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• Get notified/receive explicit intents when an activity starts

  - by qtips

  Hi, I am developing an application than gets notified when an activity chosen by a user is started. For this to work, the best approach would be to register a broadcastreceiver for ACTION_MAIN explicit intents, which as far as I know doesn't work (because these intents have specific targets). Another, probably less efficient approach, is to use the system ActivityManager and poll on the getRunningTask() which returns a list of all running tasks at the moment. The polling can be done by a background service. By monitoring the changes in this list, I can see whether an activity is running or not, so that my application can get notified. The downside is ofcourse the polling. I have not tried this yet, but I think that this last approach will probably work. Does anyone know of a better approach(es) or suggestions which are less intensive?

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• Finding the largest subtree in a BST

  - by rakeshr

  Given a binary tree, I want to find out the largest subtree which is a BST in it. Naive approach: I have a naive approach in mind where I visit every node of the tree and pass this node to a isBST function. I will also keep track of the number of nodes in a sub-tree if it is a BST. Is there a better approach than this ?

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• array of structures, or structure of arrays?

  - by Jason S

  Hmmm. I have a table which is an array of structures I need to store in Java. The naive don't-worry-about-memory approach says do this: public class Record { final private int field1; final private int field2; final private long field3; /* constructor & accessors here */ } List<Record> records = new ArrayList<Record>(); If I end up using a large number ( 106 ) of records, where individual records are accessed occasionally, one at a time, how would I figure out how the preceding approach (an ArrayList) would compare with an optimized approach for storage costs: public class OptimizedRecordStore { final private int[] field1; final private int[] field2; final private long[] field3; Record getRecord(int i) { return new Record(field1[i],field2[i],field3[i]); } /* constructor and other accessors & methods */ } edit: assume the # of records is something that is changed infrequently or never I'm probably not going to use the OptimizedRecordStore approach, but I want to understand the storage cost issue so I can make that decision with confidence. obviously if I add/change the # of records in the OptimizedRecordStore approach above, I either have to replace the whole object with a new one, or remove the "final" keyword. kd304 brings up a good point that was in the back of my mind. In other situations similar to this, I need column access on the records, e.g. if field1 and field2 are "time" and "position", and it's important for me to get those values as an array for use with MATLAB, so I can graph/analyze them efficiently.

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• What does the expression "Fail Early" mean, and when would you want to do so?

  - by Andrew Grimm

  What does the expression "Fail Early" mean, and under what circumstances is this approach most useful, and when would you avoid the approach?

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• best practice when referring to a program's name in C

  - by guest

  what is considered best practice when referring to a program's name? i've seen #define PROGRAM_NAME "myprog" printf("this is %s\n", PROGRAM_NAME); as well as printf("this is %s\n", argv[0]); i know, that the second approach will give me ./myprog rather than myprog when the program is not called from $PATH and that the first approach will guarantee consistence regarding the program's name. but is there anything else, that makes one approach superior to the other?

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• What is the preferred method of device-specific rendering in .net websites?

  - by alimac83

  I'm working on a website using webforms (although I'd be keen to hear how this works with MVC) and I'm trying to figure out the best approach for rendering content for mobile devices. Usually when I'm working on sites that have to be viewed on mobile devices, I use media queries to style the content differently. The problem is that in my current scenario I'm trying to display different content altogether, rather than just changing the layout of existing content. What's the preferred approach for this? I've had a look at 'device specific rendering' on msdn (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hkx121s4.aspx) although I'm not sure if this is a good approach? What are the pros/cons/alternatives? Thank you EDIT: I've found this but it's for use with mvc4, not webforms. EDIT #2: I think I've found what I'm after here but is this a good approach?

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• CVS: Modules vs Subdirectories

  - by Glaxalg

  Does anyone know what is the best approach to define structure of modules/directories in CVS? Specifically what if I have big project that could possibly has many sub-projects (even not related). Is it better to define module for each sub-project or use subdirectories: Approach #1 Modules CVSROOT Main Project Platform A Sub-project1 Platform A Sub-project2 Platform B Sub-project3 ... Approach #2 subdirectories CVSROOT Project Main Platform A Sub-Project 1 Sub-Project 2 Platform B Sub-Project 3 ...

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• Anyone knows good references for Machine Learning Algorithms and Image Recognition?

  - by RaymondBelonia

  I need it for my thesis and for some reason I am having a hard time finding decent books or websites for it. My thesis topic is "Classification of Modern Art Paintings using Machine Learning Approach". My goal is to classify examples of modern art paintings to its respective modern art movement(expressionism, realism,etc..) using machine learning approach. Also, suggestions and comments about my thesis are greatly appreciated.

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• Infinite detail inside Perlin noise procedural mapping

  - by Dave Jellison

  I am very new to game development but I was able to scour the internet to figure out Perlin noise enough to implement a very simple 2D tile infinite procedural world. Here's the question and it's more conceptual than code-based in answer, I think. I understand the concept of "I plug in (x, y) and get back from Perlin noise p" (I'll call it p). P will always be the same value for the same (x, y) (as long as the Perlin algorithm parameters haven't changed, like altering number of octaves, et cetera). What I want to do is be able to zoom into a square and be able to generate smaller squares inside of the already generated overhead tile of terrain. Let's say I have a jungle tile for overhead terrain but I want to zoom in and maybe see a small river tile that would only be a creek and not large enough to be a full "big tile" of water in the overhead. Of course, I want the same net effect as a Perlin equation inside a Perlin equation if that makes sense? (aka. I want two people playing the game with the same settings to get the same terrain and details every time). I can conceptually wrap my head around the large tile being based on an "zoomed out" coordinate leaving enough room to drill into but this approach doesn't make sense in my head (maybe I'm wrong). I'm guessing with this approach my overhead terrain would lose all of the cohesiveness delivered by the Perlin. Imagine I calculate (0, 0) as overhead tile 1 and then to the east of that I plug in (50, 0). OK, great, I now have 49 pixels of detail I could then "drill down" into. The issue I have in my head with this approach (without attempting it) is that there's no guarantee from my Perlin noise that (0,0) would be a good neighbor to (50,0) as they could have wildly different "elevations" or p/resultant values returning from the Perlin equation when I generate the overhead map. I think I can conceive of using the Perlin noise for the overhead tile to then reuse the p value as a seed for the "detail" level of noise once I zoom in. That would ensure my detail Perlin is always the same configuration for (0,0), (1,0), etc. ad nauseam but I'm not sure if there are better approaches out there or if this is a sound approach at all.

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• Basic web architecture : Perl -> PHP

  - by Sunny Jim

  This is an architecture question. If there is a better forum, please redirect me. Apologies in advance. Essentially every website is built around a relational database, right? When a user uploads form data, that data is stored in a table. The problem is that the table structure(s) need to be modified whenever the website form is modified. Although I understand that modern web frameworks work around this problem by automatically building forms based on the table structure. For the last 20 years, I have been building websites using Perl. When I first encountered this problem, the easiest solution was to save serialized Perl objects as data BLOBS. After XML's introduction, this solution worked even better because XML is so effective for representing arbitrary data. This approach is consistent with the original Perl principles of Hubris, Laziness, and Impatience and I'm pretty committed to it. Obviously, the biggest drawback is that this solution locks me into the Perl interpreter. So instead, I've just completed a prototype of a universal RDB table. The prototype is written in Perl but porting it to PHP will be a good chance to develop those skills. The principal is based on the XML::Dumper module, which converts arbitrary Perl data structures into uniform XML. With my approach, each XML node is stored as a table record. I underestimated this undertaking and rolled something up myself. But the effort allows me to discuss the basic design instead of implementation details. As mentioned, I'm pretty committed to this approach of using flexible data structures. It's been successfully deployed on many websites, large, and complex. But are there any drawbacks I've overlooked? I rolled my own. Are other people taking a similar approach to their data? What kinds of solutions are available? I have not abandoned my dream of eventually contributing something useful to the worldwide community. In order to proceed, the next step would be peer review. How does one pursue that effort? Thanks! -Jim

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• To access parentAM instance from within nestedAM JUnit test class

  - by Abhishek Dwivedi

  In normal model project, the way to access parent AM from within nested AM is simple - ParentAMImpl parentAM =  (ParentAMImpl)this.getRootApplicationModule(); However, the same approach doesn't help in JUnit model project. Use the following approach -  Inside setUp() method --  ParentAM parentAM =  (ParentAM)Configuration.createRootApplicationModule(ROOT_AM, ROOT_AM_CONFIG); Inside tearDown() method -- Configuration.releaseRootApplicationModule(parentAM, true);

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• For Programmers familiar with ACM API? Drawing Initials

  - by user71992

  I came across an exercise (in the book "The Art and Science of Java" by Eric Roberts) that requires using only GArc and GLine classes to create a lettering library which draws your initials on the canvas. This should be made independent of the GLabel class. I'd like to know the correct approach to use in solving this problem. I'm not sure what I have so far is good enough (I'm thinking it's too long). The questions requires that I use a good Top-Down approach.

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• Register Game Object Components in Game Subsystems? (Component-based Game Object design)

  - by topright

  I'm creating a component-based game object system. Some tips: GameObject is simply a list of Components. There are GameSubsystems. For example, rendering, physics etc. Each GameSubsystem contains pointers to some of Components. GameSubsystem is a very powerful and flexible abstraction: it represents any slice (or aspect) of the game world. There is a need in a mechanism of registering Components in GameSubsystems (when GameObject is created and composed). There are 4 approaches: 1: Chain of responsibility pattern. Every Component is offered to every GameSubsystem. GameSubsystem makes a decision which Components to register (and how to organize them). For example, GameSubsystemRender can register Renderable Components. pro. Components know nothing about how they are used. Low coupling. A. We can add new GameSubsystem. For example, let's add GameSubsystemTitles that registers all ComponentTitle and guarantees that every title is unique and provides interface to quering objects by title. Of course, ComponentTitle should not be rewrited or inherited in this case. B. We can reorganize existing GameSubsystems. For example, GameSubsystemAudio, GameSubsystemRender, GameSubsystemParticleEmmiter can be merged into GameSubsystemSpatial (to place all audio, emmiter, render Components in the same hierarchy and use parent-relative transforms). con. Every-to-every check. Very innefficient. con. Subsystems know about Components. 2: Each Subsystem searches for Components of specific types. pro. Better performance than in Approach 1. con. Subsystems still know about Components. 3: Component registers itself in GameSubsystem(s). We know at compile-time that there is a GameSubsystemRenderer, so let's ComponentImageRender will call something like GameSubsystemRenderer::register(ComponentRenderBase*). pro. Performance. No unnecessary checks as in Approach 1. con. Components are badly coupled with GameSubsystems. 4: Mediator pattern. GameState (that contains GameSubsystems) can implement registerComponent(Component*). pro. Components and GameSubystems know nothing about each other. con. In C++ it would look like ugly and slow typeid-switch. Questions: Which approach is better and mostly used in component-based design? What Practice says? Any suggestions about implementation of Approach 4? Thank you.

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• Turning your code inside out (functional style) compared to a OO paradigm

  - by Acaz Souza

  I have find this article Turning Your Code Inside Out and I want to know how this approach described in article is for OO programmers/languages. Is this style of design used in OO programmers/languages? What's downsides and goodsides of this approach in a OO language? Update: OO objects have state and behavior, the design explained in article is stateless. Is not only Single Responsability Principle. (If I'm talking shit, please explain to me instead of only downside/close votes)

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• Filling array with numbers from given range so that sum of adjacent numbers is square number

  - by REACHUS

  Problem: Fill all the cells using distinct numbers from <1,25 set, so that sum of two adjacent cells is a square number. (source: http://grymat.im.pwr.wroc.pl/etap1/zad1etp1213.pdf; numbers 20 and 13 have been given) I've already solved this problem analytically and now I would like to approach it using an algorithm. I would like to know how should I approach these kind of problems in general (not a solution, just a point for me to start).

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• Best Creational Pattern for loggers in a multi-threaded system?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  This is a follow up question on my past questions : Concurrency pattern of logger in multithreaded application As suggested by others, I am putting this question separately. As the learning from the last question. In a multi-threaded environment, the logger should be made thread safe and probably asynchronous (where in messages are queued while a background thread does writing releasing the requesting object thread). The logger could be signleton or it can be a per-group logger which is a generalization of the above. Now, the question that arise is how does logger should be assigned to the object? There are two options I can think of: 1. Object requesting for the logger: Should each of the object call some global API such as get_logger()? Such an API returns "the" singleton or the group logger. However, I feel this involves assumption about the Application environment to implement the logger -which I think is some kind of coupling. If the same object needs to be used by other application - this new application also need to implement such a method. 2. Assign logger through some known API The other alternative approach is to create a kind of virtual class which is implemented by application based on App's own structure and assign the object sometime in the constructor. This is more generalized method. Unfortunately, when there are so many objects - and rather a tree of objects passing on the logger objects to each level is quite messy. My question is there a better way to do this? If you need to pick any one of the above, which approach is would you pick and why? Other questions remain open about how to configure them: How do objects' names or ID are assigned so that will be used for printing on the log messages (as the module names) How do these objects find the appropriate properties (such as log levels, and other such parameters) In the first approach, the central API needs to deal with all this varieties. In the second approach - there needs to be additional work. Hence, I want to understand from the real experience of people, as to how to write logger effectively in such an environment.

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• Silverlight 3 Data Binding: Imperative and Mixed Approaches

  In the first part of this multi-part series on data binding in Silverlight we learned how to use the declarative XAML syntax approach. In this second part we ll learn how to use the imperative approach and how to combine the two.... Test Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Find Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 trials, demos, videos, and more.

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• Using Feature to apply themes in SharePoint 2013 Preview

  - by panjkov

  In my previous post I wrote about applying custom theme to SharePoint 2013 site using new theming engine. I also mentioned that one approach for implementing this functionality could be to encapsulate this code in Feature receiver. In this post, I will demonstrate and explain this approach for applying custom theme to SPWeb. Our custom theming Feature will On Feature Activated create and apply new theme to the existing web, while preserving information about current theme On Feature Deactivating...(read more)

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• Efficient, partial, point-in-time database restores

  - by GavinPayneUK

  This article is about a situation that many of us could describe the theoretical approach to solving, but then struggle to understand why SQL Server wasn’t following that theoretical approach when you tried it for real. Earlier this week, I had a client ask about the best way to perform: a partial database restore, 1 of 1300 filegroups; to a specific point in time; using a differential backup, and therefore; without restoring each transaction log backup taken since the full backup. The last point...(read more)

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• How far should an entity take care of its properties values by itself?

  - by Kharlos Dominguez

  Let's consider the following example of a class, which is an entity that I'm using through Entity Framework. - InvoiceHeader - BilledAmount (property, decimal) - PaidAmount (property, decimal) - Balance (property, decimal) I'm trying to find the best approach to keep Balance updated, based on the values of the two other properties (BilledAmount and PaidAmount). I'm torn between two practices here: Updating the balance amount every time BilledAmount and PaidAmount are updated (through their setters) Having a UpdateBalance() method that the callers would run on the object when appropriate. I am aware that I can just calculate the Balance in its getter. However, it isn't really possible because this is an entity field that needs to be saved back to the database, where it has an actual column, and where the calculated amount should be persisted to. My other worry about the automatically updating approach is that the calculated values might be a little bit different from what was originally saved to the database, due to rounding values (an older version of the software, was using floats, but now decimals). So, loading, let's say 2000 entities from the database could change their status and make the ORM believe that they have changed and be persisted back to the database the next time the SaveChanges() method is called on the context. It would trigger a mass of updates that I am not really interested in, or could cause problems, if the calculation methods changed (the entities fetched would lose their old values to be replaced by freshly recalculated ones, simply by being loaded). Then, let's take the example even further. Each invoice has some related invoice details, which also have BilledAmount, PaidAmount and Balance (I'm simplifying my actual business case for the sake of the example, so let's assume the customer can pay each item of the invoice separately rather than as a whole). If we consider the entity should take care of itself, any change of the child details should cause the Invoice totals to change as well. In a fully automated approach, a simple implementation would be looping through each detail of the invoice to recalculate the header totals, every time one the property changes. It probably would be fine for just a record, but if a lot of entities were fetched at once, it could create a significant overhead, as it would perform this process every time a new invoice detail record is fetched. Possibly worse, if the details are not already loaded, it could cause the ORM to lazy-load them, just to recalculate the balances. So far, I went with the Update() method-way, mainly for the reasons I explained above, but I wonder if it was right. I'm noticing I have to keep calling these methods quite often and at different places in my code and it is potential source of bugs. It also has a detrimental effect on data-binding because when the properties of the detail or header changes, the other properties are left out of date and the method has no way to be called. What is the recommended approach in this case?

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• Frequency to submit sitemap to search engines

  - by user577691

  i have went live with my site and being new to search engines and SEO fields not sure what should be the best way to handle sitemap.xml. I have created sitemap.xml and submitted it to Google using webmaster tool Yahoo/Bing using Bing Webmater Ask.com now since site will get updated every 2-3 times per week i am not sure what should be the best approach. Do i need to submit sitemap.xml again If i need to submit sitemap.xml again and again what should be the frequency to submit that Please suggest the best approach

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• How can I perform sentiment analysis on extracted text from online sources?

  - by aniket69

  I'm working on extracting the sentiment from YouTube comments, blogs, news content, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter feeds. I'm looking for an automated way to do this: the two third-party solutions I've found have been AlchemyAPI and RapidMiner. Are these the best way to approach this project, or should I be using something else? Is there a more efficient way to approach sentiment analysis? What techniques have worked for you in a project like this?

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• I have data that sends in "bursts" of 100 records with a significant delay. How do I structure my classes for multithreading?

  - by makerofthings7

  My datasource sends information in 100 batches of 100 records with a delay of 1 to 3 seconds between batches. I would like to start processing data as soon as it's received, but I'm not sure how to best approach this. Some ideas I've been playing with include: yield Concurrent Dictionary ConcurrentDictionary with INotifyProperyChanged Events etc. As you can see I'm all over the place, and would appreciate some tested guidance on how to approach this

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• "Collection Wrapper" pattern - is this common?

  - by Prog

  A different question of mine had to do with encapsulating member data structures inside classes. In order to understand this question better please read that question and look at the approach discussed. One of the guys who answered that question said that the approach is good, but if I understood him correctly - he said that there should be a class existing just for the purpose of wrapping the collection, instead of an ordinary class offering a number of public methods just to access the member collection. For example, instead of this: class SomeClass{ // downright exposing the concrete collection. Things[] someCollection; // other stuff omitted Thing[] getCollection(){return someCollection;} } Or this: class SomeClass{ // encapsulating the collection, but inflating the class' public interface. Thing[] someCollection; // class functionality omitted. public Thing getThing(int index){ return someCollection[index]; } public int getSize(){ return someCollection.length; } public void setThing(int index, Thing thing){ someCollection[index] = thing; } public void removeThing(int index){ someCollection[index] = null; } } We'll have this: // encapsulating the collection - in a different class, dedicated to this. class SomeClass{ CollectionWrapper someCollection; CollectionWrapper getCollection(){return someCollection;} } class CollectionWrapper{ Thing[] someCollection; public Thing getThing(int index){ return someCollection[index]; } public int getSize(){ return someCollection.length; } public void setThing(int index, Thing thing){ someCollection[index] = thing; } public void removeThing(int index){ someCollection[index] = null; } } This way, the inner data structure in SomeClass can change without affecting client code, and without forcing SomeClass to offer a lot of public methods just to access the inner collection. CollectionWrapper does this instead. E.g. if the collection changes from an array to a List, the internal implementation of CollectionWrapper changes, but client code stays the same. Also, the CollectionWrapper can hide certain things from the client code - from example, it can disallow mutation to the collection by not having the methods setThing and removeThing. This approach to decoupling client code from the concrete data structure seems IMHO pretty good. Is this approach common? What are it's downfalls? Is this used in practice?

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• Transformation of Product Management in Telecommunications for Rapid Launch of Next Generation Products

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } The Telecom industry continues to evolve through disruptive products, uncertain markets, shorter product lifecycles and convergence of technologies. Today’s market has moved from network centric to consumer centric and focuses primarily on the customer experience. It has resulted in several product management challenges such as an increased complexity and volume of offerings, creating product variants, accelerating time-to-market, ability to provide multiple product views for varied stakeholders, leveraging OSS intelligence to BSS layer, product co-creation and increasing audit and security concerns for service providers. The document discusses how enterprise product management enabled by PLM-based product catalogue solutions helps to launch next generation products rapidly in the context of the Telecommunication Industry.   1.0.       Introduction   Figure 1: Business Scenario   Modern business demands the launch of complex products in a very short timeframe and effecting changes in the price plan faster without IT intervention. One of the key transformation initiatives companies are focusing on is in the area of product management transformation and operational efficiency improvement. As part of these initiatives, companies are investing in best- in-class COTs-based Product Management solutions developed on industry-wide standards.   The new COTs packages are planned to integrate with existing or new B/OSS systems to provide a strategic end-to-end agile solution for reduced time-to-market and order journey time. In addition, system rationalization is being undertaken to phase out legacy systems and migrate to strategic systems.   2.0.       An Overview of Product Management in Telecom   Product data in telecom is multi- dimensional and difficult to manage. It increased significantly due to the complexity of the product, product offerings on the converged network, increased volume of offerings, bundled offering structures and ever increasing regulatory requirements.   In addition, the shrinking product lifecycle in telecom makes it difficult to manage the dynamic product data. Mergers and acquisitions coupled with organic growth pose major challenges in product portfolio management. It is a roadblock in the journey towards becoming an agile organization.       Figure 2: Complexity in Product Management   Network Technology’ is the new dimension in telecom product management where the same products are realized through different networks i.e., Soiled network to Converged network. Consequently, the product solution is different.     Figure 3: Current Scenario - Pain Points in Product Management   The major business implications arising out of the current scenario are slow time-to-market and an inefficient process that affects innovation.   3.0. Transformation of Next Generation Product Management   Companies must focus on their Product Management Transformation Journey in the areas of:   ·       Management of single truth of product information across the organization/geographies which is currently managed in heterogeneous systems   ·       Management of the Intellectual Property (IP) on the product concept and partnership in the design of discrete components to integrate into the system   ·       Leveraging structured and unstructured product data within the extended enterprise to extract consumer insights and drive innovation   ·       Management of effective operational separation to comply with regulatory bodies   ·       Reuse of existing designs and add relevant features such as value-added services to enable effective product bundling     Figure 4: Next generation needs   PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions efficiently address the above requirements and act as an enabler towards product management transformation and rapid product launch.   4.0. PLM-based Enterprise Product Management     Figure 5: PLM-based Enterprise Product Mastering   Enterprise Product Management (EPM) enables the business to manage complex product attributes of data in complex environments. Product Mastering helps create a 'single view' of the product by creating a business-driven, IT-supported environment where a global 'single truth record' is created, managed and reused.   4.1 The Business Case for Telco PLM-based solutions for Enterprise Product Management   ·       Telco PLM-based Product Mastering solutions provide a centralized authoring environment for product definition and control of all product data and rules   ·       PLM packages are designed to support multiple perspectives of product data (ordering perspective, billing perspective, provisioning perspective)   ·       Maintains relationships/links between different elements of the entire product definition   ·       Telco PLM packages are specialized in next generation lifecycle management requirements of products such as revision and state management, test and release management, role management and impact analysis)   ·       Takes into consideration all aspects of OSS product requirements compared to CRM product catalogue solutions where the product data managed is mostly order oriented and transactional     ·       New breed of Telco PLM packages are designed with 'open' standards such as SID and eTOM. They are interoperable, support integration frameworks such as subscription and notification.   ·       Telco PLM packages have developed good collaboration frameworks to integrate suppliers and partners into the product development value chain   4.2 Various Architectures/Approaches for Product Mastering using Telco PLM systems   4. 2.a Single Central Product Management (Mastering) Approach   Figure 6: Single Central Product Management (Master) Approach       This approach is implemented across verticals such as aerospace and automotive. It focuses on a physically centralized product master to which other sources are dependent on. The product definition data (Product bundles, service bundles, price plans, offers and discounts, product configuration rules and market campaigns) is created and maintained physically in a centralized environment. In addition, the product definition/authoring environment is centralized. The existing legacy product definition data available in CRM product catalogue, billing catalogue and the legacy product catalogue is migrated to the centralized PLM-based Enterprise Product Management solution.   Architectural changes must be made in the existing business landscape of applications to create and revise data because the applications have to refer to the central repository for approvals and validation of product configurations. It is achieved by modifying how the applications write data or how the applications can be adapted to use the rules to be managed and published.   Complete product configuration validation will be done in enterprise / central product catalogue and final configuration will be sent to the B/OSS system through the SOA compliant product distribution architecture. The approach/architecture enables greater control in terms of product data management and product data governance.   4.2.b Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture     Figure 7: Federated Product Management (Mastering) Architecture   In the federated product mastering approach, the basic unique product definition data (product id, description product hierarchy, basic price plans and simple product design rules) will be centrally created and will be maintained. And, the advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers & discount plans) will be created in respective down stream OSS systems. The advanced product definition (Product bundling, promotions, offers and discount plans) will be created in respective downstream OSS systems.   For example, basic product definitions such as attributes, product hierarchy and basic price plans will be created and maintained in Enterprise/Central product reference catalogue and distributed to downstream OSS systems. Respective downstream OSS systems build product bundles, promotions, advanced price plans over the basic product definition and master the advanced product definition. Central reference database accesses the respective other source product master data and assembles a point-in-time consolidated view of the product. The approach is typically adapted in some merger and acquisition scenarios where there is a low probability of a central physical authority managing the data. In addition, the migration effort in this case is minimal and there are no big architectural changes to the organization application landscape. However, this approach will not result in better product data management and data governance.   5.0 Customer Scenario – Before EPC deployment   A leading global telecommunications service provider wanted to launch a quad play and triple play service offering in the shortest possible lead time. The service provider was offering Broadband and VoIP services to customers. The company wanted to reuse a majority of the Broadband services and price plans and bundle them with new wireless and IPTV services for quad play and triple play. The challenges in launching the new service offerings were:       Figure 8: Triple Play Plan   ·       Broadband product data was stored in multiple product catalogues (CRM catalogue, Billing catalogue, spread sheets)   ·       Product managers spent a lot of time performing tasks involving duplication or re-keying of data. Manual effort caused errors, cost and time over-runs.   ·       No effective product and price data governance mechanism. Price change issues arising from the lack of data consistency across systems resulted in leakage of customer value and revenue.   ·       Product data had re-usability issues and was not in a structured format. It resulted in uncontrolled product portfolio creation and product management issues.   ·       Lack of enterprise product model resulted into product distribution challenges and thus delays in product launch.   ·       Designers are constrained by existing legacy product management solutions to model product/service requirements and product configuration rules such as upgrading, downgrading and cross selling.    5.1 Customer Scenario - After EPC deployment     Figure 9: SOA-based end-to-end EPC Solution   The company deployed PLM-based Enterprise Product Catalogue solutions to launch quad play service after evaluating various product catalogues. The broadband product offering, service and price data were migrated to the new system, and the product and price plan hierarchy for new offerings were created using the entities defined in the Enterprise Product Model. Supplier product catalogue data such as routers and set up boxes were loaded onto the new solution through SOA-based web service. Price plans and configuration rules were built in the new system. The validated final product configurations were extracted from the product catalogue in a SID format and were distributed to the downstream B/OSS systems through exposed SOA-based web services. The transformations required for the B/OSS system were handled using the transformation layer as part of the solution.   6.0 How PLM enabled Product Management Transformation         Figure 10: Product Management Transformation     PLM-based Product Catalogue Solution helped the customer reduce the product launch cycle time by 30% and enable transformation of Product Management for next generation services.   7.0 Conclusion   On the one hand, the telecom industry is undergoing changes due to disruptions, uncertain product markets and increased complexity of products. On the other hand, the ARPU is decreasing year-on-year. Communications Service Providers are embarking on convergence, bundled service offerings, flexibility to cross-sell and up-sell, introduce new value-added services, leverage Web 2.0 concepts and network capabilities. Consequently, large scale IT transformation initiatives to improve their ARPU supporting network and business transformations are a business imperative. Product Management has become a focus area. Companies are investing in best-in- class COTS solutions to reduce time-to-market, ensure rapid service delivery and improve operational efficiency. An efficient PLM-based enterprise product mastering solution plays a key role in achieving zero touch automation and rapid product launch.   References:   1.     Preston G.Smith, Donald G.Reineristsem, Van Nostrand Reinhold “Developing Products in Half the time”.   2.     John G. Innes, "Achieving Successful Product Change", Pitman Publishing.   3.     D T Pham and R M Setchi (16th Jan, 2001) "Authoring environment for documentation development" University of Wales Cardiff, U.K., Proceedings on Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 215, Part B.   4.     Oracle Product Hub for Communications:   http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/master-data-management/product-hub-082059.html  

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