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• What is the best way to track / record the current programming project you work on? [duplicate]

  - by user2424160

  This question already has an answer here: Methodology for Documenting Existing Code Base 6 answers When do you start documenting the code? 13 answers Where should a programmer explain the extended logic behind the code? 5 answers I have been in this problem for long time and I want to know how it's done in real / big companies project? Suppose I have the project to build a website. Now I divide the project into sub tasks and do it. But you know that suppose I have task1 in hand like export the page to pdf. Now I spend 3 days to do that , came across various problems, many Stack Overflow questions and in the end I solve it. Now 4 months after someone told me that there is some error in the code. Now by that I completely forgot about (60%) of how I did it and why I do this way. I document the code but I can't write the whole story of that in the code. Then I have to spend much time on code to find what was the problem so that I added this line etc. I want to know that is there any way that i can log steps in completing the project. So that I can see how I end up with code, what errors I got, what questions I asked on SO and etc. How people do it in real time? Which software to use? I know in our project management software called JIRA we have tasks but that does not cover what steps I took to solve that tasks. What is the best way so that when I look back at my 2 year old project, I know how I solve particular task?

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• What's the best way to generate an NPC's face using web technologies?

  - by Vael Victus

  I'm in the process of creating a web app. I have many randomly-generated non-player characters in a database. I can pull a lot of information about them - their height, weight, down to eye color, hair color, and hair style. For this, I am solely interested in generating a graphical representation of the face. Currently the information is displayed with text in the nicest way possible, but I believe it's worth generating these faces for a more... human experience. Problem is, I'm not artist. I wouldn't mind commissioning an artist for this system, but I wouldn't know where to start. Were it 2007, I'd naturally think to myself that using Flash would be the best choice. I'd love to see "breathing" simulated. However, since Flash is on its way out, I'm not sure of a solid solution. With a previous game, I simply used layered .pngs to represent various aspects of the player's body: their armor, the face, the skin color. However, these solutions weren't very dynamic and felt very amateur. I can't go deep into this project feeling like that's an inferior way to present these faces, and I'm certain there's a better way. Can anyone give some suggestion on how to pull this off well?

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• What's the best way to learn/increase problem-solving skills?

  - by tucaz

  Hi all! I'm not sure this is the right place to ask this question, neither if this is the right way to ask this question but I hope you help me if it is not. I work as a programmer since I was 15 (will be 24 next week) so learning programming logic was somehow natural during the course of my career and I think that it helped me to get pretty good problem-solving. One thing none of us (programmers) can deny is that programming logic helps us in a lot of fields outside computer programming. So I'd say it is a very valuable resource that one should learn. My girlfriend is not a programmer and graduated in college on a non related course (Foreign Relations) because she didn't know what to study back then. As the years passed she discovered that she liked Logistics and started to work with it almost two years ago. However, since she does not have a technical background (not even basic Math) she is really having a hard time with it. She is already trying to catch up with Math, but even simple questions/brain-teasers are hard to her. For example, trying to find the missing numbers of this sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, _, _, 34 and so on. We know that this is Fibonacci but if we didn't we would probably be able to get to the correct answer just by "guessing" (using our acquired problem-solving skills). I'm not sure if problem-solving skills or logic are the correct name for it, but this is what I mean: quick solve problems, brain-teasers, find patterns, have a "sharp" mind. So, the question is: what is the best way for someone to learn this kind of skills without being a programmer (or studying algorithms and such)? If you say it is a book, could you please recommend one? Thanks a lot!

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• Am I wrong to disagree with A Gentle Introduction to symfony's template best practices?

  - by AndrewKS

  I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views): "If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4-4. Instead, write your templates using the PHP alternative syntax, as shown in Listing 4-5, to keep the code understandable for non-PHP programmers." Listing 4-4 - The Usual PHP Syntax, Good for Actions, But Bad for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test) { echo "<p>".time()."</p>"; } ?> (The ironic thing about this is that the echo statement would look even better if time was a variable declared in the controller because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating) Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test): ?> <p><?php echo time(); ?> </p><?php endif; ?> I fail to see how listing 4-5 makes the code "understandable for non-PHP programmers", and its readability is shaky at best. 4-4 looks much more readable to me. Are there any programmers who are using symfony that write their templates like those in 4-4 rather than 4-5? Are there reasons I should use one over the other? There is the very slim chance that somewhere down the road someone less technical could be editing it the template, but how does 4-5 actually make it more understandable to them?

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• What scenarios are implementations of Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service best suited for?

  - by mindcrime

  I've always been a big fan of asynchronous messaging and pub/sub implementations, but coming from a Java background, I'm most familiar with using JMS based messaging systems, such as JBoss MQ, HornetQ, ActiveMQ, OpenMQ, etc. I've also loosely followed the discussion of AMQP. But I recently became aware of the Data Distribution Service Specification from the Object Management Group, and found there are a couple of open-source implementations: OpenSplice OpenDDS It sounds like this stuff is focused on the kind of high-volume scenarios one tends to associate with financial trading exchanges and what-not. My current interest is more along the lines of notifications related to activity stream processing (think Twitter / Facebook) and am wondering if the DDS servers are worth looking into further. Could anyone who has practical experience with this technology, and/or a deep understanding of it, comment on how useful it is, and what scenarios it is best suited for? How does it stack up against more "traditional" JMS servers, and/or AMQP (or even STOMP or OpenWire, etc?) Edit: FWIW, I found some information at this StackOverflow thread. Not a complete answer, but anybody else finding this question might also find that thread useful, hence the added link.

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• What's the best practice to do SOA exception handling?

  - by sun1991

  Here's some interesting debate going on between me and my colleague when coming to handle SOA exceptions: On one side, I support what Juval Lowy said in Programming WCF Services 3rd Edition: As stated at the beginning of this chapter, it is a common illusion that clients care about errors or have anything meaningful to do when they occur. Any attempt to bake such capabilities into the client creates an inordinate degree of coupling between the client and the object, raising serious design questions. How could the client possibly know more about the error than the service, unless it is tightly coupled to it? What if the error originated several layers below the service—should the client be coupled to those lowlevel layers? Should the client try the call again? How often and how frequently? Should the client inform the user of the error? Is there a user? By having all service exceptions be indistinguishable from one another, WCF decouples the client from the service. The less the client knows about what happened on the service side, the more decoupled the interaction will be. On the other side, here's what my colleague suggest: I believe it’s simply incorrect, as it does not align with best practices in building a service oriented architecture and it ignores the general idea that there are problems that users are able to recover from, such as not keying a value correctly. If we considered only systems exceptions, perhaps this idea holds, but systems exceptions are only part of the exception domain. User recoverable exceptions are the other part of the domain and are likely to happen on a regular basis. I believe the correct way to build a service oriented architecture is to map user recoverable situations to checked exceptions, then to marshall each checked exception back to the client as a unique exception that client application programmers are able to handle appropriately. Marshall all runtime exceptions back to the client as a system exception, along with the stack trace so that it is easy to troubleshoot the root cause. I'd like to know what you think about this? Thank you.

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• What is the best approach for database design with lots of columns?

  - by Pratyush

  I am writing a query based financial application. It lets the user to write complicated equations (much like WHERE part of an SQL query) and find companies matching those criteria. For the above, I currently have more than 500 columns in the database table (each column representing a financial field). Example of Columns are: company_name, sales_annual_00, sales_annual_01, sales_annual_02, sales_annual_03, sales_annual_04, protit_annual_00, profit_annual1...(over 500 such columns). The number of rows is around 5000. Going forward, I would like to further increase the number of columns/financial-fields. For the above I would like to get help regarding: 1) What is the best database design approach? Is it ok to have these many number of columns? 2) How can it be normalized? (User can use any of these fields in search criteria). 3) Is it ok to stick with MySQL, or modern document based databases like MongoDB should be better for it? P.S. (Update): I have been using MySQL till now and a running example of the usage is at: http://screener.in/companies/89/Formula-- In above there around 500 fields/columns to create your query on, however, I seek to increase that number to much more in future.

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• Best way to blend colors in tile lighting? (XNA)

  - by Lemoncreme

  I have made a color, decent, recursive, fast tile lighting system in my game. It does everything I need except one thing: different colors are not blended at all: Here is my color blend code: return (new Color( (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(color.R / factor, 0, 255), (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(color.G / factor, 0, 255), (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(color.B / factor, 0, 255))); As you can see it does not take the already in place color into account. color is the color of the previous light, which is weakened by the above code by factor. If I wanted to blend using the color already in place, I would use the variable blend. Here is an example of a blend that I tried that failed, using blend: return (new Color( (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(((color.R + blend.R) / 2) / factor, 0, 255), (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(((color.G + blend.G) / 2) / factor, 0, 255), (byte)MathHelper.Clamp(((color.B + blend.B) / 2) / factor, 0, 255))); This color blend produces inaccurate and strange results. I need a blend that is accurate, like the first example, that blends the two colors together. What is the best way to do this?

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• Best practice for combining a Java Applet/ Android interface?

  - by Pearsonartphoto

  I'm working on an online game, which I am seriously considering writing a Java Applet for it. The game is not overly complex on the features. I'm considering at some point having at least 3 versions of the game, which include a Java stand alone, applet, and Android game. I know from Design Patterns that the best way to use differing things like buttons and the like is to use a Bridge interface, where I have a common template for the common buttons. However, I'm having a bit of difficulty understanding what to do about the following. I know that Android programs use an Activity structure, which I am well familiar with, and that Applets extend the Applet interface, which I am not as familiar with. I also know that a stand alone java program uses basically a main() function, which doesn't have much structure. I'm convinced that there should be a way to design a common design pattern between the two, but somehow I'm missing what that is exactly. What can I do to make the different frameworks work with as much common code as possible?

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• How can I get the best performance for playing games?

  - by Oli

  I've been playing a couple of Wine-games today and decided to switch to metacity to see what the performance difference was like. If you've never done it before, you just run metacity --replace but don't do that if you use Unity! Anyway, surprise surprise it was like playing on a dedicated Windows gaming machine. Playing under metacity today was bliss. Much higher framerates and just a fluidity that you'd expect from a native game. I'm not sure I can go back. Switching to metacity is no hardship but I wonder if there's anything else in the WM landscape that I should try out. I'm essentially looking for suggestions for the best way to play games. Mix up WMs, dedicated X sessions, whatever... As long as it makes Wine games run faster. Small print One process per answer (eg: New X session + OpenBox) We should probably land on a benchmark so we can show percentage improvement over a stock Compiz desktop. I'm open to suggestions in the comments. If people could test it and submit their how much it improves things for them in the comments, that would give others a good idea of if it's worth the pain.

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• What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?

  - by Keeper

  Many people suggest to write a program, and then start optimizing it. But I think that when it's coming to multithreading with multicore, a little think ahead is required. I've read about using threads, and experienced it myself during some courses at the university (still a student). The big question is simple, but a bit abstract: What thread related steps in game design do I need to take, before implementation? Now trying to be more specific. Let's say, as an example, that I'm making a small board game (like Monopoly) that I want to be multithreaded. My goal Is that this multithreaded game will exploit the best of the multicore system, lets say 4-6 cores (like in i7 processors). My answer to this question at the moment is, one thread for each of these four basic components: GUI User Input / Output AI (computer rival) Other game related calculations (like shortest path from A to B, or level up status change) I'm not an expert (yet!), and I'm sure there are better answers out there. Any suggestion, answer, different approach will be helpful. Some thoughts: Maybe splitting the main database is a good way.. (or total disaster.. )

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• What's the best way to manage reusable classes/libraries separately?

  - by Tom

  When coding, I naturally often come up with classes or a set of classes with a high reusability. I'm looking for an easy, straight-forward way to work on them separately. I'd like to be able to easily integrate them into any project; it also should be possible to switch to a different version with as few commands as possible. Am I right with the assumption that git (or another VCS) is best suited for this? I thought of setting up local repositories for each class/project/library/plugin and then just cloning/pulling them. It would be great if I could reference those projects by name, not by the full path. Like git clone someproject. edit: To clarify, I know what VCS are about and I do use them. I'm just looking for a comfortable way to store and edit some reusable pieces of code (including unit tests) separately and to be able to include them (without the unit tests) in other projects, without having to manually copy files. Apache Maven is a good example, but I'm looking for a language-independent solution, optimally command-line-based.

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• Oracle MDM Panel at OOW 12: Best practices, Lessons Learned and More...

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  By Narayana Machiraju  We are less than two weeks out from the start of Oracle Open World 2012. The MDM team has built-up a solid line-up of product and customer sessions for you to attend this year in addition to the hands-on labs, and numerous demonstration pods in Moscone West. This year we will be hosting a customer panel session dedicated to Oracle Customer Hub at Oracle Open World. An esteemed panel of Oracle Customer Hub customers in different Industries: Credit Suisse, Allianz and Elsevier will provide insight into the journey of Customer MDM right from building a business case and MDM vision, establishing and sustaining governance, implementation strategies and realizing the benefits. You will also hear about implementation challenges, phasing strategies and lessons learned from real-life experiences. If you are already implementing Customer MDM or evaluating the benefits of MDM and you would like to hear directly from our customers then I highly recommend you attend this session: Customer MDM Panel: Discussion and Q&A on Implementation Best Practices, Data Quality, Data Governance          and ROI Wednesday October, 3rd, 5:00PM - 6:00PM Westin Market Street Hotel - Metropolitan 1 The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several customer panels, Conference sessions and Customer round table sessions featuring a lot of marquee Customers. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  We hope to see you at Open World and stay in touch via our future blogs.

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• What is the best objective way to measure language popularity trends? (What's better than TIOBE?)

  - by Eric Wilson

  The best way to get data on computer language popularity that I know is the TIOBE index. But everyone knows that TIOBE is hopelessly flawed. (If someone provides a link to support this, I'll add it here.) So is there any data on programming language popularity that is generally considered meaningful? The only other option I know is to look at the trends at indeed.com, which is inherently flawed, being based on job postings. It isn't like I would make a future language decision solely based on an index, but it might provide a useful balance to the skewed perspective one obtains by talking to ones friends and colleagues. To illustrate that bias, I'll point out that based on the experience of those I personally know, the only languages used professionally today (in order of popularity) are Java, C#, Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby, Objective C, and Perl. (Though it is evident that C, C++ and PHP were used in the past.) So my question is, everyone bashes TIOBE, but is there anything else? If so, can anyone explain how we know the alternative has better methodology? Thanks.

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• Wednesday at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - Must See Session: “Event-Driven Patterns and Best Practices: Even More Important with Big Data”

  - by Lionel Dubreuil

  Don’t miss this “CON8636 - Event-Driven Patterns and Best Practices: Even More Important with Big Data“ session: Speakers: Faisal Nazir - Senior Solutions Architect, Motorola Shinichiro Takahashi - Senior Manager, Service Platform Department, NTT DOCOMO, INC. Robin Smith - Product Management/Strategy Director - Oracle Event Processing, Oracle Date: Wednesday, Oct 3 Time: 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Location: Moscone South - 310 As the demand for big data analytics and integration grows across all industries, this session focuses on the role of the Oracle event-driven solution platform in delivering vital real-time integrated analysis intelligence to the data streams consumed and emitted from these large distributed data stores. Objectives for this session are to: Increase awareness of Oracle Event Processing, showcasing tight alignment with big data solutions Highlight emerging usage patterns in relation to streaming event data and distributed data stores Show a significant Oracle competitive advantage over IBM solutions advertised in this domain 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}

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• What is the best way to manage large 3d worlds (i.e minecraft style)?

  - by SomeXnaChump

  After playing minecraft I was marvelling a bit at their large worlds but at the same time finding it extremely slow to navigate, even with a quad core and meaty graphics card. Now I assume its fairly slow because: A) Its written in Java, and as most of the actual spatial partitioning and other memory management activities happen in there it would be slower than a native C++ version. B) They are not partitioning their world very well I could be wrong on both assumptions, however it got me thinking about the best way to manage large worlds. As it is more of a true 3d world, where a block can exist in any part of the world, it is basically a big 3d array [x][y][z], where each block in the world has a type (i.e BlockType.Empty = 0, BlockType.Dirt = 1 etc). Now I am assuming to make this sort of world performant you would need to: a) Use a tree of some variety (oct/kd/bsp) to split all the cubes out, it seems like an oct/kd would be the better option as you can just partition on a per cube level not a per triangle level. b) Use some algorithm to work out if the blocks within the scene can currently be seen, as blocks closer to the user could obfuscate the blocks behind, making it pointless to render them. c) Keep the block object themselves lightweight, so it is quick to add and remove them from the trees I guess there is no right answer to this, but I would be interested to see peoples opinions on the subject.

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• Which are the best ways to organize view hierarchies in GUI interfaces?

  - by none

  I'm currently trying to figure out the best techniques for organizing GUI view hierarchies, that is dividing a window into several panels which are in turn divided into other components. I've given a look to the Composite Design Pattern, but I don't know if I can find better alternatives, so I'd appreciate to know if using the Composite is a good idea, or it would be better looking for some other techniques. I'm currently developing in Java Swing, but I don't think that the framework or the language can have a great impact on this. Any help will be appreciated. ---------EDIT------------ I was currently developing a frame containing three labels, one button and a text field. At the button pressed, the content inside the text field would be searched, and the results written inside the three labels. One of my typical structure would be the following: MainWindow | Main panel | Panel with text field and labels. | Panel with search button Now, as the title explains, I was looking for a suitable way of organizing both the MainPanel and the other two panels. But here came problems, since I'm not sure whether organizing them like attributes or storing inside some data structure (i.e. LinkedList or something like this). Anyway, I don't really think that both my solution are really good, so I'm wondering if there are really better approaches for facing this kind of problems. Hope it helps

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• Salary Negotiation; How Best to Broach the Subject? [closed]

  - by Ed S.

  So I have an upcoming performance review / salary increase and I am at a point in which I believe I will need to negotiate a larger raise than what is to be proposed. As I suspect this may be the case I have been reading as much information on the subject (negotiation) as possible. I work for a great company and fortunately I work under some really talented and reasonable managers. Unfortunately, I am not sure how best to bring up the subject. I don't want to sound greedy and I don't want to start off on the wrong foot. For the sake of argument, assume that I am actually worth more than I am being paid at the moment and I would like to make a counter offer for a relatively large increase (say, boss says 4%, I would like to counter with 15%. I know that seems very large, but I believe I have a case for it.) My question to you, those who are/have been on the other side of this scenario, is how should I start the conversation? What approach would make you most receptive to my plea? I've never negotiated before and I just don't want to start off on the wrong foot. My direct manager is a very straightforward individual, so sugarcoating is not necessary here, but at the same time, I don't want to seem overly aggressive or demanding. Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

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• Which is the best way to catch an expiring domain name? [closed]

  - by newspeak

  I know a similar question has been asked, but I really don't know what to do. There is this .com domain which is currently on redemption period and should likely be available again within a month. I was wondering which is the best way to get it at a reasonable price. I don't think it's a highly valuable domain, it shows to have very bad ranking and has 0 exact same searches according to adwords. Why it is valuable to me is very simple: I have a project responding to this name. I already own the .net domain and would love to have the .com. I discovered the domain was going to be available thanks to an email I received by a backorder site. I did some research and these guys have a bad reputation on the web. I did further research and found that more reputable (at least in theory) companies should be the likes of snapnames, pool, namejet, godaddy, etc. I am a bit suspicious using these drop cathing services: What if they shill bids? What if they make it go into auction even if I'm the only person interested? What if I raise attention and interest to the domain by backordering? I just would rather wait for it to be deleted and available again to register it manually. It is really not an interesting domain name, and I don't think anyone would care to have it. But what if the domain is already being watched by the domain industry sharks? I did a whois research and my desired domain nameserves point to domcollect.com, which appears to be an auction site. What if I decide to wait for manual registration and I miss the chance to get it? I'm willing to spend the 60/70$ fees these sites require, but not really more than that. Suggestions? Thank you very much. I'm a bit confused and undecided.

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• How best to construct our test subjects in unit tests?

  - by Liath

  Some of our business logic classes require quite a few dependencies (in our case 7-10). As such when we come to unit test these the creation become quite complex. In most tests these dependencies are often not required (only some dependencies are required for particular methods). As a result unit tests often require a significant number of lines of code to mock up these useless dependencies (which can't be null because of null checks). For example: [Test] public void TestMethodA() { var dependency5 = new Mock<IDependency1>(); dependency5.Setup(x => x. // some setup var sut = new Sut(new Mock<IDependency1>().Object, new Mock<IDependency2>().Object, new Mock<IDependency3>().Object, new Mock<IDependency4>().Object, dependency5); Assert.SomeAssert(sut.MethodA()); } In this example almost half the test is taken up creating dependencies which aren't used. I've investigated an approach where I have a helper method. [Test] public void TestMethodA() { var dependency5 = new Mock<IDependency1>(); dependency5.Setup(x => x. // some setup var sut = CreateSut(null, null, null, null, dependency5); Assert.SomeAssert(sut.MethodA()); } private Sut CreateSut(IDependency1 d1, IDependency2 d2...) { return new Sut(d1 ?? new Mock<IDependency1>().Object, d2 ?? new Mock<IDependency2>().Object, } But these often grow very complicated very quickly. What is the best way to create these BLL classes in test classes to reduce complexity and simplify tests?

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• Which field of programming is known as the best practice for Java? [closed]

  - by user1276509

  I'm a CS student and I have some programming background such as PHP, JavaScript and Pascal. Since Java is so popular among local companies and Java is known as market skill, I'm going to learn it. But I don't know in which field I can use it. So I wonder, what can I do with Java? I heard that Java is not good for web development, although there is Play! Framework. I know a lot of people who prefer to use Python, Ruby and PHP for web development instead of Java and its Play. I also heard that Java is not good to write destkop applications, although it's cross-platform. Many programmers prefer C# for destkop. So I see there's only one field which I can use Java for it - is Android development. But I'm not interested in mobile application development. So my question is which field of programming is known as the best practice for Java? Thanks in advance.

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• Java single Array best choice for accessing pixels for manipulation?

  - by Petrol

  I am just watching this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwUnMy_pR6A and the guy (who seems to be pretty competent) is using a single array to store and access the pixels of his to-be-rendered image. I was wondering if this really is the best way to do this. The alternative of Multi-Array does have one pointer more, but Arrays do have an O(1) for accessing each index and calculating the index in a single array seems to take one addition and one multiplication operation per pixel. And if Multi-Arrays really are bad, can't you use something with Hashing to avoid those addition and multiplication operations? EDIT: here is his code... public class Screen { private int width, height; public int[] pixels; public Screen(int width, int height) { this.width = width; this.height = height; // creating array the size of one index/int for every pixel // single array has better performance than multi-array pixels = new int[width * height]; } public void render() { for (int y = 0; y < height; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < width; x++) { pixels[x + y * width] = 0xff00ff; } } } }

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• Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

  - by Roger Hart

  Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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• The best Bar on the globe is ... in Seoul/Korea

  - by Mike Dietrich

  As you know already sometimes I write about things which really don't have to do anything with a database upgrade. So if you are looking for tips and tricks and articles about that topic please stop reading now Actually I'm not a lets-go-to-a-bar person. I enjoy good food and a fine dessert wine afterwards. But last week in Seoul/Korea Ryan, our local host, did ask us after a wonderful dinner at a Korean Barbecue place if we'd like to visit a bar. I was really tired as I flew into Seoul overnight from Sunday to Monday arriving Monday early morning, getting shower, breakfast - and then a full day of very good and productive customer meetings. But one thing Ryan mentioned catched my immediate attention: The owner of the bar collects records and has a huge tube amp stereo system - and you can ask him to play your favorite songs. The bar is called "Peter, Paul and Mary" - honestly not my favorite style of music. And I even coulnd't find a webpage or an address - only that little piece of information on Facebook. But after stepping down the stairs to the cellar my eyes almost poped out of my head. This is the audio system: Enourmus huge corner horn loudspeakers from Western Electric. Pretty old I'd suppose but delivering an incredible present dynamics into the room. And plenty of tube equipment from Jadis, NSA Labs and Shindo Laboratories Western Electric 300B Limited amps from Tokyo. And the owner (I was so amazed I had simply forgotten to ask for his name) collects records since 40 years. And we had many wishes that night. Actually when we did enter Peter, Paul and Mary he played an old Helloween song. That must have been destiny. A German entering a bar in Korea and the owner is playing an old song by one of Germany's best heavy metal bands ever. And it went on with the Doors, Rainbow's Stargazer, Scorpions, later Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers, a bit of Santana, Carly Simon, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie ...Ronnie James Dio's Holy Diver, Gary Moore, Peter Gabriel's San Jacinto ... and many many more great songs ... Of course we were the last guests leaving the place at 2am in the morning - and I've never ever had a better night in a bar before ... I could have stayed days listening to so many records  ... Thanks Ryan, that was a phantastic night! -Mike

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