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• Oracle MAA Part 1: When One Size Does Not Fit All

  - by JoeMeeks

  The good news is that Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) best practices combined with Oracle Database 12c (see video) introduce first-in-the-industry database capabilities that truly make unplanned outages and planned maintenance transparent to users. The trouble with such good news is that Oracle’s enthusiasm in evangelizing its latest innovations may leave some to wonder if we’ve lost sight of the fact that not all database applications are created equal. Afterall, many databases don’t have the business requirements for high availability and data protection that require all of Oracle’s ‘stuff’. For many real world applications, a controlled amount of downtime and/or data loss is OK if it saves money and effort. Well, not to worry. Oracle knows that enterprises need solutions that address the full continuum of requirements for data protection and availability. Oracle MAA accomplishes this by defining four HA service level tiers: BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD and PLATINUM. The figure below shows the progression in service levels provided by each tier. Each tier uses a different MAA reference architecture to deploy the optimal set of Oracle HA capabilities that reliably achieve a given service level (SLA) at the lowest cost.  Each tier includes all of the capabilities of the previous tier and builds upon the architecture to handle an expanded fault domain. Bronze is appropriate for databases where simple restart or restore from backup is ‘HA enough’. Bronze is based upon a single instance Oracle Database with MAA best practices that use the many capabilities for data protection and HA included with every Oracle Enterprise Edition license. Oracle-optimized backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) provide data protection and are used to restore availability should an outage prevent the database from being able to restart. Silver provides an additional level of HA for databases that require minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure as well as many types of planned maintenance. Silver adds clustering technology - either Oracle RAC or RAC One Node. RMAN provides database-optimized backups to protect data and restore availability should an outage prevent the cluster from being able to restart. Gold raises the game substantially for business critical applications that can’t accept vulnerability to single points-of-failure. Gold adds database-aware replication technologies, Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate, which synchronize one or more replicas of the production database to provide real time data protection and availability. Database-aware replication greatly increases HA and data protection beyond what is possible with storage replication technologies. It also reduces cost while improving return on investment by actively utilizing all replicas at all times. Platinum introduces all of the sexy new Oracle Database 12c capabilities that Oracle staff will gush over with great enthusiasm. These capabilities include Application Continuity for reliable replay of in-flight transactions that masks outages from users; Active Data Guard Far Sync for zero data loss protection at any distance; new Oracle GoldenGate enhancements for zero downtime upgrades and migrations; and Global Data Services for automated service management and workload balancing in replicated database environments. Each of these technologies requires additional effort to implement. But they deliver substantial value for your most critical applications where downtime and data loss are not an option. The MAA reference architectures are inherently designed to address conflicting realities. On one hand, not every application has the same objectives for availability and data protection – the Not One Size Fits All title of this blog post. On the other hand, standard infrastructure is an operational requirement and a business necessity in order to reduce complexity and cost. MAA reference architectures address both realities by providing a standard infrastructure optimized for Oracle Database that enables you to dial-in the level of HA appropriate for different service level requirements. This makes it simple to move a database from one HA tier to the next should business requirements change, or from one hardware platform to another – whether it’s your favorite non-Oracle vendor or an Oracle Engineered System. Please stay tuned for additional blog posts in this series that dive into the details of each MAA reference architecture. Meanwhile, more information on Oracle HA solutions and the Maximum Availability Architecture can be found at: Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture - Webcast Maximize Availability with Oracle Database 12c - Technical White Paper

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• Social Search: Looking for Love

  - by Mike Stiles

  For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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• Conflict Minerals - Design to Compliance

  - by C. Chadwick

  Dr. Christina  Schröder - Principal PLM Consultant, Enterprise PLM Solutions EMEA What does the Conflict Minerals regulation mean? Conflict Minerals has recently become a new buzz word in the manufacturing industry, particularly in electronics and medical devices. Known as the "Dodd-Frank Section 1502", this regulation requires SEC listed companies to declare the origin of certain minerals by 2014. The intention is to reduce the use of tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold which originate from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries that are controlled by violent armed militia abusing human rights. Manufacturers now request information from their suppliers to see if their raw materials are sourced from this region and which smelters are used to extract the metals from the minerals. A standardized questionnaire has been developed for this purpose (download and further information). Soon, even companies which are not directly affected by the Conflict Minerals legislation will have to collect and maintain this information since their customers will request the data from their suppliers. Furthermore, it is expected that the public opinion and consumer interests will force manufacturers to avoid the use of metals with questionable origin. Impact for existing products Several departments are involved in the process of collecting data and providing conflict minerals compliance information. For already marketed products, purchasing typically requests Conflict Minerals declarations from the suppliers. In order to address requests from customers, technical operations or product management are usually responsible for keeping track of all parts, raw materials and their suppliers so that the required information can be provided. For complex BOMs, it is very tedious to maintain complete, accurate, up-to-date, and traceable data. Any product change or new supplier can, in addition to all other implications, have an effect on the Conflict Minerals compliance status. Influence on product development  It makes sense to consider compliance early in the planning and design of new products. Companies should evaluate which metals are needed or contained in supplier parts and if these could originate from problematic sources. The answer influences the cost and risk analysis during the development. If it is known early on that a part could be non-compliant with respect to Conflict Minerals, alternatives can be evaluated and thus costly changes at a later stage can be avoided. Integrated compliance management  Ideally, compliance data for Conflict Minerals, but also for other regulations like REACH and RoHS, should be managed in an integrated supply chain system. The compliance status is directly visible across the entire BOM at any part level and for the finished product. If data is missing, a request to the supplier can be triggered right away without having to switch to another system. The entire process, from identification of the relevant parts, requesting information, handling responses, data entry, to compliance calculation is fully covered end-to-end while being transparent for all stakeholders. Agile PLM Product Governance and Compliance (PG&C) The PG&C module extends Agile PLM with exactly this integrated functionality. As with the entire Agile product suite, PG&C can be configured according to customer requirements: data fields, attributes, workflows, routing, notifications, and permissions, etc… can be quickly and easily tailored to a customer’s needs. Optionally, external databases can be interfaced to query commercially available sources of Conflict Minerals declarations which obviates the need for a separate supplier request in many cases. Suppliers can access the system directly for data entry through a special portal. The responses to the standard EICC-GeSI questionnaire can be imported by the supplier or internally. Manual data entry is also supported. A set of compliance-specific dashboards and reports complement the functionality Conclusion  The increasing number of product compliance regulations, for which Conflict Minerals is just one example, requires companies to implement an efficient data and process management in this area. Consumer awareness in this matter increases as well so that an integrated system from development to production also provides a competitive advantage. Follow this link to learn more about Agile's PG&C solution

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• Need WIF Training?

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I spend numerous hours every month answering questions about WIF and identity in general. This made me realize that this is still quite a complicated topic once you go beyond the standard fedutil stuff. My good friend Brock and I put together a two day training course about WIF that covers everything we think is important. The course includes extensive lab material where you take standard application and apply all kinds of claims and federation techniques and technologies like WS-Federation, WS-Trust, session management, delegation, home realm discovery, multiple identity providers, Access Control Service, REST, SWT and OAuth. The lab also includes the latest version of the thinktecture identityserver and you will learn how to use and customize it. If you are looking for an open enrollment style of training, have a look here. Or contact me directly! The course outline looks as follows: Day 1 Intro to Claims-based Identity & the Windows Identity Foundation WIF introduces important concepts like conversion of security tokens and credentials to claims, claims transformation and claims-based authorization. In this module you will learn the basics of the WIF programming model and how WIF integrates into existing .NET code. Externalizing Authentication for Web Applications WIF includes support for the WS-Federation protocol. This protocol allows separating business and authentication logic into separate (distributed) applications. The authentication part is called identity provider or in more general terms - a security token service. This module looks at this scenario both from an application and identity provider point of view and walks you through the necessary concepts to centralize application login logic both using a standard product like Active Directory Federation Services as well as a custom token service using WIF’s API support. Externalizing Authentication for SOAP Services One big benefit of WIF is that it unifies the security programming model for ASP.NET and WCF. In the spirit of the preceding modules, we will have a look at how WIF integrates into the (SOAP) web service world. You will learn how to separate authentication into a separate service using the WS-Trust protocol and how WIF can simplify the WCF security model and extensibility API. Day 2 Advanced Topics:  Security Token Service Architecture, Delegation and Federation The preceding modules covered the 80/20 cases of WIF in combination with ASP.NET and WCF. In many scenarios this is just the tip of the iceberg. Especially when two business partners decide to federate, you usually have to deal with multiple token services and their implications in application design. Identity delegation is a feature that allows transporting the client identity over a chain of service invocations to make authorization decisions over multiple hops. In addition you will learn about the principal architecture of a STS, how to customize the one that comes with this training course, as well as how to build your own. Outsourcing Authentication:  Windows Azure & the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service Microsoft provides a multi-tenant security token service as part of the Azure platform cloud offering. This is an interesting product because it allows to outsource vital infrastructure services to a managed environment that guarantees uptime and scalability. Another advantage of the Access Control Service is, that it allows easy integration of both the “enterprise” protocols like WS-* as well as “web identities” like LiveID, Google or Facebook into your applications. ACS acts as a protocol bridge in this case where the application developer doesn’t need to implement all these protocols, but simply uses a service to make it happen. Claims & Federation for the Web and Mobile World Also the web & mobile world moves to a token and claims-based model. While the mechanics are almost identical, other protocols and token types are used to achieve better HTTP (REST) and JavaScript integration for in-browser applications and small footprint devices. Also patterns like how to allow third party applications to work with your data without having to disclose your credentials are important concepts in these application types. The nice thing about WIF and its powerful base APIs and abstractions is that it can shield application logic from these details while you can focus on implementing the actual application. HTH

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• Why We Do What We Do. (Part 3 of 5 Part Series on JDE 5G Postponed)

  - by Kem Butller-Oracle

  By Lyle Ekdahl - Oracle JD Edwards Sr. VP General Manager  In the closing of part two of this 5 part blog series, I stated that in the next installment I would explore the expected results of the digital overdrive era and the impact it will have on our economy. While I have full intentions of writing on that topic, I am inspired today to write about something that is top of mind. It’s top of mind because it has come up several times recently conversations with my Oracle’s JD Edwards team members, with customers and our partners, plus I feel passionately about why I do what I do…. It is not what we do but why we do that thing that we do Do you know what you do? For the most part, I bet you could tell me what you do even if your work has changed over the years.  My real question is, “Do you get excited about what you do, and are you fulfilled? Does your work deliver a sense of purpose, a cause to work for, and something to believe in?”  Alright, I guess that was not a single question. So let me just ask, “Why?” Why are you here, right now? Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you go to work? Of course, I can’t answer those questions for you but I can share with you my POV.   For starters, there are several things that drive me. As many of you know by now, I have a somewhat competitive nature but it is not solely the thrill of winning that actually fuels me. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like winning occasionally. However winning is only a potential result of competing and is clearly not guaranteed. So why compete? Why compete in business, and particularly why in this Enterprise Software business?  Here’s why! I am fascinated by creative and building processes. It is about making or producing things, causing something to come into existence. With the right skill, imagination and determination, whether it’s art or invention; the result can deliver value and inspire. In both avocation and vocation I always gravitate towards the create/build processes.  I believe one of the skills necessary for the create/build process is not just the aptitude but also, and especially, the desire and attitude that drives one to gain a deeper understanding. The more I learn about our customers, the more I seek to understand what makes the successful and what difficult issues cause them to struggle. I like to look for the complex, non-commodity process problems where streamlined design and modern technology can provide an easy and simple solution. It is especially gratifying to see our customers use our software to increase their own ability to deliver value to the market. What an incredible network effect! I know many of you share this customer obsession as well as the create/build addiction focused on simple and elegant design. This is what I believe is at the root of our common culture.  Are JD Edwards customers on a whole different than other ERP solutions’ customers? I would argue that for the most part, yes, they are. They selected our software, and our software is different. Why? Because I believe that the create/build process will generally result in solutions that reflect who built it and their culture. And a culture of people focused on why they create/build will attract different customers than one that is based on what is built or how the solution is delivered. In the past I have referred to this idea as character of the customer, and it transcends industry, size and run rate. Now some would argue that JD Edwards has some customers who are characters. But that is for a different post. As I have told you before, the JD Edwards culture is unique, and its resulting economy is valuable and deserving of our best efforts. 

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• Perm SSIS Developer Urgently Required

  - by blakmk

    Job Role To provide dedicated data services support to the company, by designing, creating, maintaining and enhancing database objects, ensuring data quality, consistency and integrity. Migrating data from various sources to central SQL 2008 data warehouse will be the primary function. Migration of data from bespoke legacy database’s to SQL 2008 data warehouse. Understand key business requirements, Liaising with various aspects of the company. Create advanced transformations of data, with focus on data cleansing, redundant data and duplication. Creating complex business rules regarding data services, migration, Integrity and support (Best Practices). Experience ·         Minimum 3 year SSIS experience, in a project or BI Development role and involvement in at least 3 full ETL project life cycles, using the following methodologies and tools o    Excellent knowledge of ETL concepts including data migration & integrity, focusing on SSIS. o    Extensive experience with SQL 2005 products, SQL 2008 desirable. o    Working knowledge of SSRS and its integration with other BI products. o    Extensive knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, triggers (Table/Database), views, functions in particular coding and querying. o    Data cleansing and harmonisation. o    Understanding and knowledge of indexes, statistics and table structure. o    SQL Agent – Scheduling jobs, optimisation, multiple jobs, DTS. o    Troubleshoot, diagnose and tune database and physical server performance. o    Knowledge and understanding of locking, blocks, table and index design and SQL configuration. ·         Demonstrable ability to understand and analyse business processes. ·         Experience in creating business rules on best practices for data services. ·         Experience in working with, supporting and troubleshooting MS SQL servers running enterprise applications ·         Proven ability to work well within a team and liaise with other technical support staff such as networking administrators, system administrators and support engineers. ·         Ability to create formal documentation, work procedures, and service level agreements. ·         Ability to communicate technical issues at all levels including to a non technical audience. ·         Good working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.   Location Based in Crawley with possibility of some remote working Contact me for more info: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/blakmk/contact.aspx      

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations

  - by Tanu Sood

  Welcome to the first of our partner blog series. November Mondays are all about PricewaterhouseCoopers' perespective on Identity and R2. In this series, we have identity management experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) share their perspective on (and experiences with) the recent identity management release, Oracle Identity Management R2. The purpose of the series is to discuss real world identity use cases that helped shape the innovations in the recent R2 release and the implementation strategies that customers are employing today with expertise from PwC. Part 1: Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations In this inaugural post, we will discuss some of the new features of the R2 release of Oracle Identity Manager that some of our customer organizations are implementing today and the business rationale for those. Oracle's R2 Security portfolio represents a solid step forward for a platform that is already market-leading.  Prior to R2, Oracle was an industry titan in security with reliable products, expansive compatibility, and a large customer base.  Oracle has taken their identity platform to the next level in their latest version, R2.  The new features include a customizable UI, a request catalog, flexible security, and enhancements for its connectors, and more. Oracle customers will be impressed by the new Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) business-friendly UI.  Without question, Oracle has invested significant time in responding to customer feedback about making access requests and related activities easier for non-IT users.  The flexibility to add information to screens, hide fields that are not important to a particular customer, and adjust web themes to suit a company's preference make Oracle's Identity Manager stand out among its peers.  Customers can also expect to carry UI configurations forward with minimal migration effort to future versions of OIM.  Oracle's flexible UI will benefit many organizations looking for a customized feel with out-of-the-box configurations. Organizations looking to extend their services to end users will benefit significantly from new usability features like OIM’s ‘Catalog.’  Customers familiar with Oracle Identity Analytics' 'Glossary' feature will be able to relate to the concept.  It will enable Roles, Entitlements, Accounts, and Resources to be requested through the out-of-the-box UI.  This is an industry-changing feature as customers can make the process to request access easier than ever.  For additional ease of use, Oracle has introduced a shopping cart style request interface that further simplifies the experience for end users.  Common requests can be setup as profiles to save time.  All of this is combined with the approval workflow engine introduced in R1 that provides the flexibility customers need to meet their compliance requirements. Enhanced security was also on the list of features Oracle wanted to deliver to its customers.  The new end-user UI provides additional granular access controls.  Common Help Desk use cases can be implemented with ease by updating the application profiles.  Access can be rolled out so that administrators can only manage a certain department or organization.  Further, OIM can be more easily configured to select which fields can be read-only vs. updated.  Finally, this security model can be used to limit search results for roles and entitlements intended for a particular department.  Every customer has a different need for access and OIM now matches this need with a flexible security model. One of the important considerations when selecting an Identity Management platform is compatibility.  The number of supported platform connectors and how well it can integrate with non-supported platforms is a key consideration for selecting an identity suite.  Oracle has a long list of supported connectors.  When a customer has a requirement for a platform not on that list, Oracle has a solution too.  Oracle is introducing a simplified architecture called Identity Connector Framework (ICF), which holds the potential to simplify custom connectors.  Finally, Oracle has introduced a simplified process to profile new disconnected applications from the web browser.  This is a useful feature that enables administrators to profile applications quickly as well as empowering the application owner to fulfill requests from their web browser.  Support will still be available for connectors based on previous versions in R2. Oracle Identity Manager's new R2 version has delivered many new features customers have been asking for.  Oracle has matured their platform with R2, making it a truly distinctive platform among its peers. In our next post, expect a deep dive into use cases for a customer considering R2 as their new Enterprise identity solution. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you about the specific challenges you are facing and your experience in solving those. Meet the Writers Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory  Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving.

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• Where Twitter Stands Heading Into 2013

  - by Mike Stiles

  As Twitter continued throughout 2012 to be a stage on which global politics and culture played itself out, the company itself underwent some adjustments that give us a good indication of what users and brands can expect from the platform in 2013. The power of the network did anything but fade. Celebrities continued to use it to connect one-on-one. Even the Pope signed on this year. It continued to fuel revolutions. It played an exponentially large factor in this US Presidential election. And around the world, the freedom to speak was challenged as users were fired, sued, sometimes even jailed for their tweets. Expect more of the same in 2013, as Twitter has entrenched itself, for individuals, causes and brands, as the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to message the masses so some measure of impact can come from it. It’s changed everything, and it’s not finished. These fun facts reveal the position of strength with which Twitter enters 2013: It now generates a billion tweets every 2.5 days It has 500 million+ users The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times 32% of everyone using the Internet uses Twitter It’s expected to bring in $540 million in ad revenue by 2014 11 new accounts are created every second High-level Executive Summary: people love it, people use it, and they’re going to keep loving and using it. Whether or not outside developers love it is a different matter. 2012 marked a shift from welcoming the third party support that played at least some role in Twitter being so warmly embraced, to discouraging anything that replicates what Twitter can do itself…or plans to do itself. It’s not the open playground it once was. Now Twitter must spend 2013 proving it can innovate in-house and keep us just as entranced. Likewise, Twitter is distancing itself from Facebook. Images from the #1 platform’s Instagram don’t work on Twitter anymore, and Twitter’s rolling out their own photo filter product. Where the two have lived in a “plenty of room for everybody” symbiosis up to now, 2013 could see the giants ramping up a full-on rivalry. Twitter is exhibiting a deliberate strategy. Updates have centered on more visually appealing search results, and making finding and sharing content easier. Deals have been cut with some media entities so their content stands out. CEO Dick Costolo has said tweets aren’t the attraction, they’re what leads you to content. Twitter aims to be a key distributor of media and info. Add the addition of former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to the board, and their hashtag landing page experience for events, and their media behemoth ambitions get pretty clear. There are challenges ahead and Costolo has also laid those out; entry into China, figuring out how to have Twitter deliver both comprehensive and relevant, targeted experiences, and the visualization of big data. What does this mean for corporations? They can expect a more media-rich evolution and growing emphases on imagery. They can expect more opportunities to create great media content and leverage Twitter for its distribution. And they can expect new ways to surface in searches. Are brands diving in? 56% of customer tweets to companies get completely and totally ignored. Ugh. A study Twitter recently conducted with Compete shows people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to buy a product. And, the more retailer tweets they see, the more likely they are to purchase on the retail site. As more of those tweets point to engaging media content from the brand, the results should get even better. Twitter appears ready for 2013. Enterprise brands have some work to do. @mikestilesPhoto Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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• Oracle ties social, CRM, analytics products to customer experience

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Oracle will embark on a new product strategy that centers on customer experience management, an approach driven by the company’s many recent acquisitions.  The new approach, announced by the company Monday night, will be seen in an expansive suite that features familiar Oracle products -- such as its Fusion CRM platform -- and offerings the company recently gained through acquisitions, including FatWire, RightNow and Vitrue. Billed as Oracle Customer Experience (CX), the suite enables businesses to respond to a market centered on the customer experience, said Anthony Lye, the company’s senior vice president of CRM. Companies “are very aware their products are commoditizing,” Lye said in an interview last week, referring to how the Web and social media channels have empowered customers. Customer experiences start and mature outside of CRM, and applications today need to reflect that shift, Lye said. Businesses thus need to step away from a pure CRM model, he said. Oracle claims CX will improve customer experience management by connecting businesses with customers across Web sites and social channels. Companies can create a single, real-time view of the customer and use predictive analytics of interactions to strengthen the customer experience, Oracle said. “Companies have to connect with their customers wherever, whenever and however they want,” Lye said. “They have to know and understand their customer.” Lye promoted Oracle CX as a suite that will work across channels to complement the company’s applications. A new strategy has been “cooking” for years now, but the acquisitions Oracle has made over the past two years made the time right for a “unique collaboration,” Lye said. CX includes basic Oracle CRM solutions such as Siebel and the new Fusion Apps. It also includes the company’s MDM products, Enterprise Data Quality, Customer Hub and Product Hub. And the suite is rounded out by the services that Oracle recently bought, transactions that created or enhanced the company’s presence in social, marketing, e-commerce and customer service. For instance, FatWire provides tools for marketing. ATG focuses on e-commerce. And RightNow specializes in customer service. Two recent acquisitions -- Collective Intellect and Vitrue -- gave Oracle a seat at the social table. Collective Intellect is a social intelligence program, and Vitrue is a social marketing and engagement platform. Those acquisitions have yet to be finalized. Oracle hopes to eventually integrate the two social offerings, as well as most of the other services, into the CX suite. CX can integrate on Oracle’s standard middleware, and can give users a lower TCO by leveraging it as a single stack on premise or as a cloud solution. Lye deferred questions about the pricing of CX, and instead pitched Oracle’s ability to offer multiple customer experience solutions in one suite. Businesses have struggled with the complexity of infrastructure and modern services that communicate with customers, Lye said. “They’ve struggled to pull all these things together. We’ve done that,” he said. Stephen Powers, a research director at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said it’s not surprising for Oracle to offer the CX suite and a related customer experience strategy.  “They’ve got CRM, ATG, FatWire. Clearly, it’s been the strategy for them,” he said. But the challenge for Oracle, and for any other vendor that has gone on an “acquisition spree,” is to connect its many products, Powers said. “The portfolio has to be more than the parts. They’ve got to realize the efficiencies and value of having these pieces to tie them together,” he said. “The proof is in the pudding. Adobe has done a nice job in its space with the products they’ve got. Now, Oracle has got to show it has something.” Albert McKeon (SearchCRM) Published: 25 Jun 2012 : http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240158644/Oracle-ties-social-CRM-analytics-products-to-customer-experience

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• Process Power to the People that Create Engagement

  - by Michael Snow

  Organizations often speak about their engagement problems as if the problem is the people they are trying to engage - employees,  partners, customers and citizens.  The reality of most engagement problems is that the processes put in place to engage are impersonal, inflexible, unintuitive, and often completely ignorant of the population they are trying to serve. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Delight? How appropriate during this short week of the US Independence Day Holiday that we're focusing on People, Process and Engagement. As we celebrate this holiday in the US and the historic independence we gained (sorry Brits!) - it's interesting to think back to 1776 to the creation of that pivotal document, the Declaration of Independence. What tremendous pressure to create an engaging document and founding experience they must have felt. "On June 11, 1776, in anticipation of the impending vote for independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress appointed five men — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston — to write a declaration that would make clear to people everywhere why this break from Great Britain was both necessary and inevitable. The committee then appointed Jefferson to draft a statement. Jefferson produced a "fair copy" of his draft declaration, which became the basic text of his "original Rough draught." The text was first submitted to Adams, then Franklin, and finally to the other two members of the committee. Before the committee submitted the declaration to Congress on June 28, they made forty-seven emendations to the document. During the ensuing congressional debates of July 1-4, 1776, Congress adopted thirty-nine further revisions to the committee draft. (http://www.constitution.org) If anything was an attempt for engaging the hearts and minds of the 13 Colonies at the time, this document certainly succeeded in its mission. ...Their tools at the time were pen and ink and parchment. Although the final document would later be typeset with lead type for a printing press to distribute to the colonies, all of the original drafts were hand written. And today's enterprise complains about using "Review and Track Changes" at times.  Can you imagine the manual revision control process? or lack thereof?  Collaborative process? Time delays? Would  implementing a better process have helped our founding fathers collaborate better? Declaration of Independence rough draft below. One of many during the creation process. Great comparison across multiple versions of the document here. (from http://www.ushistory.org/): While you may not be creating a new independent nation, getting your employees to engage is crucial to your success as a company in today's world. Oracle WebCenter provides the tools that power engagement. Employees that have better tools for communication, collaboration and getting their job done are more engaged employees. Better engaged employees create more engaged customers and partners. 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-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• Gaming on Cloud

  - by technomad

  Sometimes I wonder the pundits of cloud computing are way to consumed with the enterprise applications. With all the CAPEX / OPEX, ROI-talk taking the center stage, an opportunity to affect masses directly is getting overlooked. I am a self proclaimed die hard gamer. I come from the generation of gamers who started their journey in DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Allan Border Cricket (the latter is still a favorite pastime). In the late 90s, a revolution called accelerated graphics started in DirectX and OpenGL. Games got more advanced. Likes of Quake III and Unreal Tournament became the crown jewels of the industry. But with all these advancements, there started a race. A race of GFX giants ATI and NVIDIA to beat each other for better frame and image quality. Revisions to the graphics chipsets became frequent. Games became eye candies but at the cost of more GPU power / memory. Every eagerly awaited title started demanding more muscle power in graphics and PC hardware. Latest games and all the liquid smooth frame rates became the territory of the once with deep pockets who could spend lavishly on latest hardware. Enthusiasts like yours truly, who couldn’t afford this route, started exploring over-clocking, optimized hardware cooling... etc. to pursue the passion. Ever rising cost of hardware requirements lead to rampant piracy of PC games. Gamers were willing to spend on the latest titles, but the ones with tight budget prefer hardware upgrades against a legal copy of the game. It was also fueled by emergence of the P2P file sharing networks. Then came the era of Xbox and PS3s. It solved the major issue of hardware standardization and provided an alternative to ever increasing hardware costs. I have always admired these consoles, but being born and brought up in a keyboard/mouse environment, I still find it difficult to play first person shooters with a gamepad. I leave the topic of PC v/s Consol gaming for another day, but the bottom line is… PC gamers deserve an equally democratized solution. This is where I think Cloud Computing can come to rescue. It can minimize hardware requirements. Virtually end the software piracy and rationalize costs for gamers. Subscription based models like pay-as-you-play. In game rewards, like extended subscription credits for exceptional gamers (oh yes, I have beaten Xaero on nightmare in Quake III, time and again!) Easy deployment for patches and fixes. Better game AI. The list goes on and on… Fortunately, companies like OnLive are thinking in the same direction. Their gaming service is all set to launch on 17th June 2010 in E3 2010 expo in L.A. I wish them all the luck. I hope they will start a trend which will bring the smiles back on the face of budget gamers with the help of cloud computing.

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

  - by Phil Factor

  For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it.  It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system.  There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying.  Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor.  It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information.  Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out.  Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping  DBAs  is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible,  and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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• Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Ananth R. Tiru

  Do you have applications running on the cloud that you need to connect with the on premises systems. The most likely answer to this question is an astounding YES!  If so, then you understand the importance of keep the data fresh at all times across the cloud and on-premises environments. This is also one of the key focus areas for the new GoldenGate 12c release which we announced couple of week ago via a press release. Most enterprises have spent years avoiding the data “silos” that inhibit productivity. For example, an enterprise which has adopted a CRM strategy could be relying on an on-premises based marketing application used for developing and nurturing leads. At the same time it could be using a SaaS based Sales application to create opportunities and quotes. The sales and the marketing teams which use these systems need to be able to access and share the data in a reliable and cohesive way. This example can be extended to other applications areas such as HR, Supply Chain, and Finance and the demands the users place on getting a consistent view of the data. When it comes to moving data in hybrid environments some of the key requirements include minimal latency, reliability and security: Data must remain fresh. As data ages it becomes less relevant and less valuable—day-old data is often insufficient in today’s competitive landscape. Reliability must be guaranteed despite system or connectivity issues that can occur between the cloud and on-premises instances. Security is a key concern when replicating between cloud and on-premises instances. There are several options to consider when replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 1 – Secured network established between the cloud and on-premises A secured network is established between the cloud and on-premises which enables the applications (including replication software) running on the cloud and on-premises to have seamless connectivity to other applications irrespective of where they are physically located. Option 2 – Restricted network established between the cloud and on-premises A restricted network is established between the cloud and on-premises instances which enable certain ports (required by replication) be opened on both the cloud and on the on-premises instances and white lists the IP addresses of the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 3 – Restricted network access from on-premises and cloud through HTTP proxy This option can be considered when the ports required by the applications (including replication software) are not open and the cloud instance is not white listed on the on-premises instance. This option of tunneling through HTTP proxy may be only considered when proper security exceptions are obtained. Oracle GoldenGate Oracle GoldenGate is used for major Fortune 500 companies and other industry leaders worldwide to support mission-critical systems for data availability and integration. Oracle GoldenGate addresses the requirements for ensuring data consistency between cloud and on-premises instances, thus facilitating the business process to run effectively and reliably. The architecture diagram below illustrates the scenario where the cloud and the on-premises instance are connected using GoldenGate through a secured network In the above scenario, Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on both the cloud and the on-premises instances. On the cloud instance Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on the machine where the database instance can be accessed. Oracle GoldenGate can be configured for unidirectional or bi-directional replication between the cloud and on premises instances. The specific configuration details of Oracle GoldenGate processes will depend upon the option selected for establishing connectivity between the cloud and on-premises instances. The knowledge article (ID - 1588484.1) titled ' Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate' discusses in detail the options for replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. The article can be found on My Oracle Support. To learn more about Oracle GoldenGate 12c register for our launch webcast where we will go into these new features in more detail.   You may also want to download our white paper "Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 1 New Features Overview" I would love to hear your requirements for replicating between on-premises and cloud instances, as well as your comments about the strategy discussed in the knowledge article to address your needs. Please post your comments in this blog or in the Oracle GoldenGate public forum - https://forums.oracle.com/community/developer/english/business_intelligence/system_management_and_integration/goldengate

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• What 5 things should SQL Server get rid of?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been “tagged” by my friend Paul Randal. It’s a high-tech way of making someone else do what you want, but since it’s Paul, well, I guess I’m OK with that. He’s asked in his recent blog entry “What five things would you get rid of in SQL Server if you were in charge?” This is, of course, a delicate issue. After all, I work at Microsoft, so anything I say here might be taken as a criticism that would require action – but of course it really doesn’t. Interestingly, you may have more to do with what goes in to SQL Server than I did even as a Program Manager where I “owned” a feature. Unlike many places I’ve worked, Microsoft really does drive its products by what its users want – not every time, and not every user request, mind you, but overall I think we hit the mark pretty well. So, with all of that said, and of course the obligatory statement of “these are my own opinions, and have nothing to do with any official Microsoft position in any way, and do not reflect the opinions of other Microsoft employees or management”, here goes. 1. Get rid of SQL Server Management Studio Does that surprise you? After all, when I was a Program Manager, I actually owned the general architecture for SSMS. But those on my team probably would have been able to guess this one for you. I think that SSMS is a fine development tool. But I think that it does less of a good job for managing a system. It’s based on Visual Studio, probably one of the best development IDE’s around. And when I develop code, I really like it. But for a monitoring/management tool, I prefer a snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). I know, the old one (prior to 3.0) was kludgy, difficult to use and program in. But that’s changed. Of course, when I bring this up, you’ll probably immediately say “But I don’t have that in XP.” And that’s one of the reasons we didn’t go there. (But I still don’t like SSMS for management.) 2. ShrinkDB I think this discussion has been done to death, so I’ll leave it at that. 3. SQL Server Agent Does that one surprise you as well? In my mind, since we ALWAYS ride on Windows, just use the task scheduler there, along with PowerShell. You could log the results in Windows logs, files, back into SQL Server, whatever. It’s just a complexity we don’t need in SQL Server. 4. SQL Server Error Logs We have a full logging setup in Windows. They’re well done, easy to understand and ubiquitous. We should just use that. 5. Several SKU’s I won’t say which, but we have a few SKU’s of SQL Server that need to go. And we need to figure out how to help you understand clearly where you need to go to Enterprise or Data Center.  Most folks are trying to push Standard edition to do things it isn’t designed to do, and then they think SQL Server won’t scale. I think we can do a better job of showing you where Standard Edition will hit the wall, and I think with fewer choices it would be pretty simple for you to pick the right one. Well, once again I’ve probably puzzled some folks and angered others. I think my work here is done. :) Back to you, Paul. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

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• Upcoming Carbon Tax in South Africa

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle In 2012, the South Africa National Treasury announced the plan to impose a carbon tax to cut carbon emissions that are blamed for climate change. South Africa is ranked among the top 20 countries measured by absolute carbon dioxide emissions, with emissions per capita in the region of 10 metric tons per annum and over 90% of South Africa's energy produced by burning fossil fuels. The top 40 largest companies in the country are responsible for 207 million tons of carbon dioxide, directly emitting 20 percent of South Africa’s carbon output. The legislation, originally scheduled to be implemented from January 2015 to 31 December 2019, is now delayed to January 2016. It will levy a carbon tax of R120 (US$11) per ton of CO2, rising then by 10 percent a year until 2020, while all sectors bar electricity will be able to claim additional relief of at least 10 percent. The South African treasury proposed a 60 percent tax-free threshold on emissions for all sectors, including electricity, petroleum, iron, steel and aluminum. Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting (EA&R) supports these needs and guarantees consistency across organizations in how data is collected, retained, controlled, consolidated and used in calculating and reporting emissions inventory. EA&R also enables companies to develop an enterprise-wide data view that includes all 5 of the key sustainability categories: carbon emissions, energy, water, materials and waste. Thanks to its native integration with Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP Financials and Inventory Systems and the capability of capturing environmental data across business silos, Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting is uniquely positioned to support a strategic approach to carbon management that drives business value. Sources: 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:0in; 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;} African Utility Week BDlive 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Find Knowledge Quickly

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Get to relevant knowledge on the Oracle products you use in a few quick steps! Customers tell us that the volume of search results returned can make it difficult to find the information they need, especially when similar Oracle products exist. These simple tips show you how to filter, browse, search, and refine your results to get relevant answers faster. Filter first: PowerView is your best friend Powerview is an often ignored feature of My Oracle Support that enables you to control the information displayed on the Dashboard, the Knowledge tab and regions, and the Service Request tab based on one or more parameters. You can define a PowerView to limit information based on product, product line, support ID, platform, hostname, system name and others. Using PowerView allows you to restrict: Your search results to the filters you have set The product list when selecting your products in Search & Browse and when creating service requests   The PowerView menu is at the top of My Oracle Support, near the title You turn PowerView on by clicking PowerView is Off, which is a button. When PowerView is On, and filters are active, clicking the button again will toggle Powerview off. Click the arrow to the right to create new filters, edit filters, remove a filter, or choose from the list of previously created filters. You can create a PowerView in 3 simple steps! Turn PowerView on and select New from the PowerView menu. Select your filter from the Select Filter Type dropdown list and make selections from the other two menus. Hint: While there are many filter options, selecting your product line or your list of products will provide you with an effective filter. Click the plus sign (+) to add more filters. Click the minus sign (-) to remove a filter. Click Create to save and activated the filter(s) You’ll notice that PowerView is On displays along with the active filters. For more information about the PowerView capabilities, click the Learn more about PowerView… menu item or view a short video. Browse & Refine: Access the Best Match Fast For Your Product and Task In the Knowledge Browse region of the Knowledge or Dashboard tabs, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable. A best match document – a collection of knowledge articles and resources specific to your selections - may display, offering you a one-stop shop. The best match document, called an “information center,” is an aggregate of dynamically updated links to information pertinent to the product, task, and version (if applicable) you chose. These documents are refreshed every 24 hours to ensure that you have the most current information at your fingertips. Note: Not all products have “information centers.” If no information center appears as a best match, click Search to see a list of search results. From the information center, you can access topics from a product overview to security information, as shown in the left menu. Just want to search? That’s easy too! Again, pick your product, pick your task, select a version, if applicable, enter a keyword term, and click Search. Hint: In this example, you’ll notice that PowerView is on and set to PeopleSoft Enterprise. When PowerView is on and you select a product from the Knowledge Base product list, the listed products are limited to the active PowerView filter. (Products you’ve previously picked are also listed at the top of the dropdown list.) Your search results are displayed based on the parameters you entered. It’s that simple! Related Information: My Oracle Support - User Resource Center [ID 873313.1] My Oracle Support Community For more tips on using My Oracle Support, check out these short video training modules. My Oracle Support Speed Video Training [ID 603505.1]

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• BI&EPM in Focus Sep 2012

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

  Customers ·       Iluka Resources Improves Business Insight into Mining Operations Through Significantly Faster, Customized Analyses ·       Waikato Regional Council Consolidates Financial Reports up to 10 Times Faster  ·       Lojas Renner Shortens Budget Consolidation from Three Days to 15 Minutes; Improves Data Quality, and Supports Aggressive Expansion Plans  ·       Link to Complete Archive ·       Profit Magazine article featuring General Dynamics: RECONnomics: Integrate. Innovate. Grow (link) ·       Video: Goodhope Asia Unifies Financial Data with Oracle Hyperion (link)   Enterprise Performance Management ·       Oracle University Training on Demand: 1.     Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting 11.1.2 for Financial Management (link) 2.     Oracle Essbase Bootcamp: On Demand (link) 3.     Oracle Hyperion Planning 11.1.2: Create & Manage Applications On Demand (link)   Business Intelligence ·       Oracle University Training on Demand: 1.     Learn How to Create Analyses, Dashboards with OBI 11g (link) 2.     Build Repositories with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (link) 3.     Oracle BI Publisher 11g Fundamentals (link) 4.     Oracle BI Applications Courses now available for 7.9.6  (link) 5.     Oracle BI 11g: New Features and Exalytics ·       Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.6.2BP, updated information: 1.     Oracle BI Mobile at the Speed of Thought 2.     What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile 3.     What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence Visualizations 4.     Oracle Business Intelligence on Oracle.com 5.     Download the New Release ·       Discover How to Turn Data into Insight: Big Data Guide : Whitepaper and set of short Videos. ·       New OPN Specialisation Exam for OBI 11g Certification . ·       Lastest BIC2g and Exalytics Demonstration VMs for Partners . ·       New Version 2.3 Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and Server now available . ·       New Oracle BI Publisher 11.1.1.6 Trial Edition Now Available .

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• Meet Matthijs, Dutch Inside Sales Representative for Oracle Direct

  - by Maria Sandu

  Today we would like to share some information around the Dutch Core Technology team in Malaga. Matthijs is one of the team members who decided to relocate from the Netherlands to Malaga to join Oracle Direct two years ago. Matthijs: “For the past two years I have been working as an Oracle Direct Core Technology Inside Sales representative for Named Accounts in the Netherlands, based in Malaga, Spain. In my case, working for the Dutch OD Core Technology team means that I am responsible for the Account Management of Larger companies in the Travel & Transportation and the Manufacturing, Retail & Distribution sector. I work together with the Oracle Field Account Managers and our Field Sales Management in the Netherlands where I am often the main point of contact for customers. This means that I deal with their requests and I manage their various issues, provide solutions and suggestions based on the Oracle Core Technology portfolio. I work on interesting projects with end-customers, making financial proposals and building business cases. It is a very interesting sales environment and for the last two years I improved my skills substantially. This month I will finish my Inside Sales career in Malaga to move to a position within Field Sales in the Netherlands. Oracle Direct has proven to be a great stepping stone for my career. Boost your personal development One of the reasons for joining Oracle was to boost my personal & career development. You can choose from various different trainings to follow all over Europe which enable you to reach both your personal and professional goals. Furthermore, you can decide your own career path and plan the steps necessary to achieve your goal. Many people aim to grow into Field Sales in their native countries, Business Development or Sales Management, but there are many possibilities once you decide to join Oracle. Overall, working at Oracle means working for an international company and one of the worldwide leaders in Enterprise Hardware & Software. Here you get all the tools necessary to develop yourself personally & professionally. Another great advantage of working for Oracle Direct is working from our office in Malaga, Southern Spain where we have over 400 employees from many countries across EMEA. It is a truly international environment! Working and living in Spain gives you an excellent opportunity to learn Spanish and of course enjoy the Spanish lifestyle, cuisine, beaches and much, much more!” Interview day Utrecht If you are inspired by the story of Matthijs and would like to explore the opportunity to join the Technology Sales team for the Dutch market in Malaga, let us know! We will organise an Interview day in the Oracle office in Utrecht on the 18th and 19th of September. We currently have multiple openings in the Core Technology team that focus on selling our Database portfolio in the Dutch market. We are looking for native Dutch speakers with a Bachelors degree, 2-5 years sales experience (ideally in IT) who are willing to relocate to Malaga for at least 2 years! For more information please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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• ORE graphics using Remote Desktop Protocol

  - by Sherry LaMonica

  Oracle R Enterprise graphics are returned as raster, or bitmap graphics. Raster images consist of tiny squares of color information referred to as pixels that form points of color to create a complete image. Plots that contain raster images render quickly in R and create small, high-quality exported image files in a wide variety of formats. However, it is a known issue that the rendering of raster images can be problematic when creating graphics using a Remote Desktop connection. Raster images do not display in the windows device using Remote Desktop under the default settings. This happens because Remote Desktop restricts the number of colors when connecting to a Windows machine to 16 bits per pixel, and interpolating raster graphics requires many colors, at least 32 bits per pixel.. For example, this simple embedded R image plot will be returned in a raster-based format using a standalone Windows machine:  R> library(ORE) R> ore.connect(user="rquser", sid="orcl", host="localhost", password="rquser", all=TRUE)  R> ore.doEval(function() image(volcano, col=terrain.colors(30))) Here, we first load the ORE packages and connect to the database instance using database login credentials. The ore.doEval function executes the R code within the database embedded R engine and returns the image back to the client R session. Over a Remote Desktop connection under the default settings, this graph will appear blank due to the restricted number of colors. Users who encounter this issue have two options to display ORE graphics over Remote Desktop: either raise Remote Desktop's Color Depth or direct the plot output to an alternate device. Option #1: Raise Remote Desktop Color Depth setting In a Remote Desktop session, all environment variables, including display variables determining Color Depth, are determined by the RCP-Tcp connection settings. For example, users can reduce the Color Depth when connecting over a slow connection. The different settings are 15 bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, or 32 bits per pixel. To raise the Remote Desktop color depth: On the Windows server, launch Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration from the Accessories menu.Under Connections, right click on RDP-Tcp and select Properties.On the Client Settings tab either uncheck LimitMaximum Color Depth or set it to 32 bits per pixel. Click Apply, then OK, log out of the remote session and reconnect.After reconnecting, the Color Depth on the Display tab will be set to 32 bits per pixel.  Raster graphics will now display as expected. For ORE users, the increased color depth results in slightly reduced performance during plot creation, but the graph will be created instead of displaying an empty plot. Option #2: Direct plot output to alternate device Plotting to a non-windows device is a good option if it's not possible to increase Remote Desktop Color Depth, or if performance is degraded when creating the graph. Several device drivers are available for off-screen graphics in R, such as postscript, pdf, and png. On-screen devices include windows, X11 and Cairo. Here we output to the Cairo device to render an on-screen raster graphic.  The grid.raster function in the grid package is analogous to other grid graphical primitives - it draws a raster image within the current plot's grid.  R> options(device = "CairoWin") # use Cairo device for plotting during the session R> library(Cairo) # load Cairo, grid and png libraries  R> library(grid) R> library(png)  R> res <- ore.doEval(function()image(volcano,col=terrain.colors(30))) # create embedded R plot  R> img <- ore.pull(res, graphics = TRUE)$img[[1]] # extract image  R> grid.raster(as.raster(readPNG(img)), interpolate = FALSE) # generate raster graph R> dev.off() # turn off first device   By default, the interpolate argument to grid.raster is TRUE, which means that what is actually drawn by R is a linear interpolation of the pixels in the original image. Setting interpolate to FALSE uses a sample from the pixels in the original image.A list of graphics devices available in R can be found in the Devices help file from the grDevices package: R> help(Devices)

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• Introduction to WebCenter Personalization: &ldquo;The Conductor&rdquo;

  - by Steve Pepper

  There are some new faces in the town of WebCenter with the latest 11g PS3 release.  A new component has introduced itself as "Oracle WebCenter Personalization", a.k.a WCP, to simplify delivery of a personalized experience and content to end users.  This posting reviews one of the primary components within WCP: "The Conductor". The Conductor: This ain't just an ordinary cloud... One of the founding principals behind WebCenter Personalization was to provide an open client-side API that remains independent of the technology invoking it, in addition to independence from the architecture running it.  The Conductor delivers this, and much, much more. The Conductor is the engine behind WebCenter Personalization that allows flow-based documents, called "Scenarios", to be managed and executed on the server-side through a well published and RESTful api.      The Conductor also supports an extensible model for custom provider integration that can be easily invoked within a Scenario to promote seamless integration with existing business assets. Introducing the Scenario Conductor Scenarios are declarative offline-authored documents using the custom Personalization JDeveloper bundle included with WebCenter.  A Scenario contains one (or more) statements that can: Create variables that are scoped to the current execution context Iterate over collections, or loop until a specific condition is met Execute one or more statements when a condition is met Invoke other scenarios that exist within the same namespace Invoke a data provider that integrates with custom applications Once a variable is assigned within the Scenario's execution context, it can be referenced anywhere within the same Scenario using the common Expression Language syntax used in J2EE web containers. Scenarios are then published and tested to the Integrated WebLogic Server domain, or published remotely to other domains running WebCenter Personalization. Various Client-side Models The Conductor server API is built upon RESTful services that support a wide variety of clients able to communicate over HTTP.  The Conductor supports the following client-side models: REST:  Popular browser-based languages can be used to manage and execute Conductor Scenarios.  There are other public methods to retrieve configured provider metadata that can be used by custom applications. The Conductor currently supports XML and JSON for it's API syntax. Java: WebCenter Personalization delivers a robust and light-weight java client with the popular Jersey framework as it's foundation.  It has never been easier to write a remote java client to manage remote RESTful services. Expression Language (EL): Allow the results of Scenario execution to control your user interface or embed personalized content using the session-scoped managed bean.  The EL client can also be used in straight JSP pages with minimal configuration. Extensible Provider Framework The Conductor supports a pluggable provider framework for integrating custom code with Scenario execution.  There are two types of providers supported by the Conductor: Function Provider: Function Providers are simple java annotated classes with static methods that are meant to be served as utilities.  Some common uses would include: object creation or instantiation, data transformation, and the like.  Function Providers can be invoked using the common EL syntax from variable assignments, conditions, and loops. For example:  ${myUtilityClass:doStuff(arg1,arg2))} If you are familiar with EL Functions, Function Providers are based on the same concept. Data Provider: Like Function Providers, Data Providers are annotated java classes, but they must adhere to a much more strict object model.  Data Providers have access to a wealth of Conductor services, such as: Access to namespace-scoped configuration API that can be managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager, Scenario execution context for expression resolution, and more.  Oracle ships with three out-of-the-box data providers that supports integration with: Standardized Content Servers(CMIS),  Federated Profile Properties through the Properties Service, and WebCenter Activity Graph. Useful References If you are looking to immediately get started writing your own application using WebCenter Personalization Services, you will find the following references helpful in getting you on your way: Personalizing WebCenter Applications Authoring Personalized Scenarios in JDeveloper Using Personalization APIs Externally Implementing and Calling Function Providers Implementing and Calling Data Providers

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• Move over DFS and Robocopy, here is SyncToy!

  - by andywe

  Ever since Windows 2000, I have always had the need to replicate data to multiple endpoints with the same content. Until DFS was introduced, the method of thinking was to either manually copy the data location by location, or to batch script it with xcopy and schedule a task. Even though this worked (and still does today), it was cumbersome, and intensive on the network, especially when dealing with larger amounts of data. Then along came robocopy, as an internal tool written by an enterprising programmer at Microsoft. We used it quite a bit, especially when we could not use DFS in the early days. It was received so well, it made it into the public realm. At least now we could have the ability to determine what files had changed and only replicate those. Well, over time there has been evolution of this ideal. DFS is obviously the Windows enterprise class service to do this, along with BrancheCache..however you don’t always need or want the power of DFS, especially when it comes to small datacenter installations, or remote offices. I have specific data sets that are on closed or restricted networks, that either have a security need for this, or are in remote countries where bandwidth is a premium. FOr this, I use the latest evolution for one off replication names Synctoy. Synctoy is from Microsoft, seemingly released in 2009, that wraps a nice GUI around setting up a paired set of folders (remember the mobile briefcase from Windows 98?), and allowing you the choice of synchronization methods. 1 way, or 2 way. Simply create a paired set of folders on the source and destination, choose your options for content, exclude any file types you don’t want to replicate, and click run. Scheduling is even easier. MS has included a wrapper for doing just this so all you enter in your task schedule in the SynToyCMD.exe, a –R as an argument, and the time schedule. No more complicated command lines or scripts.   I find this especially useful when I use MS backup to back up a system volume, but only want subsets of backup information of a data share and ONLY when that dataset has changed. Not relying on full backups and incremental. An example of this is my application installation master share. I back this up with SyncToy because I do not need multiple backup copies..one copy elsewhere suffices to back it up. At home, very useful for your pictures, videos, music, ect..the backup is online and ready to access, not waiting for you to restore a backup file, and no need to institute a domain simply to have DFS.'   Do note there is a risk..if you accidently delete a file and do not catch this before the next sync, then depending on your SyncToy settings, you can indeed lose that file as the destination updates..so due diligence applies. I make it a rule to sync manly one way…I use my master share for making changes, and allow the schedule to follow suit. Any real important file I lock down as read only through file permissions so it cannot be deleted unless I intervene.   Check out the tool and have some fun! http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&id=15155

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• At times, you need to hire a professional.

  - by Phil Factor

  After months of increasingly demanding toil, the development team I belonged to was told that the project was to be canned and the whole team would be fired.  I’d been brought into the team as an expert in the data implications of a business re-engineering of a major financial institution. Nowadays, you’d call me a data architect, I suppose.  I’d spent a happy year being paid consultancy fees solving a succession of interesting problems until the point when the company lost is nerve, and closed the entire initiative. The IT industry was in one of its characteristic mood-swings downwards.  After the announcement, we met in the canteen. A few developers had scented the smell of death around the project already hand had been applying unsuccessfully for jobs. There was a sense of doom in the mass of dishevelled and bleary-eyed developers. After giving vent to anger and despair, talk turned to getting new employment. It was then that I perked up. I’m not an obvious choice to give advice on getting, or passing,  IT interviews. I reckon I’ve failed most of the job interviews I’ve ever attended. I once even failed an interview for a job I’d already been doing perfectly well for a year. The jobs I’ve got have mostly been from personal recommendation. Paradoxically though, from years as a manager trying to recruit good staff, I know a lot about what IT managers are looking for.  I gave an impassioned speech outlining the important factors in getting to an interview.  The most important thing, certainly in my time at work is the quality of the résumé or CV. I can’t even guess the huge number of CVs (résumés) I’ve read through, scanning for candidates worth interviewing.  Many IT Developers find it impossible to describe their  career succinctly on two sides of paper.  They leave chunks of their life out (were they in prison?), get immersed in detail, put in irrelevancies, describe what was going on at work rather than what they themselves did, exaggerate their importance, criticize their previous employers, aren’t  aware of the important aspects of a role to a potential employer, suffer from shyness and modesty,  and lack any sort of organized perspective of their work. There are many ways of failing to write a decent CV. Many developers suffer from the delusion that their worth can be recognized purely from the code that they write, and shy away from anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. No.  A resume must make a good impression, which means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. You can’t do it yourself. Why not have your resume professionally written? A good professional CV Writer will know the qualities being looked for in a CV and interrogate you to winkle them out. Their job is to make order and sense out of a confused career, to summarize in one page a mass of detail that presents to any recruiter the information that’s wanted. To stand back and describe an accurate summary of your skills, and work-experiences dispassionately, without rancor, pity or modesty. You are no more capable of producing an objective documentation of your career than you are of taking your own appendix out.  My next recommendation was more controversial. This is to have a professional image overhaul, or makeover, followed by a professionally-taken photo portrait. I discovered this by accident. It is normal for IT professionals to face impossible deadlines and long working hours by looking more and more like something that had recently blocked a sink. Whilst working in IT, and in a state of personal dishevelment, I’d been offered the role in a high-powered amateur production of an old ex- Broadway show, purely for my singing voice. I was supposed to be the presentable star. When the production team saw me, the air was thick with tension and despair. I was dragged kicking and protesting through a succession of desperate grooming, scrubbing, dressing, dieting. I emerged feeling like “That jewelled mass of millinery, That oiled and curled Assyrian bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence.” (Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Section v1 stanza 6) I was then photographed by a professional stage photographer.  When the photographs were delivered, I was amazed. It wasn’t me, but it looked somehow respectable, confident, trustworthy.   A while later, when the show had ended, I took the photos, and used them for work. They went with the CV to job applications. It did the trick better than I could ever imagine.  My views went down big with the developers. Old rivalries were put immediately to one side. We voted, with a show of hands, to devote our energies for the entire notice period to getting employable. We had a team sourcing the CV Writer,  a team organising the make-overs and photographer, and a third team arranging  mock interviews. A fourth team determined the best websites and agencies for recruitment, with the help of friends in the trade.  Because there were around thirty developers, we were in a good negotiating position.  Of the three CV Writers we found who lived locally, one proved exceptional. She was an ex-journalist with an eye to detail, and years of experience in manipulating language. We tried her skills out on a developer who seemed a hopeless case, and he was called to interview within a week.  I was surprised, too, how many companies were experts at image makeovers. Within the month, we all looked like those weird slick  people in the ‘Office-tagged’ stock photographs who stare keenly and interestedly at PowerPoint slides in sleek chromium-plated high-rise offices. The portraits we used still adorn the entries of many of my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn. After a months’ worth of mock interviews, and technical Q&A, our stutters, hesitations, evasions and periphrastic circumlocutions were all gone.  There is little more to relate. With the résumés or CVs, mugshots, and schooling in how to pass interviews, we’d all got new and better-paid jobs well  before our month’s notice was ended. Whilst normally, an IT team under the axe is a sad and depressed place to belong to, this wonderful group of people had proved the power of organized group action in turning the experience to advantage. It left us feeling slightly guilty that we were somehow cheating, but I guess we were merely leveling the playing-field.

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