). The screenshot of the BPEL process can be found here and the Assign activity can be found here. The project source can be found at the following location. A sample pdf file to test the project and a screenshot of the BPM Human task screen after the successful creation of the instance can be found here. References: [1] https://blogs.oracle.com/fmwinaction/entry/oracle_bpm_adding_an_attachment

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On The Road with the HR Community

- by Kathryn Perry

A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 4

- by AshishRay

This is Part 4 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In Part 3, I talked in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing, and the distance implications you have to keep in mind. In this final article of the series, I will talk about how you can nicely complement Data Guard SYNC with the ability to failover in seconds. Wait - Did I Say “Seconds”? Did I just say that some customers do Data Guard failover in seconds? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Data Guard has an automatic failover capability, aptly called Fast-Start Failover. Initially available with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 for Data Guard SYNC transport mode (and enhanced in Oracle Database 11g to support Data Guard ASYNC transport mode), this capability, managed by Data Guard Broker, lets your Data Guard configuration automatically failover to a designated standby database. Yes, this means no human intervention is required to do the failover. This process is controlled by a low footprint Data Guard Broker client called Observer, which makes sure that the primary database and the designated standby database are behaving like good kids. If something bad were to happen to the primary database, the Observer, after a configurable threshold period, tells that standby, “Your time has come, you are the chosen one!” The standby dutifully follows the Observer directives by assuming the role of the new primary database. The DBA or the Sys Admin doesn’t need to be involved. And - in case you are following this discussion very closely, and are wondering … “Hmmm … what if the old primary is not really dead, but just network isolated from the Observer or the standby - won’t this lead to a split-brain situation?” The answer is No - It Doesn’t. With respect to why-it-doesn’t, I am sure there are some smart DBAs in the audience who can explain the technical reasons. Otherwise - that will be the material for a future blog post. So - this combination of SYNC and Fast-Start Failover is the nirvana of lights-out, integrated HA and DR, as practiced by some of our advanced customers. They have observed failover times (with no data loss) ranging from single-digit seconds to tens of seconds. With this, they support operations in industry verticals such as manufacturing, retail, telecom, Internet, etc. that have the most demanding availability requirements. One of our leading customers with massive cloud deployment initiatives tells us that they know about server failures only after Data Guard has automatically completed the failover process and the app is back up and running! Needless to mention, Data Guard Broker has the integration hooks for interfaces such as JDBC and OCI, or even for custom apps, to ensure the application gets automatically rerouted to the new primary database after the database level failover completes. Net Net? To sum up this multi-part blog article, Data Guard with SYNC redo transport mode, plus Fast-Start Failover, gives you the ideal triple-combo - that is, it gives you the assurance that for critical outages, you can failover your Oracle databases: very fast without human intervention, and without losing any data. In short, it takes the element of risk out of critical IT operations. It does require you to be more careful with your network and systems planning, but as far as HA is concerned, the benefits outweigh the investment costs. So, this is what we in the MAA Development Team believe in. What do you think? How has your deployment experience been? We look forward to hearing from you!

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Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

- by Natalia Rachelson

All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'" "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud." "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns. After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

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Webcast Q&A: Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter

- by kellsey.ruppel

Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A. Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features. There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first. We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution. Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets. One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system. Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations. Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats. Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours. Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action! Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

- by Crazy Eddie

The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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Something about Property Management or … the understanding of SharePoint Admins/roles ?!?

- by Enrique Lima

When I talk about SharePoint, for some reason it comes to my mind as if it were property management and all the tasks associated with it. So, imagine you have a lot ( a piece of land of sorts), you then decide there is something you want to do with it. So, you make the choice of having a building built. Now, in order to go forward with your plan, you need to check what the rules/regulations are. Has is it been zoned residential, commercial, industrial … you get the idea. This to me sounds like Governance. The what am I to do given a defined set of rules. We keep on moving forward based on those rules. And with this we start the process of building, the building process takes us to survey the land, identify what our boundaries are. And as we go along we start getting the idea in our head as to what we will do as far as the building goes. We identify the essentials of the building, basic services and such. All in all, we plan. And as with many things we do, we like solid foundations. What a solid foundation looks like will depend on where and what we build. The way buildings are built depends in many ways in being able to foresee the potential for natural disasters or to try to leverage the lay of the land. Sound familiar? We have done our Requirements Gathering. We have the building in place, we have followed the zoning rules, we have implemented services. But we need someone to manage the building, now we move on to the human side of the story. We want to establish a means to normalcy in the building, someone that can be the monitoring agent as to the “what’s going on?” of it. This person will be tasked with making sure all basic services are functional, that measures are taken if there is an issue and so on. Enter the Farm Administrator. In a way, we establish an extension of the rules to make sure the building and the apartments/offices build follow a standard set of rules too. Now, in turn you will have people leasing or buying the apartments/offices, they will be the keepers of that space. So, now we are building sites, we have moved from having the building (farm) ready, to leasing/selling offices/apartments (site collections). There will be someone assuming responsibility for those offices, that person will authorize or be informed about activities and also who not only gets a code into the building, but perhaps a key to the office. Enter Site Collection Administrator. And then perhaps we move on to the person that would be responsible for specifics within the office, for example a Human Resources Manager or Coordinator. They will have specific control and knowledge about people. A facilities coordinator, and so on. I would translate that into Site Administrators. With that said then, we identify the following: Role Name Responsibility (but not limited to) Farm Administrator Infrastructure Site Collection Admin Policies for Content, Hierarchy, Recycle Bin, Security and Access Site Owner (Site Admin) Security and Access, Training, Guidance, Manage Templates All in all there are different levels of responsibility to be handled, but it is very important to understand what they are and what they mean. Here is a link to very well laid out explanation on this … http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/08/11/site-managers-and-end-user-expectations-roles-and-responsibilities/

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Finding Leaders Breakfasts - Adelaide and Perth

- by rdatson-Oracle

HR Executives Breakfast Roundtables: Find the best leaders using science and social media! Perth, 22nd July & Adelaide, 24th July What is leadership in the 21st century? What does the latest research tell us about leadership? How do you recognise leadership qualities in individuals? How do you find individuals with these leadership qualities, hire and develop them? Join the Neuroleadership Institute, the Hay Group, and Oracle to hear: 1. the latest neuroscience research about human bias, and how it applies to finding and building better leaders; 2. the latest techniques to recognise leadership qualities in people; 3. and how you can harness your people and social media to find the best people for your company. Reflect on your hiring practices at this thought provoking breakfast, where you will be challenged to consider whether you are using best practices aimed at getting the right people into your company. Speakers Abigail Scott, Hay Group Abigail is a UK registered psychologist with 10 years international experience in the design and delivery of talent frameworks and assessments. She has delivered innovative assessment programmes across a range of organisations to identify and develop leaders. She is experienced in advising and supporting clients through new initiatives using evidence-based approach and has published a number of research papers on fairness and predictive validity in assessment. Karin Hawkins, NeuroLeadership Institute Karin is the Regional Director of NeuroLeadership Institute’s Asia-Pacific region. She brings over 20 years experience in the financial services sector delivering cultural and commercial results across a variety of organisations and functions. As a leadership risk specialist Karin understands the challenge of building deep bench strength in teams and she is able to bring evidence, insight, and experience to support executives in meeting today’s challenges. Robert Datson, Oracle Robert is a Human Capital Management specialist at Oracle, with several years as a practicing manager at IBM, learning and implementing latest management techniques for hiring, deploying and developing staff. At Oracle he works with clients to enable best practices for HR departments, and drawing the linkages between HR initiatives and bottom-line improvements. Agenda 07:30 a.m. Breakfast and Registrations 08:00 a.m. Welcome and Introductions 08:05 a.m. Breaking Bias in leadership decisions - Karin Hawkins 08:30 a.m. Identifying and developing leaders - Abigail Scott 08:55 a.m. Finding leaders, the social way - Robert Datson 09:20 a.m. Q&A and Closing Remarks 09:30 a.m. Event concludes If you are an employee or official of a government organisation, please click here for important ethics information regarding this event. To register for Perth, Tuesday 22nd July, please click HERE To register for Adelaide, Thursday 24th July, please click HERE 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* 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;} Contact: To register or have questions on the event? Contact Aaron Tait on +61 2 9491 1404

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Field Report - Notes from IHRIM Atlanta Event

- by Natalia Rachelson

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-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;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle Recently I had the pleasure to serve as a guest speaker at the IHRIM Atlanta/SE Chapter meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The focus of my talk was Mobile Technology in Human Resources, and while still a new and developing area, the enormous growth and ubiquitous presence of mobile devices and increasing importance of and demand for constant connectivity in both our personal and professional lives has put planning and developing a mobile HR technology strategy high on many organizations lists of priorities in 2012. Numerous studies have shown that the confluence of ever-rising sales of smartphones and tablets; and the increasing tendency for workers of all kinds to be more mobile and less tied down to traditional, fixed-location workplaces and what now seem like old-fashioned PC-centric and traditional computing environments are driving Human Resources leaders to think about how, where, when, and for whom that the deployment of mobile HR solutions will help them address their business needs, and put information in the hands of those that need it, when they need it, and on their preferred devices. In the session we talked about some of the potential opportunities for mobile HR technologies, from simple workflow-based approval capability, to employee directories and robust employee profiles, to more advanced use cases like internal social networking and location-based mobile recruiting applications. And truly we are just scratching the surface of the potential and the value that all kinds of HR-related mobile technologies will help deliver to enterprises in the coming years. Additionally, it was encouraging to talk with many of the HR leaders in attendance who expressed interest in these kinds of mobile HR technology opportunities, as well as to hear how some of them are already working on developing their own mobile strategies or experimenting with mobile solutions in their workforces. It was a fantastic meeting and I’d like to express my thanks to Kim Bryant, IHRIM Atlanta/SE Board President, the other board members, and also the IHRIM Atlanta Chapter members and attendees at the event. If you are in the Atlanta area and are interested in HR and HR Technology, you can learn more about the programs and services that the Chapter has to offer at their website - http://www.ihrimatlantase.org/. And for people that are interested in what we at Oracle are working on in mobile, you can also sign up to receive the latest updates about the Oracle Fusion Applications tablet solutions, Oracle Fusion Tap, at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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Make the Time

- by WonderOfItAll

Took the little one to the pool tonight for swim lessons. Okay, Okay. They're not really lessons so much as they are "Hey, here's a few bucks, let me rent out a small section of your pool to swim around with my little one" Saw a dad at the pool. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, and two year old somewhere around there. Saw a mom at the pool. Arguing with her five year old to NOT take a shower after swimming. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, work laptop open on stadium seats. Her reasoning for not wanting the child to shower "Look, I have to get this stuff to the office by 6:30, we don't have time for you to shower. Let's go" Wait, isn't the whole point of this little experience called Mommy and Me (or, as in my case, Daddy and Me). Wherein Mommy/Daddy is supposed to spend time with little one. Not with the Bluetooth. Not with the work laptop. Dad (yeah, the same dad from earlier), in the pool. Bluetooth off (it's not waterproof or I'm sure he would've had it on), two year old in hand and iPad somewhere put away. Getting frustrated with kid because he won't 'perform' on command. Here's a little exchange Kid: "I don't wanna get in the water" Dad: "Well, we're here for 30 minutes, get in the water" Kid: "No, don't wanna" Dad: "Fine, I'm getting in" and, true to his word, in he goes, off to swim. Kid: Crying Dad: "Well, c'mon" Kid: Walking to stands Dad: Ignoring kid Kid: At stands Dad: Out of pool, drying off. Frustrated. Grabs bag, grabs kid, leaves How sad. It really seems like I am living in a generation of parents who view their children as one big scheduled distraction to another. It's almost like the dad was saying "Look, little 2 year old boy, I have a busy scheduled. Right now my Outlook Calendar tells me that I have 30 mins to spend with you, so, let's go kid: PERFORM because I have the time" Really? Can someone please tell me when the hell this happened? When did spending time with your kid, spending time with your family, spending time with your spouse, etc... become a distraction? I've seen people at work all day Tweeting throughout the day, checked in with Four Square, IM up and running constantly so they can 'stay in touch' only to see these same folks come home and be irritated because their kids or their spouse wants to connect with the. I've seen these very same people leave the house, go to the corner bar/store/you-name-the-place to be 'alone' only to find them there, plugged in, tweeting away, etc, etc, etc I LOVE technology. I love working with technology. But I also know that I am a human being. A person who, by very definition, is a social being. I needed social interactions and contact--and, no, I'm not talking about the Social Graph kind of connections, I'm talking about those interactions which, *GASP* involve eye to eye contact and human contact. A recent study found that the number one complaint of kids is that they feel they have to compete with technology for their parents time and attention. The number one wish from high school kids? That there parents would turn off the computer/tv/cell phone at dinner. This, coming from high school kids. Shouldn't that tell you a whole helluva lot? So, do yourself a favor tomorrow. Plug into technology all day. Throw yourself into it. Be passionate about what you do. When you walk through the door to your family, turn it all off for 30 mins and be there with your loved ones. If you can manage to play Angry Birds, I'm sure you can handle being disconnected for 30 minutes. Make the time

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Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

- by Dennis

Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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When should I use a Process Model versus a Use Case?

- by Dave Burke

This Blog entry is a follow on to https://blogs.oracle.com/oum/entry/oum_is_business_process_and and addresses a question I sometimes get asked…..i.e. “when I am gathering requirements on a Project, should I use a Process Modeling approach, or should I use a Use Case approach?” Not surprisingly, the short answer is “it depends”! Let’s take a scenario where you are working on a Sales Force Automation project. We’ll call the process that is being implemented “Lead-to-Order”. I would typically think of this type of project as being “Process Centric”. In other words, the focus will be on orchestrating a series of human and system related tasks that ultimately deliver value to the business in a cost effective way. Put in even simpler terms……implement an automated pre-sales system. For this type of (Process Centric) project, requirements would typically be gathered through a series of Workshops where the focal point will be on creating, or confirming, the Future-State (To-Be) business process. If pre-defined “best-practice” business process models exist, then of course they could and should be used during the Workshops, but even in their absence, the focus of the Workshops will be to define the optimum series of Tasks, their connections, sequence, and dependencies that will ultimately reflect a business process that meets the needs of the business. Now let’s take another scenario. Assume you are working on a Content Management project that involves automating the creation and management of content for User Manuals, Web Sites, Social Media publications etc. Would you call this type of project “Process Centric”?.......well you could, but it might also fall into the category of complex configuration, plus some custom extensions to a standard software application (COTS). For this type of project it would certainly be worth considering using a Use Case approach in order to 1) understand the requirements, and 2) to capture the functional requirements of the custom extensions. At this point you might be asking “why couldn’t I use a Process Modeling approach for my Content Management project?” Well, of course you could, but you just need to think about which approach is the most effective. Start by analyzing the types of Tasks that will eventually be automated by the system, for example: Best Suited To? Task Name Process Model Use Case Notes Manage outbound calls Ö A series of linked human and system tasks for calling and following up with prospects Manage content revision Ö Updating the content on a website Update User Preferences Ö Updating a users display preferences Assign Lead Ö Reviewing a lead, then assigning it to a sales person Convert Lead to Quote Ö Updating the status of a lead, and then converting it to a sales order As you can see, it’s not an exact science, and either approach is viable for the Tasks listed above. However, where you have a series of interconnected Tasks or Activities, than when combined, deliver value to the business, then that would be a good indicator to lead with a Process Modeling approach. On the other hand, when the Tasks or Activities in question are more isolated and/or do not cross traditional departmental boundaries, then a Use Case approach might be worth considering. Now let’s take one final scenario….. As you captured the To-Be Process flows for the Sales Force automation project, you discover a “Gap” in terms of what the client requires, and what the standard COTS application can provide. Let’s assume that the only way forward is to develop a Custom Extension. This would now be a perfect opportunity to document the functional requirements (behind the Gap) using a Use Case approach. After all, we will be developing some new software, and one of the most effective ways to begin the Software Development Lifecycle is to follow a Use Case approach. As always, your comments are most welcome.

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Ruby on rails generates tests for you. Do those give a false sense of a safety net?

- by Hamish Grubijan

Disclaimer: I have not used RoR, and I have not generated tests. But, I will still dare to post this question. Quality Assurance is theoretically impossible to get 100% right in general (Undecidable problem ;), and it is hard in practice. So many developers do not understand that writing good automated tests is an art, and it is hard. When I hear that RoR generates the tests for you, I get very skeptical. It cannot be that easy. Testing is a general concept; it applies across languages. So does the concept of code contracts, it is similar for languages that support it. Code contracts do not generate themselves. The programmer must add the requirements and the promises manually, after doing some thinking about the algorithm / function. If a human gets it wrong, then the tools will propagate the error. Similarly with testing - it takes human judgement about what should happen. Tests do not write themselves, and we are far from the day when a business analyst can just have a conversation with a computer and tell it informally what the requirements are and have the computer do all the work. There is no magic ... how can RoR generate good tests for you? Please shed some light on this. Opinions are ok, for this is a community wiki. Thanks!

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Error number 13 - Remote access svn with dav_svn failing

- by C. Ross

I'm getting the following error on my svn repository <D:error> <C:error/> <m:human-readable errcode="13"> Could not open the requested SVN filesystem </m:human-readable> </D:error> I've followed the instructions from the How to Geek, and the Ubuntu Community Page, but to no success. I've even given the repository 777 permissions. <Location /svn/myProject > # Uncomment this to enable the repository DAV svn # Set this to the path to your repository SVNPath /svn/myProject # Comments # Comments # Comments AuthType Basic AuthName "My Subversion Repository" AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd # More Comments </Location> The permissions follow: drwxrwsrwx 6 www-data webdev 4096 2010-02-11 22:02 /svn/myProject And svnadmin validates the directory $svnadmin verify /svn/myProject/ * Verified revision 0. and I'm accessing the repository at http://ipAddress/svn/myProject Edit: The apache error log says [Fri Feb 12 13:55:59 2010] [error] [client <ip>] (20014)Internal error: Can't open file '/svn/myProject/format': Permission denied [Fri Feb 12 13:55:59 2010] [error] [client <ip>] Could not fetch resource information. [500, #0] [Fri Feb 12 13:55:59 2010] [error] [client <ip>] Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #13] [Fri Feb 12 13:55:59 2010] [error] [client <ip>] Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #13] Even though I confirmed that this file is ugo readable and writable. What am I doing wrong?

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