women in technology - Page 248

Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining weight: Examples of certified add-on's

- by Richard Lefebvre

The Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining traction. Please find below few examples of the partners having certified their add-on's to seamlessly work on top of Oracle Fusion CRM. For more information, please contact [email protected] · Opportunity-to-Quote. Big Machines now integrates seamlessly to Oracle Fusion CRM, enabling customers with complex products and services and multiple sales channels to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote process, including product selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, and approval workflows. Create a custom hyperlink in the Opportunity to invoke Big Machines CPQ application to create a quote and sync up with the Fusion CRM custom quote object using the CRUD operations. The quote can be updated using the custom button in the custom tab in the opportunity details. See: http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php · SaaS Billing and Subscription Management. Is your prospect/customer asking whether top billing partners support Fusion CRM? Positioning an integrated CRM solution for billing usage and subscription based services? Need to implement a billable solution on the Oracle Java Cloud Service? Aria Systems and Zuora have recently engaged with Oracle to deepen their integrations to Fusion CRM and team with Oracle for joint opportunities. · Google Apps, SharePoint, Email-CRM Integrations o Do your prospects use Google Apps in their business operations? A “Best of AppExchange” award winner recently completed their integration for Fusion CRM. CirrusInsight plugs Fusion CRM web services directly into Gmail, allowing you to search existing opportunity or contact, provide account information, and create an interaction such as phone call, appointment, or email against a customer or contact in Fusion CRM directly from Gmail. o An EMEA / France based partner, Aryvart provides bi-directional synchronization of appointments and tasks between Google calendar and Oracle Fusion CRM. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to use Google calendar for appointments. o Looking to lower the barrier and expand in SharePoint accounts? InFact Group (EMEA / France & Germany) provides Microsoft SharePoint Connector for Oracle Fusion CRM. With this solution, you can store documents attached to an opportunity, into Microsoft SharePoint repository. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to collaborate across existing content management infrastructure. o Need to connect to MacMail, GroupWise, or Outlook/Exchange? Omni Technology is a partner whose Riva CRM Integration recently engaged for support Fusion CRM as a key platform. Migration Tools from competitive CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM. Data Migration Tools from legacy CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM. A partner with the tools and techniques to speed adoption, Conemis provides data integration tools to export data from legacy CRM, and import into Oracle Fusion CRM via WebServices APIs. For customers, it means reducing cost of data migration from legacy CRM system into Oracle Fusion CRM.

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Oracle’s New Memory-Optimized x86 Servers: Getting the Most Out of Oracle Database In-Memory

- by Josh Rosen, x86 Product Manager-Oracle

With the launch of Oracle Database In-Memory, it is now possible to perform real-time analytics operations on your business data as it exists at that moment – in the DRAM of the server – and immediately return completely current and consistent data. The Oracle Database In-Memory option dramatically accelerates the performance of analytics queries by storing data in a highly optimized columnar in-memory format. This is a truly exciting advance in database technology.As Larry Ellison mentioned in his recent webcast about Oracle Database In-Memory, queries run 100 times faster simply by throwing a switch. But in order to get the most from the Oracle Database In-Memory option, the underlying server must also be memory-optimized. This week Oracle announced new 4-socket and 8-socket x86 servers, the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8, both of which have been designed specifically for Oracle Database In-Memory. These new servers use the fastest Intel® Xeon® E7 v2 processors and each subsystem has been designed to be the best for Oracle Database, from the memory, I/O and flash technologies right down to the system firmware.Amongst these subsystems, one of the most important aspects we have optimized with the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8 are their memory subsystems. The new In-Memory option makes it possible to select which parts of the database should be memory optimized. You can choose to put a single column or table in memory or, if you can, put the whole database in memory. The more, the better. With 3 TB and 6 TB total memory capacity on the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8, respectively, you can memory-optimize more, if not your entire database. Sun Server X4-8 CMOD with 24 DIMM slots per socket (up to 192 DIMM slots per server) But memory capacity is not the only important factor in selecting the best server platform for Oracle Database In-Memory. As you put more of your database in memory, a critical performance metric known as memory bandwidth comes into play. The total memory bandwidth for the server will dictate the rate in which data can be stored and retrieved from memory. In order to achieve real-time analysis of your data using Oracle Database In-Memory, even under heavy load, the server must be able to handle extreme memory workloads. With that in mind, the Sun Server X4-8 was designed with the maximum possible memory bandwidth, providing over a terabyte per second of total memory bandwidth. Likewise, the Sun Server X4-4 also provides extreme memory bandwidth in an even more compact form factor with over half a terabyte per second, providing customers with scalability and choice depending on the size of the database.Beyond the memory subsystem, Oracle’s Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8 systems provide other key technologies that enable Oracle Database to run at its best. The Sun Server X4-4 allows for up 4.8 TB of internal, write-optimized PCIe flash while the Sun Server X4-8 allows for up to 6.4 TB of PCIe flash. This enables dramatic acceleration of data inserts and updates to Oracle Database. And with the new elastic computing capability of Oracle’s new x86 servers, server performance can be adapted to your specific Oracle Database workload to ensure that every last bit of processing power is utilized.Because Oracle designs and tests its x86 servers specifically for Oracle workloads, we provide the highest possible performance and reliability when running Oracle Database. To learn more about Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8, you can find more details including data sheets and white papers here. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager for Oracle’s x86 servers, focusing on Oracle’s operating systems and software. He previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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Systems Solutions at COLLABORATE12

- by ferhat

Want to connect with fellow Oracle users and learn more about how to maximize your Oracle software environments with Oracle Systems? Pack your bags for Las Vegas! COLLABORATE 12 is right around the corner! COLLABORATE 12 Conference will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV 22-26 April, 2012. This is an event designed and delivered by users just like you with sessions, interactive panel discussions and hands-on learning opportunities packed with first-hand experiences, case studies and practical “how-to” content.. This year’s event includes a number of educational sessions and demos for users interested in learning from the experts how to use Oracle Optimized Solutions to get the most out of their Oracle Technology and Application software. Oracle Optimized Solutions are proven blueprints that eliminate integration guesswork by combing best in class hardware and software components to deliver complete system architectures that are fully tested, and include documented best practices that reduce integration risks and deliver better application performance. And because they are highly flexible by design, Oracle Optimized Solutions can be implemented as an end-to-end solution or easily adapted into existing environments. Follow Oracle Infrared at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn to catch the latest news, developments, announcements, and inside views from Oracle Optimized Solutions. Please come by our Exhibition Booth #1273 to see the demos and meet 1-1 with the experts behind a number of Oracle Optimized Solutions including those for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft HCM, Oracle WebCenter, and Oracle Database. Exhibitor Showcase Booth #1273 DAY TIME TITLE Monday April 23 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm Welcome Reception in the Exhibitor Showcase Tuesday April 24 10:15 am - 4:00 pm Exhibitor Showcase Open 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Dedicated Exhibitor Showcase Time 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm Exhibitor Showcase Happy Hour Wednesday April 25 10:30 am - 3:00 pm Exhibitor Showcase Open 2:15 pm -3:00 pm Afternoon Break in Exhibitor Showcase There are also a number of deep dive, educational sessions covering deployment best practices using Oracle’s engineered systems and best-in-class hardware, operating system and virtualization technologies. Education Sessions DAY TIME TITLE LOCATION Monday April 23 9:45 am - 10:45 am Architecting and Implementing Backup and Recovery Solutions Surf E Tuesday April 24 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Oracle's High Performance Systems for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mandalay Bay GH 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm Virtualization Boot Camp: What's New with Oracle VM Server for x86 Mandalay Bay C 9:30 am - 10:30 am Oracle on Oracle VM - Expert Panel Mandalay Bay L Wednesday April 25 9:30 am - 10:30 am Cloud Computing Directions: Part II Understanding Oracle's Cloud Directions South Seas E And don’t forget the keynotes and software roadmap sessions! Keynotes and Roadmap Sessions DAY TIME TITLE LOCATION Sunday April 22 3:20 pm – 4:20 pm Oracle’s Cloud Computing Strategy Breakers B Monday April 23 11:00 am – 12:00 pm JD Edwards - Vision, Promises and Execution: IT'S THE WAY WE ROLL and Why it Matters! Mandalay Bay A 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PeopleSoft Executive Update and Roadmap Mandalay Bay J 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm Oracle Database - Engineered for Innovation Mandalay Bay L 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager Update Mandalay Bay D Tuesday April 24 9:15 am - 10:15 am IT at Oracle: The Art of IT Transformation to Enable Business Growth Mandalay Bay Ballroom H

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SQL SERVER – 3 Challenges for DBA and Smart Solutions

- by Pinal Dave

Developer’s life is never easy. DBA’s life is even crazier. DBA’s Life When a developer wakes up in the morning, most of the time have no idea what different challenges they are going to face that day. Of course, most of the developers know the project and roadmap, which they are working on. However, developers have no clue what coding challenges which they are going face for that day. DBA’s life is even crazier. When DBA wakes up in the morning – they often thank that they were not disturbed during the night due to server issues. The very next thing they wish is that they do not want to challenge which they can’t solve for that day. The problems DBA face every single day are mostly unpredictable and they just have to solve them as they come during the day. Though the life of DBA is not always bad. There are always ways and methods how one can overcome various challenges. Let us see three of the challenges and how a DBA can use various tools to overcome them. Challenge #1 Synchronize Data Across Server A Very common challenge DBA receive is that they have to synchronize the data across the servers. If you try to manually write that up, it may take forever to accomplish the task. It is nearly impossible to do the same with the help of the T-SQL. However, thankfully there are tools like dbForge Studio which can save a day and synchronize data across servers. Read my detailed blog post about the same over here: SQL SERVER – Synchronize Data Exclusively with T-SQL. Challenge #2 SQL Report Builder DBA’s are often asked to build reports on the go. It really annoys DBA’s, but hardly people care about it. No matter how busy a DBA is, they are just called upon to build reports on things on very short notice. I personally like to avoid any task which is given to me accidently and personally building report can be boring. I rather spend time with High Availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning rather than building report. I use SQL third party tool when I have to work with SQL Report. Others have extended reporting capabilities. The latter group of products includes the SQL report builder built-in todbForge Studio for SQL Server. I have blogged about this earlier over here: SQL SERVER – SQL Report Builder in dbForge Studio for SQL Server. Challenge #3 Work with the OTHER Database The manager does not understand that MySQL is different from SQL Server and SQL Server is different from Oracle. For them everything is same. In my career hundreds of times I have faced a situation that I am given a database to manage or do some task when their regular DBA is on vacation or leave. When I try to explain I do not understand the underlying the technology, I have been usually told that my manager has trust on me and I can do anything. Honestly, I can’t but I hardly dare to argue. I fall back on the third party tool to manage database when it is not in my comfort zone. For example, I was once given MySQL performance tuning task (at that time I did not know MySQL so well). To simplify search for a problem query let us use MySQL Profiler in dbForge Studio for MySQL. It provides such commands as a Query Profiling Mode and Generate Execution Plan. Here is the blog post discussing about the same: MySQL – Profiler : A Simple and Convenient Tool for Profiling SQL Queries. Well, that’s it! There were many different such occasions when I have been saved by the tool. May be some other day I will write part 2 of this blog post. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL Tagged: Devart, SQL Tool

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Today's Links (6/29/2011)

- by Bob Rhubart

Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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Using NServiceBus behind a custom web service

- by Michael Stephenson

In this post I'd like to talk about an architecture scenario we had recently and how we were able to utilise NServiceBus to help us address this problem. Scenario Cognos is a reporting system used by one of my clients. A while back we developed a web service façade to allow line of business applications to be able to access reports from Cognos to support their various functions. The service was intended to provide access to reports which were quick running reports or pre-generated reports which could be accessed real-time on demand. One of the key aims of the web service was to provide a simple generic interface to allow applications to get any report without needing to worry about the complex .net SDK for Cognos. The web service also supported multi-hop kerberos delegation so that report data could be accesses under the context of the end user. This service was working well for a period of time. The Problem The problem we encountered was that reports were now also required to be available to batch processes. The original design was optimised for low latency so users would enjoy a positive experience, however when the batch processes started to request 250+ concurrent reports over an extended period of time you can begin to imagine the sorts of problems that come into play. The key problems this new scenario caused are: Users may be affected and the latency of on demand reports was significantly slower The Cognos infrastructure was not scaled sufficiently to be able to cope with these long peaks of load From a cost perspective it just isn't feasible to scale the Cognos infrastructure to be able to handle the load when it is only for a couple of hour window each night. We really needed to introduce a second pattern for accessing this service which would support high through-put scenarios. We also had little control over the batch process in terms of being able to throttle its load. We could however make some changes to the way it accessed the reports. The Approach My idea was to introduce a throttling mechanism between the Web Service Façade and Cognos. This would allow the batch processes to push reports requests hard at the web service which we were confident the web service can handle. The web service would then queue these requests and process them behind the scenes and make a call back to the batch application to provide the report once it had been accessed. In terms of technology we had some limitations because we were not able to use WCF or IIS7 where the MSMQ-Activated WCF services could have helped, but we did have MSMQ as an option and I thought NServiceBus could do just the job to help us here. The flow of how this would work was as follows: The batch applications would send a request for a report to the web service The web service uses NServiceBus to send the message to a Queue The NServiceBus Generic Host is running as a windows service with a message handler which subscribes to these messages The message handler gets the message, accesses the report from Cognos The message handler calls back to the original batch application, this is decoupled because the calling application provides a call back url The report gets into the batch application and is processed as normal This approach looks something like the below diagram: The key points are an application wanting to take advantage of the batch driven reports needs to do the following: Implement our call back contract Make a call to the service providing a call back url Provide a correlation ID so it knows how to tie each response back to its request What does NServiceBus offer in this solution So this scenario is not the typical messaging service bus type of solution people implement with NServiceBus, but it did offer the following: Simplified interaction with MSMQ Offered the ability to configure the number of processes working through the queue so we could find a balance between load on Cognos versus the applications end to end processing time NServiceBus offers retries and a way to manage failed messages NServiceBus offers a high availability setup The simple thing is that NServiceBus gave us the platform to build the solution on. We just implemented a message handler which functionally processed a message and we could rely on NServiceBus to do all of the hard work around managing the queues and all of the lower level things that would have took ages to write to any kind of robust level. Conclusion With this approach we were able to deal with a fairly significant performance issue with out too much rework. Hopefully this write up gives people some insight into ideas on how to leverage the excellent NServiceBus framework to help solve integration and high through-put scenarios.

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Google TV Gets Bad Reception. Can Media Center Pull in the Signal?

- by andrewbrust

The news hit Monday morning that Google has decided to delay the release of its Google TV platform, and has asked its OEMs to delay any products that embed the software. Coming just about two weeks prior to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google’s timing is about the worst imaginable. CES is where the platform should have had its coming out party, especially given all the anticipation that has built up since its initial announcement came 7 months ago. At last year’s CES, it seemed every consumer electronics company had fashioned its own software stack for Internet-based video programming and applications/widgets on its TVs, optical disc players and set top boxes. In one case, I even saw two platforms on a single TV set (one provided by Yahoo and the other one native to the TV set). The whole point of Google TV was to solve this problem and offer a standard, embeddable platform. But that won’t be happening, at least not for a while. Google seems unable to get it together, and more proprietary approaches, like Apple TV, don’t seem to be setting the world of TV-Internet convergence on fire, either. It seems to me, that when it comes to building a “TV operating system,” Windows Media Center is still the best of a bad bunch. But it won’t stay so for much longer without some changes. Will Redmond pick up the ball that Google has fumbled? I’m skeptical, but hopeful. Regardless, here are some steps that could help Microsoft make the most of Google’s faux pas: Introduce a new Media Center version that uses XBox 360, rather than Windows 7 (or 8), as the platform. TV platforms should be appliance-like, not PC-like. Combine that notion with the runaway sales numbers for Xbox 360 Kinect, and the mass appeal it has delivered for Xbox, and the switch form Windows makes even more sense. As I have pointed out before, Microsoft’s Xbox implementation of its Mediaroom platform (announced and demoed at last year’s CES) gets Redmond 80% of the way toward this goal. Nothing stops Microsoft from going the other 20%, other than its own apathy, which I hope has dissipated. Reverse the decision to remove Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (WHS), and create deep integration between WHS and Media Center. I have suggested this previously as well, but the recent announcement that Drive Extender would be dropped from WHS 2.0 creates the need for me to a) join the chorus of people urging Microsoft to reconsider and b) reiterate the importance of Media Center-WHS integration in the context of a Google compete scenario. Enable Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a Media Center client. This would tighten the integration loop already established between WP7, Xbox and Zune. But it would also counter Echostar/DISH Network/Sling Media, strike a blow against Google/Android (and even Apple/iOS) and could be the final strike against TiVO. Bring the WP7 user interface to Media Center and Kinect-enable it. This would further the integration discussed above and would be appropriate recognition of WP7’s Metro UI having been built on the heritage of the original Media Center itself. And being able to run your DVR even if you can’t find the remote (or can’t see its buttons in the dark) could be a nifty gimmick. Microsoft can do this but its consumer-oriented organization, responsible for Xbox, Zune and WP7, has to take the reins here, or none of this will likely work. There’s a significant chance that won’t happen, but I won’t let that stop me from hoping that it does and insisting that it must. Honestly, this fight is Microsoft’s to lose.

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The Next Wave of PeopleSoft Capabilities for the Staffing Industry Is Here

- by Mark Rosenberg

With the release of PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 in January this year, we introduced substantial new capabilities for our Staffing Industry customers. Through a co-development project with Infosys Limited, we have enriched Oracle's PeopleSoft Staffing Solution with new tools aimed at accelerating and improving the quality of job order fulfillment, increasing branch recruiter productivity, and driving profitable growth. Staffing industry firms succeed based on their ability to rapidly, cost-effectively, and continually fill their pipelines with new clients and job orders, recruit the best talent, and match orders with talent. Pressure to execute in each of these functional areas is even more acute on staffing firms as contingent labor becomes a more substantial and permanent part of the workforce mix. In an industry that creates value through speedy execution, there is little room for manual, inefficient processes and brittle, custom integrations, which throttle profitability and growth. The latest wave of investment in the PeopleSoft Staffing Solution focuses on generating efficiency and flexibility for our customers. Simplicity To operate profitably and continue growing, a Staffing enterprise needs its client management, recruiting, order fulfillment, and other processes to function in harmony. Most importantly, they need to be simple for recruiters, branch managers, and applicants to access and understand. The latest PeopleSoft Staffing Solution set of enhancements includes numerous automated defaulting mechanisms and information-rich dashboard pagelets that even a new employee can learn quickly. Pending Applicant, Agenda management, Search, and other pagelets are just a few of the newest, easy-to-use tools that not only aggregate and summarize information, but also provide instant access to applicants, tasks, and key reports for branch staff. Productivity The leading firms in the Staffing industry are those that can more efficiently orchestrate large numbers of candidates, clients, and orders than their competitors can. PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 delivers productivity boosters that Staffing firms can leverage to streamline tasks and processes for competitive advantage. For example, we enhanced the Recruiting Funnel, which manages the candidate on-boarding process, with a highly interactive user interface. It integrates disparate Staffing business processes and exploits new PeopleTools technologies to offer a superior on-boarding user experience. Automated creation of agenda items and assignment tasks for each candidate minimizes setup and organizes assignment steps for the on-boarding process. Mass updates of tasks and instant access to the candidate overview page (which we also expanded), candidate event status, event counts, and other key data enable recruiters to better serve clients and candidates. Lower TCO Constructing and maintaining an efficient yet flexible labor supply chain can be complicated, let alone expensive. Traditionally, Staffing firms have been challenged in controlling their technology cost of ownership because connecting candidate and client-facing tools involved building and integrating custom applications and technologies and managing staff turnover, placing heavy demands on IT and support staff. With PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2, there are two major enhancements that aggressively tackle these challenges. First, we added another integration framework to enable cost-effective linking of the Staffing firm’s PeopleSoft applications and its job board distributors. (The first PeopleSoft 9.1 Feature Pack released in March 2011 delivered an integration framework to connect to resume parsing providers.) Second, we introduced the teaming concept to enable work to be partitioned to groups, as well as individuals. These two capabilities, combined with a host of others, position Staffing firms to configure and grow their businesses without growing their IT and overhead expenditures. For our Staffing Industry customers, PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack 2 is loaded with high-value tools aimed at enabling and sustaining a flexible labor supply chain. For more information, contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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Last GUID used up - new ScottGuID unique ID to replace it

- by Eilon

You might have heard in recent news that the last ever GUID was used up. The GUID {FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF} was just consumed by a soon to be released project at Microsoft. Immediately after the GUID's creation the word spread around the Microsoft campuses around the globe. Microsoft's approximately 100,000 worldwide employees then started blogging, tweeting, and facebooking about the dubious "achievement." The following screenshot shows GUIDGEN (the Windows tool for creating GUIDs) with the last ever GUID. All GUIDs created by projects at Microsoft must be registered in a central repository for record keeping. This allows quick-fix engineers, security engineers, anti-malware developers, and testers to do a quick look up of an unknown GUID and find out if it belongs to Microsoft. The following screenshot shows the Microsoft GUID Tracker internal application and the last few GUIDs being used up by various Microsoft projects. What is perhaps more interesting than the news about the GUID is the project that used that last GUID. The recent announcements regarding the development experience for the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) all involve free editions of Visual Studio 2010. One of the lesser known developer tools is based on a resurrected project that many of you are probably familiar with, but have never used. The tool is in fact Microsoft Bob 7 Series (MB7S). MB7S is an agent-based approach for mobile phone app development. The UI incorporates both natural language interfaces and motion gesture behaviors, similar to the Windows Phone 7 Series “Metro” interface. If it works, it will help to expand the breadth of mobile app developers. After the GUID: The ScottGuID It came as no big surprise that eventually the last GUID would be used up. Knowing this, a group of engineers at Microsoft has designed, implemented, and tested a replacement to the GUID: The ScottGuID. There are several core principles of the ScottGuID: 1. The concepts used in ScottGuIDs must be easily understood by a developer who is already familiar with GUIDs 2. There must exist a compatibility layer between ScottGuIDs and GUIDs 3. A ScottGuID must be usable in a practical manner in non-computing environments 4. There must exist ScottGuID APIs for all common platforms: Win32/Win64/WinCE, .NET (incl. Silverlight), Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS (incl. iPhone OS), Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, etc. 5. ScottGuIDs must never run out ScottGuID use cases One of the more subtle principles of the ScottGuID is principle #3. While technically a GUID could be used in any environment, it was not practical to do so in terms of data entry and error detection. In order to have the ScottGuID be a true universal ID it must be usable in non-computing environments. Prior to the announcement of the ScottGuID there have been a number of until-now confidential projects. One of the tools that will soon become public is ScottGuIDGen, which is in essence an updated version of GUIDGEN that can create ScottGuIDs. The following screenshot shows a sample ScottGuID. To demonstrate the various applications of the ScottGuID there were test deployments around the globe. The following examples are a small showcase of the applications that have already been prototyped. Log in to Hotmail: Pay for gas: Sign in to Twitter: Dispense cat food: Conclusion I hope that this brief introduction to the ScottGuID shows how technology can continue to move forward, even when it appears there is a point that cannot be passed. With a small number of principles, a team of smart engineers, and a passion for "getting it right" the ScottGuID should last well past our lifetimes. In the coming months expect further announcements regarding additional developer tools, samples, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos. Please leave a comment on this post if you have any questions about the ScottGuID or what you would like to see us do with it. With ScottGuID, the possibilities are nearly endless and we want to stretch their reach as far as possible.

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Major Analyst Report Chooses Oracle As An ECM Leader

- by brian.dirking(at)oracle.com

Oracle announced that Gartner, Inc. has named Oracle as a Leader in its latest "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management" in a press release issued this morning. Gartner's Magic Quadrant reports position vendors within a particular quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, "Leaders have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clearly articulated vision. In the context of ECM, they have strong channel partners, presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technology or vertical market. Leaders deliver a suite that addresses market demand for direct delivery of the majority of core components, though these are not necessarily owned by them, tightly integrated, unique or best-of-breed in each area. We place more emphasis this year on demonstrated enterprise deployments; integration with other business applications and content repositories; incorporation of Web 2.0 and XML capabilities; and vertical-process and horizontal-solution focus. Leaders should drive market transformation." "To extend content governance and best practices across the enterprise, organizations need an enterprise content management solution that delivers a broad set of functionality and is tightly integrated with business processes," said Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle. "We believe that Oracle's position as a Leader in this report is recognition of the industry-leading performance, integration and scalability delivered in Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g." With Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g, Oracle offers a comprehensive, integrated and high-performance content management solution that helps organizations increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve content security. In the report, Oracle is grouped among the top three vendors for execution, and is the furthest to the right, placing Oracle as the most visionary vendor. This vision stems from Oracle's integration of content management right into key business processes, delivering content in context as people need it. Using a PeopleSoft Accounts Payable user as an example, as an employee processes an invoice, Oracle ECM Suite brings that invoice up on the screen so the processor can verify the content right in the process, improving speed and accuracy. Oracle integrates content into business processes such as Human Resources, Travel and Expense, and others, in the major enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and E-Business Suite. As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents strategy, you can see an example of these integrations in this webinar: Managing Customer Documents and Marketing Assets in Siebel. You can also get a white paper of the ROI Embry Riddle achieved using Oracle Content Management integrated with enterprise applications. Embry Riddle moved from a point solution for content management on accounts payable to an infrastructure investment - they are now using Oracle Content Management for accounts payable with Oracle E-Business Suite, and for student on-boarding with PeopleSoft e-Campus. They continue to expand their use of Oracle Content Management to address further use cases from a core infrastructure. Oracle also shows its vision in the ability to deliver content optimized for online channels. Marketers can use Oracle ECM Suite to deliver digital assets and offers as part of an integrated campaign that understands website visitors and ensures that they are given the most pertinent information and offers. Oracle also provides full lifecycle management through its built-in records management. Companies are able to manage the lifecycle of content (both records and non-records) through built-in retention management. And with the integration of Oracle ECM Suite and Sun Storage Archive Manager, content can be routed to the appropriate storage media based upon content type, usage data or other business rules. This ensures that the most accessed content is instantly available, and archived content is stored on a more appropriate medium like tape. You can learn more in this webinar - Oracle Content Management and Sun Tiered Storage. If you are interested in reading more about why Oracle was chosen as a Leader, view the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management.

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You Are Hiring But Do Candidate’s Want to Work For You

- by david.talamelli

So here you are – it has happened, you are now interviewing for that position that you have either applied for or maybe were called about. Whether you are an “active” candidate looking for a job or a “passive” candidate who was contacted about the opportunity, it doesn’t matter now. Regardless of the circumstances of how you got to the interview stage, how you and your new potential manager connect with each other at interview will play a part in whether you are successful in landing that job. The best manager/employee relationships I think tend to be the ones where both the manager and employee have a common goal that they are both working towards and they work together in unison to achieve these goals. Candidates – when you are interviewing for a role, remember that an interview is a two way process. An interview shouldn’t be just a case of a company interviewing you to see if you are a good fit for a certain role. Don’t forget in an interview process it is equally important that you take the opportunity to similarly interview the company to see if that role/company are the right place for you to move to as the next step in your career. I think an interview should not only be a chance for a Hiring Manager to get to better know a candidate and asses his capability and cultural fit for a team/company but it should also be a chance for the candidate to similarly assess a company or manager about whether they are someone that they want to work with. Managers – I know Recruiters have been talking about the “war for talent” since before many of you were managers, but there is no denying it – it exists. You are not only competing with other companies for talented individuals but you are also competing with the existing companies that those talented individuals are working at. Companies are not going to let the people they have identified as superstars resign without a fight (this is the classic Counter Offer scenario which may be another blog post in itself). So how do we get these great people – their current employer will do all they can to keep them, everyone else wants them – does this mean all hope is lost? No, absolutely not. The same reasons that have always existed on why candidates are interested in other opportunities is still there: it could be that someone is looking for career advancement, or they want the chance to work with new technology or maybe you have an opportunity that is exactly what that person is looking to do. As a Hiring Manager don’t just conduct your interviews in question/answer mode. You should talk to that individual to work out what it is they are looking for and you can then relate how your role addresses that. It is potentially going to be the two of you working together so you two are the ones who have to be most comfortable with each other. Don’t oversell the role – set realistic expectations of what that candidate can expect working in your team – give them the good, the bad and the ugly so they can make an informed decision. Manager’s think back to when you last were looking for a job and put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. When you were looking for a job, what was it that you wanted to know about Oracle, or what was it that you wanted more information about. There are some great Business Leaders that work here at Oracle – if you are one of them it is likely that you already are doing all these things anyway. The good news for you is that you are also likely raising yourself head and shoulders above what many interviewers do – that in itself gives you a competitive advantage in this ‘war for talent’ but as a great Business Leader you already know that

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Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

- by Janice J. Heiss

Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation). I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems. We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him.

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Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

- by Janice J. Heiss

Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation). I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems. We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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iPad Impressions

- by Aaron Lazenby

So, I spent some quality time with my new iPad on Saturday. Here are things I like/don't like: -- Don't like that it has to sync with iTunes before you use it: I was traveling and left my laptop at home thinking I'd use this iPad thing instead. But the first thing it asked me to do is connect it to a laptop. Ugh. Had to borrow my mother-in-law's MacBook Pro just to get the iPad rolling. -- Like that magazines and newspapers are forever changed: And I think for the better...it's why I bought this thing in the first place. I spent significant time with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Popular Science on the iPad. Sliding stories around, jumping from section to section, enlarging images = all excellent experiences. Actually prefer iPad magazine to print, which will require a major shift in editorial strategy, summed up by Popular Science's Mark Jannot in his editor's note "What defines a magazine? Curated expertise--not paper." -- Don't like the screwy human factors: I actually enjoy the virtual keyboard (although I think I'm in the minority), but you have to hunch over to look down at what you're typing. Bad technology ergonomics have already jacked my body in various ways. The iPad just introduced a new one.-- Like the multitouch: In fact, it's awesome. Hands down. Probably will have the most lasting impact on the personal computing industry as a whole. -- Don't like that it's heavy: If you plan to read in bed, you'd better double up on the creatine and curls. Holding this thing up on your own gets pretty uncomfortable. -- Like the Netfilx app: I wanted to watch "The Big Lebowski," so I did. That is all. -- Don't like that people feel 3G is necessary: For $30 a month? Please. I'm already accustomed to limiting my laptop internet use to readily available free wi-fi. Why do I expect anything different with the iPad? Most anyplace I have time to sit and read/use a computer (cafe, airport, you house, library, etc.) has free wi-fi. I can live without web surfing in your car. That's what the iPhone is for. -- Don't like that not everyone was ready in day one: I'm looking at you Facebook. No iPad app for launch? Lame. iPhone apps scaled-up to work on the iPad look grainy and cheap. Not a quality befitting this beautiful $700 piece of glass.Verdict: I'm bringing it to COLLABORATE 08 and seeing if I can go the whole week using only the iPad. If I can trade this thing for my laptop, I know it's a winner. For now, I'm enjoying Popular Science.

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Is Microsoft’s Cloud Bet Placed on the Ground?

- by andrewbrust

Today at the Unversity of Washington, Steve Ballmer gave a speech on Microsoft’s cloud strategy. Significantly, Azure was only briefly mentioned and was not shown. Instead, Ballmer spoke about what he called the five “dimensions” of the cloud, and used that as the basis for an almost philosophical discussion. Ballmer opined on how the cloud should be distinguished from the Internet.as well as what the cloud will and should enable. Ballmer worked hard to portray the cloud not as a challenger to Windows and PCs (as Google would certainly suggest it is) but really as just the latest peripheral that adds value to PCs and devices. At one point during his speech, Ballmer said “We start with Windows at Microsoft. It’s the most popular smart device on the planet. And our design center for the future of Windows is to make it one of those smarter devices that the cloud really wants.” I’m not sure I agree with Ballmer’s ambition here, but I must admit he’s taken the “software + services” concept and expanded on it in more consumer-friendly fashion. There were demos too. For example, Blaise Aguera y Arcas reprised his Bing Maps demo from the TED conference held last month. And Simon Atwell showed how Microsoft has teamed with Sky TV in the UK to turn Xbox into something that looks uncannily like Windows Media Center. Specifically, an Xbox console app called Sky Player provides full access to Sky’s on-demand programming but also live TV access to an array of networks carried on its home TV service, complete with an on-screen programming guide. Windows Phone 7 Series was shown quickly and Ballmer told us that while Windows Mobile/Phone 6.5 and earlier were designed for voice and legacy functionality, Windows Phone 7 Series is designed for the cloud. Over and over during Ballmer’s talk (and those of his guest demo presenters), the message was clear: Microsoft believes that client (“smart”) devices, and not mere HTML terminals, are the technologies to best deliver on the promise of the cloud. The message was that PCs running Windows, game consoles and smart phones whose native interfaces are Internet-connected offer the most effective way to utilize cloud capabilities. Even the Bing Maps demo conveyed this message, because the advanced technology shown in the demo uses Silverlight (and thus the PCs computing power), and not AJAX (which relies only upon the browser’s native scripting and rendering capabilities) to produce the impressive interface shown to the audience. Microsoft’s new slogan, with respect to the cloud, is “we’re all in.” Just as a Texas Hold ‘em player bets his entire stash of chips when he goes all in, so too is Microsoft “betting the company” on the cloud. But it would seem that Microsoft’s bet isn’t on the cloud in a pure sense, and is instead on the power of the cloud to fuel new growth in PCs and other client devices, Microsoft’s traditional comfort zone. Is that a bet or a hedge? If the latter, is Microsoft truly all in? I don’t really know. I think many people would say this is a sucker’s bet. But others would say it’s suckers who bet against Microsoft. No matter what, the burden is on Microsoft to prove this contrarian view of the cloud is a sensible one. To do that, they’ll need to deliver on cloud-connected device innovation. And to do that, the whole company will need to feel that victory is crucial. Time will tell. And I expect to present progress reports in future posts.

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Installing SharePoint 2010 in one machine with built in database

- by sreejukg

It is very easy to deploy SharePoint 2010 in a single server using the built-in database. Normally one need to choose such installation for evaluation purposes. When installing with default settings, setup installs Microsoft SQL server 2008 express database along with SharePoint. After installing SharePoint, you need to run SharePoint products and technology configuration wizard which will install central admin website and creates the configuration database and content database for SharePoint sites. Limitations 1. You can not perform this installation on a domain controller 2. The maximum size for express edition database is 4 GB SharePoint 2010 only supports 64 bit operating systems. The installation steps are for windows server r2 64 bit enterprise edition. Installation steps The first screen for the installation is as follows As a first step you need to install the s/w prerequisites. Click on the corresponding link Click next, here you have to agree on the license terms. Select the checkbox and then click next. The installation will starts. The progress will be updated in the screen. This may take some time as during this process, there are some components needs to be downloaded from internet. Make sure you are connected to the internet, then only the installation will become a success. If any error occurs, it will display the error, you need to configure in order to continue. If everything ok you will receive the following success page. Click finish to exit the installation window. Now from the first screen, select Install SharePoint server. This will install SharePoint and SQL server 2008 express edition. First you need to enter the product key for SharePoint. Enter the product key and clicks continue. Now you need to accept the license agreement. Select the checkbox and click on continue. Select the installation type you want. Now click on the standalone button. In production scenario, you need to select the server farm installation. This article only cover the first option, installing server farm is not in the scope of this article. Once you click on the standalone, the installation starts and you can view the progress as below. If any error occurred during installation, you will get the details and link to the log file. Refer log file and fix the corresponding issue and then start the installation again. If installation completes without any error, you will see the below screen. Make sure you selected the check box “Run the SharePoint products Configuration Wizard now” and click close. The SharePoint products configuration wizard starts. Click next; you will get the following warning Click yes and the configuration steps starts. You can view the progress for each step. Once completed the below screen appears to the user. Click finish to complete the installation. Now SharePoint installation is completed. You can navigate to SharePoint central administration website from the administrative tools and start building your portal. Good luck

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Chalk Talk with John: Business Value of Identity and Access Management

- by John Brunswick

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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Conveying the business value of Identity and Access Management to non technologists can potentially be challenging, especially considering the breadth capability supplied by these technologies. In this episode of Chalk Talk with John, Bob at Codeaway Valley asks Jim from Middleware Fields how they are able to manage access to buildings and facilities throughout their community. Bob and his team struggle to keep up with the needs of their community members, while ensuring the community’s safety. Jim shares his creative solution to simplifying the management of access throughout their community in Middleware Fields. 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About me: Hi, I am John Brunswick, an Oracle Enterprise Architect. As an Oracle Enterprise Architect, I focus on the alignment of technical capabilities in support of business vision and objectives, as well as the overall business value of technology. Before coming to Oracle, I was a Practice Manager within BEA System's Business Interaction Division consulting organization, orchestrating enterprise systems in support of line of business goals. Follow me on Twitter and visit my site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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What’s the use of code reuse?

- by Tony Davis

All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), moving logic into specific “helper” modules that they can then reuse, agonizing about the minutiae of the class structure, inheritance and interface design that will promote easy reuse. Unfortunately, writing code specifically for reuse often leads to complicated object hierarchies and inheritance models that are anything but reusable. If, instead, one strives to write simple code units that are highly maintainable and perform a single function, in a concise, isolated fashion then the potential for reuse simply “drops out” as a natural by-product. Programmers, of course, care about these principles, about encapsulation and clean interfaces that don’t expose inner workings and allow easy pluggability. This is great when it helps with the maintenance and development of code but how often, in practice, do we actually reuse our code? Most DBAs and database developers are familiar with the practical reasons for the limited opportunities to reuse database code and its potential downsides. However, surely elsewhere in our code base, reuse happens often. After all, we can all name examples, such as date/time handling modules, which if we write with enough care we can plug in to many places. I spoke to a developer just yesterday who looked me in the eye and told me that in 30+ years as a developer (a successful one, I’d add), he’d never once reused his own code. As I sat blinking in disbelief, he explained that, of course, he always thought he would reuse it. He’d often agonized over its design, certain that he was creating code of great significance that he and other generations would reuse, with grateful tears misting their eyes. In fact, it never happened. He had in his head, most of the algorithms he needed and would simply write the code from scratch each time, refining the algorithms and tailoring the code to meet the specific requirements. It was, he said, simply quicker to do that than dig out the old code, check it, correct the mistakes, and adapt it. Is this a common experience, or just a strange anomaly? Viewed in a certain light, building code with a focus on reusability seems to hark to a past age where people built cars and music systems with the idea that someone else could and would replace and reuse the parts. Technology advances so rapidly that the next time you need the “same” code, it’s likely a new technique, or a whole new language, has emerged in the meantime, better equipped to tackle the task. Maybe we should be less fearful of the idea that we could write code well suited to the system requirements, but with little regard for reuse potential, and then rewrite a better version from scratch the next time.

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I spy a Live Framework portal

- by jamiet

Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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#MIX Day 2 Keynote: Put the Phone Down and Listen

- by andrewbrust

MIX day 1’s keynote was all about Windows Phone 7 (WP7). MIX day 2’s was a reminder that Microsoft has much more going on than a new mobile platform. Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, Doug Purdy and others showed us lots of other good things coming from Microsoft, mostly in the developer stack, that we certainly shouldn’t overlook. These included the forthcoming IE9, its new JavaScript compiling engine and support for HTML 5 that takes full advantage of the local PC resources, including the Graphics Processing Unit. The announcements also included important additions to ASP.NET (and one subtraction, in the form of lighter-weight ViewState technology) including almost-obsessive jQuery support. That support is so good that John Resig, creator of the jQuery project, came on stage to tell us so. Then Scott Guthrie told us that Microsoft would be contributing code to Open Source jQuery project. This is not your father’s Microsoft, it would seem. But to me, the crown jewel in today’s keynote were the numerous announcements around the Open Data Protocol (OData). OData is nothing more than the protocol side of “Astoria” (now known as WCF Data Services, and until recently called ADO.NET Data Services) separated out and opened up as a platform-neutral standard. The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was Microsoft’s vehicle for first announcing OData, as well as project “Dallas,” an Azure-based cloud platform for publishing commercial OData feeds. And we had already known about “bridges” for Astoria (and thus OData) for PHP and Java. We also knew that PowerPivot, Microsoft’s forthcoming self-service BI plug-in for Excel 2010, will consume OData feeds and then facilitate drill-down analysis of their data. And we recently found out that SQL Reporting Services reports (in the forthcoming SQL Server 2008 R2) and SharePoint 2010 lists will be consumable in OData format as well. So what was left to announce? How about OData clients for Palm webOS and Apple iPhone/Objective C? How about the release to Open Source of .NET’s OData client? Or the ability to publish any SQL Azure database as an OData service by simply checking a checkbox at deployment? Maybe even a Silverlight tool (code-named “Houston”) to create SQL Azure databases (and then publish them as OData) right in the browser? And what if you you could get at NetFlix’s entire catalog in OData format? You can – just go to http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/ and see for yourself. Douglas Purdy, who made these announcements said “we want OData to work on as many devices and platforms as possible.” After all the cross-platform OData announcements made in about a half year’s time, it’s hard to dispute this. When Microsoft plays the data card, and plays it well, watch out, because data programmability is the company’s heritage. I’ll be discussing OData at length in my April Redmond Review column. I wrote that column two weeks ago, and was convinced then that OData was a big deal. Today upped the ante even more. And following the Windows Phone 7 euphoria of yesterday was, I think, smart timing. The phone, if it’s successful, will be because it’s a good developer platform play. And developer platforms (as well as their creators) are most successful when they have a good data strategy. OData is very Silverlight-friendly, and that means it’s WP7-friendly too. Phone plus service-oriented data is a one-two punch. A phone platform without data would have been a phone with no signal.

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Integrating Windows Form Click Once Application into SharePoint 2007 – Part 1 of 2

- by Kelly Jones

Last year, I had the opportunity to build a solution that involved integrating a Windows Form application into a SharePoint 2007 (WSS version 3.0). In this post, I’ll layout our architecture thinking and in part two, I’ll describe the technical details. Business Case Our challenge was this: we needed an easy way for a small group of our users to upload documents, in batches. They also needed to quickly set the meta data values, as well as set security on individual files. Using the out of the box uploads just didn’t fit. The single file upload allows set the meta data, but our users would be uploading dozens of files. The multiple upload would allow our users to upload batches of files, but it doesn’t allow them to set the meta data during upload. Also, neither upload method allows the users to set the permissions on the file. Our Solution We looked into building a web control of some kind, but ruled that out due to security complexities (if I remember correctly). Another option would have been using a technology like Silverlight (or Flash?), but our team didn’t have the skills necessary to build with these. So, after looking at what was technically possible, and also what skills our team had, we settled on a Windows Form application. We also decided to deliver it to the clients via Click Once, so we would have the ability to easily update the application in the future. Lessons Learned After deploying our solution, we’ve learned a few lessons. First, you’ll need to have the .Net Framework installed on the client computers. We knew this, but we still ran into issues making sure our users had the proper framework version installed. Second, we had issues with authentication. Our issues were due to our testing domain being a separate Active Directory domain from the domain that our end users and their workstations were members of. (See my earlier post about Clearing Saved Passwords for the fix to our problem). Our third issue was how we dealt with uploading files that were named the same. Our application would replace the existing file with the new file, which is the way we expected it to work. However, our users wanted to upload weekly reports, named the same as the previous week. We solved this by using folders within the document library to keep the sets of reports separate from previous weeks. One last thing to consider before implementing a solution like this, is what browsers and platforms your users will be working from. We only needed to support IE and Windows, which works fine. However, if you need to support Firefox, there are add-ons that allow Click Once to work with Firefox. This is still a Windows only solution though. In order to support Macs, you’d have to focus on either browser techniques (AJAX?) or Silverlight/Flash. Summary Our users are happy with the Click Once app. It allowed them to move all of their content to our SharePoint site in under a couple hours, which they were thrilled with. We’re happy because we can easily deploy updates, our development time was small, and we met all of our business requirements.

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Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture?

- by Michael Glas

I recently had a discussion around who should own an organization’s Enterprise Architecture. It was spawned by an article titled “Busting CIO Myths” in CIO magazine1 where the author interviewed Jeanne Ross, director of MIT's Center for Information Systems Research and co-author of books on enterprise architecture, governance and IT value.In the article Jeanne states that companies need to acknowledge that "architecture says everything about how the company is going to function, operate, and grow; the only person who can own that is the CEO". "If the CEO doesn't accept that role, there really can be no architecture."The first question that came up when talking about ownership was whether you are talking about a person, role, or organization (there are pros and cons to each, but in general, I like to assign accountability to as few people as possible). After much thought and discussion, I came to the conclusion that we were answering the wrong question. Instead of talking about ownership we were talking about responsibility and accountability, and the answer varies depending on the particular role of the organization’s Enterprise Architecture and the activities of the enterprise architect(s).Instead of looking at just who owns the architecture, think about what the person/role/organization should do. This is one possible scenario (thanks to Bob Covington): The CEO should own the Enterprise Strategy which guides the business architecture. The Business units should own the business processes and information which guide the business, application and information architectures. The CIO should own the technology, IT Governance and the management of the application and information architectures/implementations. The EA Governance Team owns the EA process. If EA is done well, the governance team consists of both IT and the business. While there are many more roles and responsibilities than listed here, it starts to provide a clearer understanding of ‘ownership’. Now back to Jeanne’s statement that the CEO should own the architecture. If you agree with the statement about what the architecture is (and I do agree), then ultimately the CEO does need to own it. However, what we ended up with was not really ownership, but more statements around roles and responsibilities tied to aspects of the enterprise architecture. You can debate the semantics of ownership vs. responsibility and accountability, but in the end the important thing is to come to a clearer understanding that is easily communicated (and hopefully measured) around the question “Who owns the Enterprise Architecture”.The next logical step . . . create a RACI matrix that details the findings . . . but that is a step that each organization needs to do on their own as it will vary based on current EA maturity, company culture, and a variety of other factors. Who ‘owns’ the Enterprise Architecture in your organization? 1 CIO Magazine Article (Busting CIO Myths): http://www.cio.com/article/704943/Busting_CIO_Myths 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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Guest (and occasional co-host) on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast

- by Jon Galloway

I was a recent guest on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast talking about the latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Azure releases. Download / Listen: Yet Another Podcast #75–Jon Galloway on ASP.NET/ MVC/ Azure Co-hosted shows: Jesse's been inviting me to co-host shows and I told him I'd show up when I was available. It's a nice change to be a drive-by co-host on a show (compared with the work that goes into organizing / editing / typing show notes for Herding Code shows). My main focus is on Herding Code, but it's nice to pop in and talk to Jesse's excellent guests when it works out. Some shows I've co-hosted over the past year: Yet Another Podcast #76–Glenn Block on Node.js & Technology in China Yet Another Podcast #73 - Adam Kinney on developing for Windows 8 with HTML5 Yet Another Podcast #64 - John Papa & Javascript Yet Another Podcast #60 - Steve Sanderson and John Papa on Knockout.js Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond And some more on the way that haven't been released yet. Some of these I'm pretty quiet, on others I get wacky and hassle the guests because, hey, not my podcast so not my problem. Show notes from the ASP.NET / MVC / Azure show: What was just released Visual Studio 2012 Web Developer features ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strongly Typed data controls Data access via command methods Similar Binding syntax to ASP.NET MVC Some context: Damian Edwards and WebFormsMVP Two questions from Jesse: Q: Are you making this harder or more complicated for Web Forms developers? Short answer: Nothing's removed, it's just a new option History of SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource Q: If I'm using some MVC patterns, why not just move to MVC? Short answer: This works really well in hybrid applications, doesn't require a rewrite Allows sharing models, validation, other code between Web Forms and MVC ASP.NET MVC Adaptive Rendering (oh, also, this is in Web Forms 4.5 as well) Display Modes Mobile project template using jQuery Mobile OAuth login to allow Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. login Jon (and friends') MVC 4 book on the way: Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 Windows 8 development Jesse and Jon announce they're working on a new book: Pro Windows 8 Development with XAML and C# Jon and Jesse agree that it's nice to be able to write Windows 8 applications using the same skills they picked up for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone development. Compare / contrast ASP.NET MVC and Windows 8 development Q: Does ASP.NET and HTML5 development overlap? Jon thinks they overlap in the MVC world because you're writing HTML views without controls Jon describes how his web development career moved from a preoccupation with server code to a focus on user interaction, which occurs in the browser Jon mentions his NDC Oslo presentation on Learning To Love HTML as Beautiful Code Q: How do you apply C# / XAML or HTML5 skills to Windows 8 development? Q: If I'm a XAML programmer, what's the learning curve on getting up to speed on ASP.NET MVC? Jon describes the difference in application lifecycle and state management Jon says it's nice that web development is really interactive compared to application development Q: Can you learn MVC by reading a book? Or is it a lot bigger than that? What is Azure, and why would I use it? Jon describes the traditional Azure platform mode and how Azure Web Sites fits in Q: Why wouldn't Jesse host his blog on Azure Web Sites? Domain names on Azure Web Sites File hosting options Q: Is Azure just another host? How is it different from any of the other shared hosting options? A: Azure gives you the ability to scale up or down whenever you want A: Other services are available if or when you want them

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The Hunger Games for Aspiring IT Professionals

- by Dain C. Hansen

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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} It seems that no one can escape the buzz around Hunger Games. And who could? Stephen King said it best in his review when he referred to the Collins’ novel as “a violent, jarring speed-rap of a novel that generates nearly constant suspense and may also generate a fair amount of controversy”. So what’s the tie in for IT? Let’s leave the dystopia of District 12 and come back to today’s reality. This is the world of radical IT paradigm shifts that haven’t been seen since Java was introduced in 1995. Everything you learned in school is probably outdated as of Friday. And everything you learned on Friday will probably change when you get to work on Monday. Nevertheless, we’re eager, we’re aspiring, we’re hungry to learn. While the challenges upon us may not rival the venomous bees (or ‘tracker jackers’) seen in this blockbuster, there are certainly obstacles to be found. In preparation, I leave you two pieces of advice - aside from avoiding werewolves… Learn the Cloud If you had asked me what to learn in 1995, I would have said, “Go learn Java”. But now my advice is “Go learn Java and then learn Cloud”. Cloud computing and Java go hand in hand. This is especially true for Oracle’s own Public Cloud which uses Java (via WebLogic 12c) as well as Oracle Database at its core foundation. Understanding the connotations of elasticity, scale, virtualization, and multi-tenancy, (to name just a few) requires a strong foundation in computer science and especially Java to get it right. Without Java, the Cloud is nothing more than a brittle application meagerly deployed on the internet. Get Social and Actively Participate And at all levels. Socializing your ideas internally is dreadfully important. And this means socializing and communicating your good ideas to lines of business, to architects, business analysts, developers, DBAs and Operations. But don’t forget to go external. Stay current by being on the lookout for blogs, tweets, webcasts, papers, podcasts and videos for your technology area. Be not just a subscriber but a participant in these channels as well. Attend industry and vendor sponsored events to learn from the experts – and seek out opportunities to stay connected with those that are smarter than you. You’ll gain more understanding if you participate actively. At the same time you’ll make friends (and allies) and you’ll be glad you did. Tell help you get social and actively participate [while learning the Cloud] here are a couple of pointers for you: See our website on Cloud and Fusion Middleware Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Find us at one of our key events Meanwhile, happy IT hunger games!

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It’s the thought that counts…

- by Tony Davis

I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers really need to know”. Sure, some of the writing skills were a bit rusty as one would expect from busy people, but the ideas and energy were sheer nectar. Any seasoned editor can deal easily with the problem of fixing the output of untrained writers. We can handle with the occasional technical error too, which is why we have technical reviewers. The editor’s real job is to hone the clarity and flow of ideas, making the author’s knowledge and experience accessible to as many others as possible. What the writer needs to bring, on the other hand, is enthusiasm, attention to detail, common sense, and a sense of the person behind the writing. If any of these are missing, no editor can fix it. We can see these essential characteristics in many of the more seasoned and widely-published writers about SQL. To illustrate what I mean by enthusiasm, or passion, take a look at the work of Laerte Junior or Fabiano Amorim. Both authors have English as a second language, but their energy, enthusiasm, sheer immersion in a technology and thirst to know more, drives them, with a little editorial help, to produce articles of far more practical value than one can find in the “manuals”. There’s the attention to detail of the likes of Jonathan Kehayias, or Paul Randal. Read their work and one begins to understand the knowledge coupled with incredible rigor, the willingness to bend and test every piece of advice offered to make sure it’s correct, that marks out the very best technical writing. There’s the common sense of someone like Louis Davidson. All writers, including Louis, like to stretch the grey matter of their readers, but some of the most valuable writing is that which takes a complicated idea, or distils years of experience, and expresses it in a way that sounds like simple common sense. There’s personality and humor. Contrary to what you may have been told, they can and do mix well with technical writing, as long as they don’t become a distraction. Read someone like Rodney Landrum, or Phil Factor, for numerous examples of articles that teach hard technical lessons but also make you smile at least twice along the way. Writing well is not easy and it takes a certain bravery to expose your ideas and knowledge for dissection by others, but it doesn’t mean that writing should be the preserve only of those trained in the art, or best left to the MVPs. I believe that Tribal SQL is testament to the fact that if you have passion for what you do, and really know your topic then, with a little editorial help, you can write, and people will learn from what you have to say. You can read a sample chapter, by Mark Rasmussen, in this issue of Simple-Talk and I hope you’ll consider checking out the book (if you needed any further encouragement, it’s also for a good cause, Computers4Africa). Cheers, Tony

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