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• PeopleSoft 9.2 Financial Management Training – Now Available

  - by Di Seghposs

  A guest post from Oracle University.... Whether you’re part of a project team implementing PeopleSoft 9.2 Financials for your company or a partner implementing for your customer, you should attend some of the new training courses.  Everyone knows project team training is critical at the start of a new implementation, including configuration training on the core application modules being implemented. Oracle offers these courses to help customers and partners understand the functionality most relevant to complete end-to-end business processes, to identify any additional development work that may be necessary to customize applications, and to ensure integration between different modules within the overall business process. Training will provide you with the skills and knowledge needed to ensure a smooth, rapid and successful implementation of your PeopleSoft applications in support of your organization’s financial management processes - including step-by-step instruction for implementing, using, and maintaining your applications. It will also help you understand the application and configuration options to make the right implementation decisions. Courses vary based on your role in the implementation and on-going use of the application, and should be a part of every implementation plan, whether it is for an upgrade or a new rollout. Here’s some of the roles that should consider training: · Configuration or functional implementers · Implementation Consultants (Oracle partners) · Super Users · Business Analysts · Financial Reporting Specialists · Administrators PeopleSoft Financial Management Courses: New Features Course: · PeopleSoft Financial Solutions Rel 9.2 New Features Functional Training: · PeopleSoft General Ledger Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Payables Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Receivables Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Asset Management Rel 9.2 · Expenses Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Project Costing Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Billing Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft PS / nVision for General Ledger Rel 9.2 Accelerated Courses (include content from two courses for more experienced team members): · PeopleSoft General Ledger Foundation Accelerated Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Billing / Receivables Accelerated Rel 9.2 · PeopleSoft Purchasing / Payable Accelerated Rel 9.2 View PeopleSoft Training Overview Video

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• SQL SERVER – A Cool Trick – Restoring the Default SQL Server Management Studio – SSMS

  - by pinaldave

  “I do not know where my windows went!” “I just closed my object explorer and now I cannot find it.” “How do I get my original windows layout back in SQL Server Management Studio?” “How do I get the window which was there in left side back again?” Since last 2-3 years, every single day I receive more than 5 emails on SSMS and its layout. For the beginners it is very common to get confused when they attempt to change SQL Server Management Studio’s windows layout. They often change the layout and are not able to get the original layout back. Often people do not change the layout whole of their life, leading to uncomfortable feeling when they go to another’s computer where the windows are differently placed. Today’s blog post is dedicated all the beginners in SQL Server. It is extremely simple to reset the SSMS layout to default layout. The default layout involves 2 major things 1) Object Explorer on left side 2) Query Windows on right side (80% screen estate). Personally I am so used to this as well that if there is any other changes in the same, I do not enjoy working on the environment. Well, the solution to rest the SSMS layout is very simple. One can do it in split seconds.  To restore the default configuration, on the Window menu, click Reset Window Layout. Have you ever used this feature? Do you feel uncomfortable when SSMS layout is not in default state? How do you address this situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Drive project success & financial performance with business critical Enterprise Project Portfolio Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  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";} Oracle Primavera invites you to the first in a series of three webcasts linking Enterprise Project Portfolio Management with enhanced operational performance and better financial results. Few organizations fully understand the impact projects have on their business. Consistently delivering successful projects is vital to the financial success of an asset intensive organization. Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) is not a new concept yet for many organizations it is not considered "business critical". Webcast 1: Plan – Aligning project selection and prioritization with corporate objectives This webcast will look at 2 key questions: Are you aligning portfolio decisions with strategic objectives? How do you effectively measure the success of your portfolio decisions? Hear from Accenture who'll present a compelling case for why asset intensive organizations should consider EPPM as business critical. They'll explore: How technology is being used to enhance project delivery How collaboration enhances delivery performance The major challenges associated with the planning phase of a project Next hear from Geoff Roberts, Industry Strategist from Oracle Primavera. With over 30 years experience in project management/project controls in the construction, utilities and oil & gas sectors, Geoff will investigate how EPPM is a best practice and can support an organization through project selection and prioritization ensuring that decisions are aligned with corporate objectives. Don’t miss out, register today!

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• Oracle Brings Analytics to Project Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss  Nonprofit and for-profit organizations have many differences, but there is one way they are alike—managers struggle with huge amounts of data generated every day. Project data by itself has limited use—but any organization that can gain insight to make accurate predictions or to use resources more effectively can gain an operational advantage. Oracle’s Primavera P6 Analytics 2.0 business intelligence solution enables organizations using Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management to do just that: identify critical issues and uncover trends in stores of project data. Primavera P6 Analytics provides management with the ability to look at not only how a single effort is progressing, but also how the entire organization is doing from a project perspective. The latest release includes new features that make it even easier to gather and analyze critical information. For example, the addition of geocoding gives Primavera P6 Analytics users the ability to track resources geographically on longitude and latitude and use a map to get an overall view of how projects, programs, and activities are deployed. “A nonprofit with relief projects in Vietnam, for example, can drill down to the project and get a world view and a regional view,” says Yasser Mahmud, vice president of product strategy and industry marketing in Oracle’s Primavera Global Business Unit. “Then they can drill down further to show statistics; key performance indicators; and how that program, portfolio, or project work is actually getting done.” The addition of new mobile capabilities to Primavera P6 Analytics puts deep-dive analysis into project managers’ hands with compatibility with major tablet operating systems. Now, nonprofits or for-profits working in remote locations can provide real-time visibility into projects to alert management if issues are occurring that need to be addressed immediately. “Primavera P6 Analytics generates information that can help organizations improve their utilization and trim down overall operating costs,” says Mahmud. “But more importantly, it gives organizations improved visibility.”

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• NBC Sports Chooses Oracle for Social Relationship Management

  - by Pat Ma

  0 0 1 247 1411 involver 11 3 1655 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; } NBC Sports wanted to engage fans, grow their audience, and give their advertising customers more value. They wanted to use social media to accomplish this. NBC Sports recognized that sports in inherently social. When you watch a game at the stadium or at home, you’re chatting with the people around you, commenting on plays, and celebrating together after each score. NBC Sports wanted to deliver this same social experience via social media channels. NBC Sports used Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) to create an online sporting community on Facebook. Fans can watch sporting events live on NBC television while participating in fan commentary about the event on Facebook. The online fan community is extremely engaged – much like fans in a sporting stadium would be during a game. NBC Sports also pose sporting questions, provide sporting news, and tie-in special promotions with their advertisers to their fans via Facebook. Since implementing their social strategy, NBC Sports has seen their fans become more engaged, their television audience grow, and their advertisers happier with new social offerings. To see how Oracle Social Relationship Management can help create better customer experiences for your company, contact Oracle here. Watch NBC Sports Video: Mark Lazarus, Chairman, NBC Sports Group, describes how Oracle Cloud’s SRM tools helped the broadcaster engage with their fans on social media channels. Watch Thomas Kurian Keynote: Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Product Development, Oracle, describes Oracle’s Cloud platform and application strategy, how it is transforming business management, and delivering great customer experiences here.

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• Variant Management– Which Approach fits for my Product?

  - by C. Chadwick

  Jürgen Kunz – Director Product Development – Oracle ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG Introduction In a difficult economic environment, it is important for companies to understand the customer requirements in detail and to address them in their products. Customer specific products, however, usually cause increased costs. Variant management helps to find the best combination of standard components and custom components which balances customer’s product requirements and product costs. Depending on the type of product, different approaches to variant management will be applied. For example the automotive product “car” or electronic/high-tech products like a “computer”, with a pre-defined set of options to be combined in the individual configuration (so called “Assembled to Order” products), require a different approach to products in heavy machinery, which are (at least partially) engineered in a customer specific way (so-called “Engineered-to Order” products). This article discusses different approaches to variant management. Starting with the simple Bill of Material (BOM), this article presents three different approaches to variant management, which are provided by Agile PLM. Single level BOM and Variant BOM The single level BOM is the basic form of the BOM. The product structure is defined using assemblies and single parts. A particular product is thus represented by a fixed product structure. As soon as you have to manage product variants, the single level BOM is no longer sufficient. A variant BOM will be needed to manage product variants. The variant BOM is sometimes referred to as 150% BOM, since a variant BOM contains more parts and assemblies than actually needed to assemble the (final) product – just 150% of the parts You can evolve the variant BOM from the single level BOM by replacing single nodes with a placeholder node. The placeholder in this case represents the possible variants of a part or assembly. Product structure nodes, which are part of any product, are so-called “Must-Have” parts. “Optional” parts can be omitted in the final product. Additional attributes allow limiting the quantity of parts/assemblies which can be assigned at a certain position in the Variant BOM. Figure 1 shows the variant BOM of Agile PLM. Figure 1 Variant BOM in Agile PLM During the instantiation of the Variant BOM, the placeholders get replaced by specific variants of the parts and assemblies. The selection of the desired or appropriate variants is either done step by step by the user or by applying pre-defined configuration rules. As a result of the instantiation, an independent BOM will be created (Figure 2). Figure 2 Instantiated BOM in Agile PLM This kind of Variant BOM  can be used for „Assembled –To-Order“ type products as well as for „Engineered-to-Order“-type products. In case of “Assembled –To-Order” type products, typically the instantiation is done automatically with pre-defined configuration rules. For „Engineered- to-Order“-type products at least part of the product is selected manually to make use of customized parts/assemblies, that have been engineered according to the specific custom requirements. Template BOM The Template BOM is used for „Engineered-to-Order“-type products. It is another type of variant BOM. The engineer works in a flexible environment which allows him to build the most creative solutions. At the same time the engineer shall be guided to re-use existing solutions and it shall be assured that product variants of the same product family share the same base structure. The template BOM defines the basic structure of products belonging to the same product family. Let’s take a gearbox as an example. The customer specific configuration of the gearbox is influenced by several parameters (e.g. rpm range, transmitted torque), which are defined in the customer’s requirement document.  Figure 3 shows part of a Template BOM (yellow) and its relation to the product family hierarchy (blue).  Figure 3 Template BOM Every component of the Template BOM has links to the variants that have been engineeried so far for the component (depending on the level in the Template BOM, they are product variants, Assembly Variant or single part variants). This library of solutions, the so-called solution space, can be used by the engineers to build new product variants. In the best case, the engineer selects an existing solution variant, such as the gearbox shown in figure 3. When the existing variants do not fulfill the specific requirements, a new variant will be engineered. This new variant must be compliant with the given Template BOM. If we look at the gearbox in figure 3  it must consist of a transmission housing, a Connecting Plate, a set of Gears and a Planetary transmission – pre-assumed that all components are must have components. The new variant will enhance the solution space and is automatically available for re-use in future variants. The result of the instantiation of the Template BOM is a stand-alone BOM which represents the customer specific product variant. Modular BOM The concept of the modular BOM was invented in the automotive industry. Passenger cars are so-called „Assembled-to-Order“-products. The customer first selects the specific equipment of the car (so-called specifications) – for instance engine, audio equipment, rims, color. Based on this information the required parts will be determined and the customer specific car will be assembled. Certain combinations of specification are not available for the customer, because they are not feasible from technical perspective (e.g. a convertible with sun roof) or because the combination will not be offered for marketing reasons (e.g. steel rims with a sports line car). The modular BOM (yellow structure in figure 4) is defined in the context of a specific product family (in the sample it is product family „Speedstar“). It is the same modular BOM for the different types of cars of the product family (e.g. sedan, station wagon). The assembly or single parts of the car (blue nodes in figure 4) are assigned at the leaf level of the modular BOM. The assignment of assembly and parts to the modular BOM is enriched with a configuration rule (purple elements in figure 4). The configuration rule defines the conditions to use a specific assembly or single part. The configuration rule is valid in the context of a type of car (green elements in figure 4). Color specific parts are assigned to the color independent parts via additional configuration rules (grey elements in figure 4). The configuration rules use Boolean operators to connect the specifications. Additional consistency rules (constraints) may be used to define invalid combinations of specification (so-called exclusions). Furthermore consistency rules may be used to add specifications to the set of specifications. For instance it is important that a car with diesel engine always is build using the high capacity battery.  Figure 4 Modular BOM The calculation of the car configuration consists of several steps. First the consistency rules (constraints) are applied. Resulting from that specification might be added automatically. The second step will determine the assemblies and single parts for the complete structure of the modular BOM, by evaluating the configuration rules in the context of the current type of car. The evaluation of the rules for one component in the modular BOM might result in several rules being fulfilled. In this case the most specific rule (typically the longest rule) will win. Thanks to this approach, it is possible to add a specific variant to the modular BOM without the need to change any other configuration rules.  As a result the whole set of configuration rules is easy to maintain. Finally the color specific assemblies respective parts will be determined and the configuration is completed. Figure 5 Calculated Car Configuration The result of the car configuration is shown in figure 5. It shows the list of assemblies respective single parts (blue components in figure 5), which are required to build the customer specific car. Summary There are different approaches to variant management. Three different approaches have been presented in this article. At the end of the day, it is the type of the product which decides about the best approach.  For „Assembled to Order“-type products it is very likely that you can define the configuration rules and calculate the product variant automatically. Products of type „Engineered-to-Order“ ,however, need to be engineered. Nevertheless in the majority of cases, part of the product structure can be generated automatically in a similar way to „Assembled to Order“-tape products.  That said it is important first to analyze the product portfolio, in order to define the best approach to variant management.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R3 introduces advancements in cloud lifecycle and operations management

  - by Anand Akela

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 (R3) was announced ( Press Release ) earlier today. It is now available for download at  OTN . This latest release features improvements in several areas, including: Improvements to Private Cloud and Engineered Systems Management Expanded Middleware and Application Management Capabilities Efficiency Gains for Enterprise manager Users in EM’s Enterprise-Ready Framework You can learn more about what's new in the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R3 in the Enterprise Manager 12c documentation . You will see more blogs and details about the new features during the next few weeks. Please let us what On July 18th, you can join us at a webcast to hear Thomas Kurian, EVP of Product Development on what Oracle Engineering has achieved with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 to address these challenges. Later, during this webcast, Oracle experts will discuss the latest capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 for cloud lifecycle and operations management. The presentation will be followed by a live Q&A session with Oracle experts. You can also join us online on Twitter to get your specific questions answered. Please use hash tag #em12c to join the conversation. /* 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";} Register Now for the Webcast! Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• .NET Dependency Management Systems

  - by StriplingWarrior

  I have some .NET projects that are starting to get large enough to merit looking into Dependency Management solutions, so we don't have to copy binaries from one project to another. Here's what I've found so far: NPanday is based on a port of Maven. I can't tell how recently it was worked on, but the last release was in May 2011. NuGet seems to be under active development, and it appears to have support directly from Microsoft. Some people complained that it "only addresses dependency resolution," but I don't know what else it should address, or whether it has added more features since that point. It does appear to have recently added the ability to import binaries as part of the build process so we don't have to commit them to our repositories. Refix appears to still be in Beta, after having received no attention since Sept 2011. Would somebody with recent experience using any of these dependency management tools (or any others that work well) share your experience? Is NuGet mature enough to use it for dependency management? If not, what does it lack?

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• Oracle Transportation Management (Lead) Functional Consultant in Germany

  - by user769227

  My name is Giovanni and I lead the practice of OTM (Oracle Transportation Management) consultants in Western Europe. I currently have a role open for an OTM Lead Consultant to join my international team in Germany. Oracle Transportation Management is the leading TMS application software in the market, as confirmed by Gartner’s classification as LEADER of its TMS Magic Quadrant with the highest rating among vendors. The OTM Consulting practice is a team of OTM functional and technical specialists located across Europe whose broad objective is to assist companies in the implementation of their TMS solution based on OTM. These companies are leading Shippers of various industries and Logistic Service Providers. Key requirements for this role are: relevant experience with Supply Chain or Transportation Management in other consulting organizations or large enterprises, the drive to learn the leading TMS application software in today’s market and the interest to join a truly international team. We offer the opportunity to work for a leader of the IT Industry and assist international clients to realize their business transformation initiatives through innovation. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and are you looking for a work culture where innovation is the goal, hard work is expected, and creativity is rewarded then please visit this link for more information.

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• Most Innovative IDM Projects: Awards at OpenWorld

  - by Tanu Sood

  On Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Oracle recognized the winners of Innovation Awards 2012 at a ceremony presided over by Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President at Oracle. Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards recognize customers for achieving significant business value through innovative uses of Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. This year’s Award honors customers for their cutting-edge solutions driving business innovation and IT modernization using Oracle Fusion Middleware. The program has grown over the past 6 years, receiving a record number of nominations from customers around the globe. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that ranked each nomination across multiple different scoring categories. Congratulations to both Avea and ETS for winning this year’s Innovation Award for Identity Management. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Avea Company: Founded in 2004, AveA is the sole GSM 1800 mobile operator of Turkey and has reached a nationwide customer base of 12.8 million as of the end of 2011 Region: Turkey (EMEA) Products: Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics, Oracle Access Management Suite Business Drivers: ·         To manage the agility and scale required for GSM Operations and enable call center efficiency by enabling agents to change their identity profiles (accounts and entitlements) rapidly based on call load. ·         Enhance user productivity and call center efficiency with self service password resets ·         Enforce compliance and audit reporting ·         Seamless identity management between AveA and parent company Turk Telecom Innovation and Results: ·         One of the first Sun2Oracle identity management migrations designed for high performance provisioning and trusted reconciliation built with connectors developed on the ICF architecture that provides custom user interfaces for  dynamic and rapid management of roles and entitlements along with entitlement level attestation using closed loop remediation between Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Analytics. ·         Dramatic reduction in identity administration and call center password reset tasks leading to 20% reduction in administration costs and 95% reduction in password related calls. ·         Enhanced user productivity by up to 25% to date ·         Enforced enterprise security and reduced risk ·         Cost-effective compliance management ·         Looking to seamlessly integrate with parent and sister companies’ infrastructure securely. Identity Management Innovation Award 2012 Winner – Education Testing Service (ETS)       See last year's winners here --Company: ETS is a private nonprofit organization devoted to educational measurement and research, primarily through testing. Region: U.S.A (North America) Products: Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Identity Manager Business Drivers: ETS develops and administers more than 50 million achievement and admissions tests each year in more than 180 countries, at more than 9,000 locations worldwide.  As the business becomes more globally based, having a robust solution to security and user management issues becomes paramount. The organizations was looking for: ·         Simplified user experience for over 3000 company users and more than 6 million dynamic student and staff population ·         Infrastructure and administration cost reduction ·         Managing security risk by controlling 3rd party access to ETS systems ·         Enforce compliance and manage audit reporting ·         Automate on-boarding and decommissioning of user account to improve security, reduce administration costs and enhance user productivity ·         Improve user experience with simplified sign-on and user self service Innovation and Results: 1.    Manage Risk ·         Centralized system to control user access ·         Provided secure way of accessing service providers' application using federated SSO. ·         Provides reporting capability for auditing, governance and compliance. 2.    Improve efficiency ·         Real-Time provisioning to target systems ·         Centralized provisioning system for user management and access controls. ·         Enabling user self services. 3.    Reduce cost ·         Re-using common shared services for provisioning, SSO, Access by application reducing development cost and time. ·         Reducing infrastructure and maintenance cost by decommissioning legacy/redundant IDM services. ·         Reducing time and effort to implement security functionality in business applications (“onboard” instead of new development). ETS was able to fold in new and evolving requirement in addition to the initial stated goals realizing quick ROI and successfully meeting business objectives. Congratulations to the winners once again. We will be sure to bring you more from these Innovation Award winners over the next few months.

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• What can I do to improve a project if there is a no-listening situation. Developers vs Management

  - by NazGul

  Hi all, I hope that I'm not the only one and I can get a answer from someone with more experience than me, so I can think cleaner and I don't get depressed with this developer's life. I'm working as developer for a small company three years now. In that three years I'm working in the same project and sincerely, I think this project could be used as a CASE STUDY because it has all the situations that cannot happen in a project and that makes a project fails. To begin with, and I believe you've already noticed, the project has 3 years already (develoment only) and is still unfinished, because in every meeting there is a "new priority" ,or a "new problem" to be solve or a "new feature" to be add. So, first problem is no target set. How can you know when something is finished if you don't know what you want? I understand Management, because they see an oportunity and try to get that, but I don't understand how can they not see (or hear us) that they'll lose all they already have and what they'll eventually get. Second, there is no team group. My team consists of three people, a Senior Developer, a DBA and, finally, I for all the work (support, testing, new features, bug fixing, meeting, projet management of clients, etc) aka Junior Developer. The first (senior developer), does not perform any tests on his changes, so, most of the time, his changes give us problems (us = me, since I'm the one who will fix it). The second (DBA) is an uncompromising person and you can not talk to him, believe me, I tried! In his view, everything he does is fantastic... even if it is the most complicated to make it... And he does everything he wants, even if we need that only for 5 months later and would help some extra-hand to do the things we have to do for now. As you can see, there is very hard to work with no help... Third, there is no testings. Every... I repeat, Every release of the project, the customers wants to kill us, because there is a lot of bugs. Management? They say that they want tests before the release. Us? We say the same. Time? No time. Management? There is always some time to open the application and click in some buttons. Us? Try to explain that it is not so simple. Management doesn't care... end of story. Actually, must of the bugs could be avoid with a rigorous work... Some people just want to do the show to the Management. "Did you ask for this? Cool, it's done. Bugs? The Do-all-the-work guy will solve." Unfortunally for me, sometimes the Do-all-the-work also has to finish it. And to makes this all better, I'm the person who will listen the complaints from the customers. Cool, huh? I know, everyone makes mistakes. But there is mistakes and mistakes... To complete, in the Management view, "the problem is the lack of an individual project management", because we cannot do all the stuff they ask, even if there is no PM for the project itself. And ask us to work overtime without any reward... I do say all this stuff to the management and others members, but by telling this, the I'm the bad guy, the guy who is complain when everything is going well... but we need to work overtime... sigh What can I do to make it works? Anyone has a situation like this, what did you do? I hope you could understand my problem, my English is a little rusty. Thanks.

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• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

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• New Release of Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)

  - by Theresa Hickman

  I'm a huge fan of Hyperion products and consider Hyperion to be one of the best acquisitions Oracle has made in terms of applications. So I am really excited to talk about their latest release, Release 11.1.2 of the Oracle EPM System. This is EPM's largest release in 2 years, and it's jam-packed with new modules and features. In terms of brand new products, there are three: 1. Public Sector Planning and Budgeting meets the needs of public sector agencies, higher education, governments, etc. that have complex budget requirements. It supports position or employee-based budgeting and integrates with MS Office and your ERP ledgers to perform commitment control. 2. Hyperion Financial Close Management is a complete financial close solution that orchestrates the entire close process from subledgers and general ledger to financial reporting and disclosure submissions. And of course, it is integrated with GL systems and consolidation systems. I saw a demo of this and it looked pretty slick. They have this unified close calendar that looks like a regular calendar that gives each person participating in the close process a task list. It comes with a Gantt chart that shows the relationships and dependencies among closing tasks. There are dashboards to allow you to track the close progress and completion of tasks as well as perform trend analysis and see how much time is being spent on different activities in the close process. This gives you visibility that you never had before to understand where the bottlenecks are and where improvements could be made. I think what I liked best about this product was that it provides a central place for all participants to communicate their progress. When I worked as an Accountant, we used ad hoc tools, such as spreadsheets, Word documents, emails, and phone calls during the close process. I like the idea of having a central system to track the overall progress as well as automate the entire financial close process. Who knows, maybe Accountants won't have to revolve their lives around the month end close anymore with a tool like this. Those periodic fire drills can become predictable, well managed processes. 3. Disclosure Management is an out-of-the-box, pre-packaged XBRL solution to meet statutory reporting requirements. This product is really going to help companies improve the timeliness of producing financial reports. Reports can be authored using MS Word and Excel and then XBRL instance documents can be produced with its embedded XBRL tags. It even supports footnotes and disclosures of non-financial information. With a product like this, companies no longer have to outsource their XBRL filing; they can bring it back in house to save costs and time. In terms of other enhancements, they have ERP Integrator that provides integration and drill downs from Hyperion products to source systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and SAP. No other vendor offers this level of integration. There's also a new product that links Oracle Essbase directly to Hyperion Financial Management for internal financial reporting, and new integrations between Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle's GRC products. They also improved the usability of Oracle Hyperion Planning. They made it much easier for end users to use the system via the web or via MS Excel when submitting plans and budgets. It is also integrated with intelligent approval workflows that are data-driven, user-configurable, and scenario-specific to efficiently streamline the budgeting process. Here's the press release from April 7, 2010. Here's the pre-recorded web cast where you can see the demos. Just register and watch the hour long presentation. And finally, here's the newsletter

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• Master Data Management for Location Data - Oracle Site Hub

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Most MDM discussions cover key domains such as customer, supplier, product, service, and reference data. It is usually understood that these domains have complex structures and hundreds if not thousands of attributes that need governing. Location, on the other hand, strikes most people as address data. How hard can that be? But for many industries, locations are complex, and site information is critical to efficient operations and relevant analytics. Retail stores and malls, bank branches, construction sites come to mind. But one of the best industries for illustrating the power of a site mastering application is Oil & Gas.   Oracle's Master Data Management solution for location data is the Oracle Site Hub. It is a location mastering solution that enables organizations to centralize site and location specific information from heterogeneous systems, creating a single view of site information that can be leveraged across all functional departments and analytical systems.   Let's take a look at the location entities the Oracle Site Hub can manage for the Oil & Gas industry: organizations, property, land, buildings, roads, oilfield, service center, inventory site, real estate, facilities, refineries, storage tanks, vendor locations, businesses, assets; project site, area, well, basin, pipelines, critical infrastructure, offshore platform, compressor station, gas station, etc. Any site can be classified into multiple hierarchies, like organizational hierarchy, operational hierarchy, geographic hierarchy, divisional hierarchies and so on. Any site can also be associated to multiple clusters, i.e. collections of sites, and these can be used as a foundation for driving reporting, analysis, organize daily work, etc. Hierarchies can also be used to model entities which are structured or non-structured collections of nodes, like for example routes, pipelines and more. The User Defined Attribute Framework provides the needed infrastructure to add single row attributes groups like well base attributes (well IDs, well type, well structure and key characterizing measures, and more) and well geometry, and multi row attribute groups like well applications, permits, production data, activities, operations, logs, treatments, tests, drills, treatments, and KPIs. Site Hub can also model areas, lands, fields, basins, pools, platforms, eco-zones, and stratigraphic layers as specific sites, tracking their base attributes, aliases, descriptions, subcomponents and more. Midstream entities (pipelines, logistic sites, pump stations) and downstream entities (cylinders, tanks, inventories, meters, partner's sites, routes, facilities, gas stations, and competitor sites) can also be easily modeled, together with their specific attributes and relationships. Site Hub can store any type of unstructured data associated to a site. This could be stored directly or on an external content management solution, like Oracle Universal Content Management. Considering a well, for example, Site Hub can store any relevant associated multimedia file such as: CAD drawings of the well profile, structure and/or parts, engineering documents, contracts, applications, permits, logs, pictures, photos, videos and more. For any site entity, Site Hub can associate all the related assets and equipments at the site, as well as all relationships between sites, between a site and multiple parties, and between a site and any purchasable or sellable item, over time. Items can be equipment, instruments, facilities, services, products, production entities, production facilities (pipelines, batteries, compressor stations, gas plants, meters, separators, etc.), support facilities (rigs, roads, transmission or radio towers, airstrips, etc.), supplier products and services, catalogs, and more. Items can just be associated to sites using standard Site Hub features, or they can be fully mastered by implementing Oracle Product Hub. Site locations (addresses or geographical coordinates) are also managed with out-of-the-box address geo-coding capabilities coupled with Google Maps integration to deliver powerful mapping capabilities and spatial data analysis. Locations can be shared between different sites. Centered on the site location, any site can also have associated areas. Site Hub can master any site location specific information, like for example cadastral, ownership, jurisdictional, geological, seismic and more, and any site-centric area specific information, like for example economical, political, risk, weather, logistic, traffic information and more. Now if anyone ever asks you why locations need MDM, think about how all these Oil & Gas entities and attributes would translate into your business locations. To learn more about Oracle's full MDM solution for the digital oil field, here is a link to Roberto Negro's outstanding whitepaper: Oracle Site Master Data Management for mastering wells and other PPDM entities in a digital oilfield context  

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• Centralized Project Management Brings Needed Cost Controls to Growing Brazilian Firm

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Fast growth and a significant increase in business activities were creating project management challenges for CPqD, a developer of innovative information and communication technologies for large Brazilian organizations. To bring greater efficiency and centralized project management capabilities to its operations, CPqD chose Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. “Oracle Primavera is an essential tool for our day-to-day business, and I notice the effort Oracle makes to constantly innovate and to add more functionality in an increasingly shorter period of time,” says Márcio Alexandre da Silva, IT department project coordinator, CPqD. He explains that before CPqD implemented the Oracle solution, the company did not have a corporate view of projects. “Our project monitoring was decentralized and restricted to each coordinator,” the project coordinator says. “With the Oracle solution, we achieved actual shared management, more control, and budgets that stay within projections.” Among the benefits that CPqD now enjoys are The ability to more effectively identify how employees are allocated, enabling managers to increase or reduce resources based on project scope, as well as secure the resources required for unexpected projects and demands A 75 percent reduction in the time it takes to collect project data and indicators—automated and centralized collection means project coordinators no longer have to manually compile information that was spread among various systems Read the complete CPqD company snapshot Read more in the October Edition of the quarterly Information InDepth EPPM Newsletter 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-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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• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) Designs May Improve End User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Applications User Experience on March 10, 2011 Michele Molnar, Senior Usability Engineer, Applications User Experience The Challenge: The SCM User Experience team, in close collaboration with product management and strategy, completely redesigned the user experience for Oracle Fusion applications. One of the goals of this redesign was to increase end user productivity by applying design patterns and guidelines and incorporating findings from extensive usability research. But a question remained: How do we know that the Oracle Fusion designs will actually increase end user productivity? The Test: To answer this question, the SCM Usability Engineers compared Oracle Fusion designs to their corresponding existing Oracle applications using the workflow time analysis method. The workflow time analysis method breaks tasks into a sequence of operators. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time can be calculated. The workflow time analysis method has been recently adopted by the Applications User Experience group for use in predicting end user productivity. Using this method, a design can be tested and refined as needed to improve productivity even before the design is coded. For the study, we selected some of our recent designs for Oracle Fusion Product Information Management (PIM). The designs encompassed tasks performed by Product Managers to create, manage, and define products for their organization. (See Figure 1 for an example.) In applying this method, the SCM Usability Engineers collaborated with Product Management to compare the new Oracle Fusion Applications designs against Oracle’s existing applications. Together, we performed the following activities: Identified the five most frequently performed tasks Created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task Conducted task walkthroughs Analyzed and documented the steps and flow required to complete each task Applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate the overall task completion time Figure 1. The interactions on each Oracle Fusion Product Information Management screen were documented, as indicated by the red highlighting. The task scenario and script provided the context for each task.  The Results: The workflow time analysis method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Applications designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 8% to 62%, with an overall productivity gain of 43%. All other factors being equal, the new designs should enable these tasks to be completed in about half the time it takes with existing Oracle Applications. Further analysis revealed that these performance gains would be achieved by reducing the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. Conclusions: Using the workflow time analysis method, we can expect the Oracle Fusion Applications redesign to succeed in improving end user productivity. The workflow time analysis method appears to be an effective and efficient tool for testing, refining, and retesting designs to optimize productivity. The workflow time analysis method does not replace usability testing with end users, but it can be used as an early predictor of design productivity even before designs are coded. We are planning to conduct usability tests later in the development cycle to compare actual end user data with the workflow time analysis results. Such results can potentially be used to validate the productivity improvement predictions. Used together, the workflow time analysis method and usability testing will enable us to continue creating, evaluating, and delivering Oracle Fusion designs that exceed the expectations of our end users, both in the quality of the user experience and in productivity. (For more information about studying productivity, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.)

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• Reaching to the Holy Grail of Data Management

  - by Irem Radzik

  Pervasive, continuous access to trusted data. That’s the ultimate goal of data management. It enables to leverage data as an asset to create value for customers and the organization. It creates the strong foundation needed to move the business forward. How you get there is also critical. As with all IT initiatives using high performance solutions with low cost of ownership is another key requirement in today’s IT world. Oracle's  data integration product strategy focuses on helping customers achieve this ultimate goal with high performance and low TCO.  At OpenWorld, we will be showing how Oracle Data Integration products help you reach your data management goals, considering new trends in information management, such as big data and cloud computing. We will also provide an update on the latest product releases, such as Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2. If you will be at OpenWorld, please join us on Monday Oct 1st 10:45am at Moscone West – 3005 to hear our VP of Product Development, Brad Adelberg, present "Future Strategy, Direction, and Roadmap of Oracle’s Data Integration Platform". The Data Integration track at OpenWorld covers variety of topics and speakers. In addition to product management of Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Data Integrator, and Enteprise Data Quality presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several customer panels and stand-alone sessions featuring select customers such as St. Jude Medical, Raymond James, Aderas, Turkcell, Paychex, Comcast,  Ticketmaster, Bank of America and more. You can see an overview of Data Integration sessions here. If you are not able to attend OpenWorld, please check out our latest resources for Data Integration and Oracle GoldenGate. In the coming weeks you will see more blogs about our products’ new capabilities and what to expect at OpenWorld. I hope to see you at OpenWorld and stay in touch via our future blogs. 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in.   Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: •          Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.   Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service.  This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc.    Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.   While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:   Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted.  There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise.   According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized."   David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems."    Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey.   Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes.   An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."  Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized.       Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here.  Hope to see you there.

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• Looking for a good free or cheap task tracking system

  - by JWood

  I've finally decided that pen and paper/whiteboards are not up to the job as my workload increases so I'm looking for a good task tracking system. I need something that can track tasks in categories (projects) and allow me to assign priority to each task. I've tried iTeamWork which requires projects to have an end time which is no good for me as at least one of my projects is ongoing. I also tried Teamly which was required tasks to be set to a specific day which is no good as tasks sometimes take more than a day and I would like them organised by priority rather than specific days. Preferably looking for something hosted but I'm happy to install on our servers if it supports PHP/MySQL. Oh, and an iPhone client would be the icing on the cake! Can anyone recommend anything?

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• Project and Business Document Organization

  - by dassouki

  How do you organize, maintain edits, revisions and the relationship between: Proposals Contracts Change Orders Deliverables Projects How do you organize your projects for re-usability? For example, is there a way to add tags to projects, to make them more accessible? What's a good data structure to dump all my files on an internet server for easy access? Presently, my work folder is setup as follows: (1)/work/ (2)/projects (3)/project_a (4)/final (which includes all final documents) (5)/contracts (5)/rfp_rfq (5)/change_orders (5)/communications (logs all emails, faxes, and meeting notes and minutes) (5)/financial (6)/paid (6)/unpaid (5)/reports (4)/old (include all documents that didn't make it into the project_a/final/ (3)/project_b (4) ... same as above ... (2)/references (3)/technical_references (3)/gov_regulations (3)/data_sources (3)/books (3)/topic_based (each area of my expertise has a folder with references in them) (2)/business_contacts (3)/contacts.xls (file contains all my contacts) (2)/banking (3)/banking.xls (contains a list of all paid and unpaid invoices as well as some cool stats) (3)/quicken (to do my taxes and yada yada) (4)/year (2)/education (courses I've taken (3)/webinars (3)/seminars (3)/online_courses (2)/publications (includes the publications I've made (3)/publication_id We're mostly 5 people working together part-time on this thing. Since this is a very structured approach, I find it really difficult to remember what I've done on previous projects and go back and forth easily. What are your suggestions on improving my processes? I'm open to closed and open source software (as long as the price isn't too high). I also want to implement a system where I can save most of the projects online to increase collaboration and efficiency and reduce bandwidth especially on document editing. Imagine emailing a document back and forth 5-10 times a day.

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• What are some SMART Criteria I can use when comparing "green" datacenters?

  - by makerofthings7

  I'm looking to reduce my carbon footprint and want to find a "green" datacenter. There are so many ways to define a "green datacenter' I'm looking for examples of SMART Criteria such as 20% of power from renewable resources Low Power Usage Effectiveness When it comes to running a green datacenter, what are additional key factors I need to look for? What key words or technologies might those energy efficient datacenters be using?

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• What was scientifically shown to support productivity when organizing/accessing file and folders?

  - by Tom Wijsman

  I have gathered terabytes of data but it has became a habit to store files and folders to the same folder, that folder could be kind of seen as a Inbox where most files (non-installations) enter my system. This way I end up with a big collections of files that are hard to organize properly, I mostly end up making folders that match their file type but then I still have several gigabytes of data per folder which doesn't make it efficient such that I can productively use the folder. I'd rather do a few clicks than having to search through the files, whether that's by some software product or by looking through the folder. Often the file names themselves are not proper so it would be easier to recognize them if there were few in a folder, rather than thousands of them. Scaling in the structure of directory trees in a computer cluster summarizes this problem as following: The processes of storing and retrieving information are rapidly gaining importance in science as well as society as a whole [1, 2, 3, 4]. A considerable effort is being undertaken, firstly to characterize and describe how publicly available information, for example in the world wide web, is actually organized, and secondly, to design efficient methods to access this information. [1] R. M. Shiffrin and K. B¨orner, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 5183 (2004). [2] S. Lawrence, C.L. Giles, Nature 400, 107–109 (1999). [3] R.F.I. Cancho and R.V. Sol, Proc. R. Soc. London, Ser. B 268, 2261 (2001). [4] M. Sigman and G. A. Cecchi, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 1742 (2002). It goes further on explaining how the data is usually organized by taking general looks at it, but by looking at the abstract and conclusion it doesn't come with a conclusion or approach which results in a productive organization of a directory hierarchy. So, in essence, this is a problem for which I haven't found a solution yet; and I would love to see a scientific solution to this problem. Upon searching further, I don't seem to find anything useful or free papers that approach this problem so it might be that I'm looking in the wrong place. I've also noted that there are different ways to term this problem, which leads out to different results of papers. Perhaps a paper is out there, but I'm not just using the same terms as that paper uses? They often use more scientific terms. I've once heard a story about an advocate with a laptop which has simply outperformed an advocate with had tons of papers, which shows how proper organization leads to productivity; but that story didn't share details on how the advocate used the laptop or how he had organized his data. But in any case, it was way more useful than how most of us organize our data these days... Advice me how I should organize my data, I'm not looking for suggestions here. I would love to see statistics or scientific measurement approaches that help me confirm that it does help me reach my goal.

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• Letting users make their own dns changes? Any software available to manage this tricky situation?

  - by Jaredk

  I currently waste a lot of time making dns changes for my organization. DDNS of course helps for workstations, but we still have a few thousand unique servers with still more applications needing cname records that DHCP/DDNS alone will not support, so someone needs to make updates, but I'd like to see sysadmins make their own dns updates for their machines. I'm currently working on extending our asset database to support this functionality, but I hold out hope that there are COTS solutions available.

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• Goal setting/tracking packages for software projects

  - by Avi

  I'm a developer working by myself. I'm looking for a computerized tool to manage my goals and activities. I own it Microsoft Project, but I don't like it. I've started many "projects" but could never keep on using it. Too complex and heavyweight for me. I use MS-Outlook tasks. They are not what I need. No planning capability. Tracking is not nice. I'm using the Pomodoro technique and I like it, but I'm looking for something more comprehensive and with better computerized support. Something that would allow me to define goals with dependencies and time estimation, keep daily prioritized lists etc. So, I'm looking for a solution. One I've found is GoalPro, but I uneasy because I could not find a cross-product "top ten" like review. Are you using any goal setting package such as GoalPro? Which? Does it help? Pros and Cons?

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• Looking for a good free or cheap task tracking system

  - by JWood

  I've finally decided that pen and paper/whiteboards are not up to the job as my workload increases so I'm looking for a good task tracking system. I need something that can track tasks in categories (projects) and allow me to assign priority to each task. I've tried iTeamWork which requires projects to have an end time which is no good for me as at least one of my projects is ongoing. I also tried Teamly which was required tasks to be set to a specific day which is no good as tasks sometimes take more than a day and I would like them organised by priority rather than specific days. Preferably looking for something hosted but I'm happy to install on our servers if it supports PHP/MySQL. Oh, and an iPhone client would be the icing on the cake! Can anyone recommend anything?

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