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• Great Customer Service Example

  - by MightyZot

  A few days ago I wrote about what I consider a poor customer service interaction with TiVo, a company that I have been faithful to for the past 12 years or so. In that post I talked about how they helped me, but I felt like I was doing something wrong at the end of the call – when in reality I was just following through with an offer that TiVo made possible through my cable company. Today I had a wonderful customer service interaction with American Express, another company that I have been loyal to for many years.(I am a Gold Card member.) I like my Amex card because I can use it for big purchases and it forces me to pay them off at the end of the month. Well, the reality is that I’m not always so good at doing that, so sometimes my payments are over a couple of months.  :) A few days ago I received an email from “American Express” fraud detection. The email stated that I should call a toll free number and have the last four digits of my card handy. I grew up during the BBS era with some creative and somewhat mischievous friends. I’ve learned to be extremely cautious with regard to my online life! So, I did what you would expect…I sent them a nice reply that said “Go screw yourself.” For the past couple of days someone has been trying to call me and I assumed it was the same prankster trying to get the last four digits of my card. The last caller left a message indicating that they were from American Express and they wanted to talk to me about my card. After looking up their customer service numbers on the www.americanexpress.com web site, I called and was put through to the fraud detection group. The rep explained that there were some charges on my wife’s card that did not fit our purchase profile. She went through each charge and, for the most part, they looked like charges my wife may have made. My wife had asked to use the card for some Christmas shopping during the same timeframe as the charges. The American Express rep very politely explained that these looked out of character to her. She continued through the charges. She listed a charge for $160 – at this point my adrenaline started kicking in. My wife said she was going to charge about $25 or $30 dollars, not $160. Next, the rep listed a charge for over $1200. Uh oh!! Now I know that my account has been compromised. I informed the rep that we definitely did not make those charges. She replied with, “that’s ok Mr Pope, we declined those charges as well as some others.” We went through the pending charges and there were a couple more that were questionable. The rep very patiently waited while I called my wife on my office phone to verify the charges. Sure enough, my wife had not ordered anything from Netflix or purchased anything with Yahoo Wallet! “No problem Mr Pope, we will remove those charges as well.” “We are going to cancel your wife’s card and send her a new one. She will receive it by 7pm tomorrow via Federal Express. Please watch your statements over the next couple of months. If you notice anything fishy, give us a call and we will take care of it for you.” (Wow, I’m thinking to myself!) “Is there anything else I can help you with Mr Pope?” “Nope, thank you very much for catching this so early and declining those charges!”, I said smiling. Apparently she could hear me smiling on the other end of the phone line because she replied with “keep smiling Mr Pope and have a good rest of your week.” Now THAT’s customer service!  Thank you American Express!!! I shall remain an ever faithful customer. Interesting…

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• Simple Excel Export with EPPlus

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/10/30/simple-excel-export-with-epplus.aspxAnyone I’ve ever met who works with an application that sits in front of a lot of data loves it when they can get that data exported to an Excel file for them to mess around with offline. As both developer and end user of a little website project that I’ve been working on, I found myself wanting to be able to get a bunch of the data that the application was collecting into an Excel file. The great thing about being both an end user and a developer on a project is that you can build the features that you really want! While putting this feature together I came across the fantastic EPPlus library. This library is certainly very well known and popular, but I was so impressed with it that I thought it was worth a quick blog post. This library is extremely powerful; it lets you create and manipulate Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets in .NET code with a high degree of flexibility. My only gripe with the project is that they are not touting how insanely easy it is to build a basic Excel workbook from a simple data source. If I were running this project the approach I’m about to demonstrate in this post would be front and center on the landing page for the project because it shows how easy it really is to get started and serves as a good way to ease yourself in to some of the more advanced features. The website in question uses RavenDB, which means that we’re dealing with POCOs to model the data throughout all layers of the application. I love working like this so when it came time to figure out how to export some of this data to an Excel spreadsheet I wanted to find a way to take an IEnumerable<T> and just have it dumped to Excel with each item in the collection being modeled as a single row in the Excel worksheet. Consider the following class: public class Employee { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public decimal HourlyRate { get; set; } public DateTime HireDate { get; set; } } Now let’s say we have a collection of these represented as an IEnumerable<Employee> and we want to be able to output it to an Excel file for offline querying/manipulation. As it turns out, this is dead simple to do with EPPlus. Have a look: public void ExportToExcel(IEnumerable<Employee> employees, FileInfo targetFile) { using (var excelFile = new ExcelPackage(targetFile)) { var worksheet = excelFile.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromCollection(Collection: employees, PrintHeaders: true); excelFile.Save(); } } That’s it. Let’s break down what’s going on here: Create a ExcelPackage to model the workbook (Excel file). Note that the ‘targetFile’ value here is a FileInfo object representing the location on disk where I want the file to be saved. Create a worksheet within the workbook. Get a reference to the top-leftmost cell (addressed as A1) and invoke the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, passing it our collection of Employee objects. Behind the scenes this is reflecting over the properties of the type provided and pulling out any public members to become columns in the resulting Excel output. The ‘PrintHeaders’ parameter tells EPPlus to grab the name of the property and put it in the first row. Save the Excel file All of the heavy lifting here is being done by the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, and that’s a good thing. Now, this was really easy to do, but it has some limitations. Using this approach you get a very plain, un-styled Excel worksheet. The column widths are all set to the default. The number format for all cells is ‘General’ (which proves particularly interesting if you have a DateTime property in your data source). I’m a “no frills” guy, so I wasn’t bothered at all by trading off simplicity for style and formatting. That said, EPPlus has tons of samples that you can download that illustrate how to apply styles and formatting to cells and a ton of other advanced features that are way beyond the scope of this post.

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• C# 4.0: COM Interop Improvements

  - by Paulo Morgado

  Dynamic resolution as well as named and optional arguments greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as Office Automation Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). But, in order to alleviate even more COM Interop development, a few COM-specific features were also added to C# 4.0. Ommiting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. These parameters are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. Specifically for COM methods, the compiler allows to declare the method call passing the arguments by value and will automatically generate the necessary temporary variables to hold the values in order to pass them by reference and will discard their values after the call returns. From the point of view of the programmer, the arguments are being passed by value. This method call: object fileName = "Test.docx"; object missing = Missing.Value; document.SaveAs(ref fileName, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); can now be written like this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx", Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value); And because all parameters that are receiving the Missing.Value value have that value as its default value, the declaration of the method call can even be reduced to this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx"); Dynamic Import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object form the context of the call, but has to explicitly perform a cast on the returned values to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. To make the developer’s life easier, it is now possible to import the COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic which means that COM signatures have now occurrences of dynamic instead of object. This means that members of a returned object can now be easily accessed or assigned into a strongly typed variable without having to cast. Instead of this code: ((Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1])).Value2 = "Hello World!"; this code can now be used: excel.Cells[1, 1] = "Hello World!"; And instead of this: Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1]); this can be used: Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; Indexed And Default Properties A few COM interface features are still not available in C#. On the top of the list are indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above, these will be possible if the COM interface is accessed dynamically, but will not be recognized by statically typed C# code. No PIAs – Type Equivalence And Type Embedding For assemblies indentified with PrimaryInteropAssemblyAttribute, the compiler will create equivalent types (interfaces, structs, enumerations and delegates) and embed them in the generated assembly. To reduce the final size of the generated assembly, only the used types and their used members will be generated and embedded. Although this makes development and deployment of applications using the COM components easier because there’s no need to deploy the PIAs, COM component developers are still required to build the PIAs.

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• Travelling MVP #4: DevReach 2012

  - by DigiMortal

  Our next stop after Varna was Sofia where DevReach happens. DevReach is one of my favorite conferences in Europe because of sensible prices and strong speakers line-up. Also they have VIP-party after conference and this is good event to meet people you don’t see every day, have some discussion with speakers and find new friends. Our trip from Varna to Sofia took about 6.5 hours on bus. As I was tired from last evening it wasn’t problem for me as I slept half the trip. After smoking pause in Velike Tarnovo I watched movies from bus TV. We had supper later in city center Happy’s – place with good meat dishes and nice service. And next day it begun…. :) DevReach 2012 DevReach is held usually in Arena Mladost. It’s near airport and Telerik office. The event is organized by local MVP Martin Kulov together with Telerik. Two days of sessions with strong speakers is good reason enough for me to go to visit some event. Some topics covered by sessions: Windows 8 development web development SharePoint Windows Azure Windows Phone architecture Visual Studio Practically everybody can find some interesting session in every time slot. As the Arena is not huge it is very easy to go from one sessions to another if selected session for time slot is not what you expected. On the second floor of Arena there are many places where you can eat. There are simple chunk-food places like Burger King and also some restaurants. If you are hungry you will find something for your taste for sure. Also you can buy beer if it is too hot outside :) Weather was very good for October – practically Estonian summer – 25C and over. Sessions I visited Here is the list of sessions I visited at DevReach 2012: DevReach 2012 Opening & Welcome Messsage with Martin Kulov and Stephen Forte Principled N-Tier Solution Design with Steve Smith Data Patterns for the Cloud with Brian Randell .NET Garbage Collection Performance Tips with Sasha Goldshtein Building Secured, Scalable, Low-latency Web Applications with the Windows Azure Platform with Ido Flatow It’s a Knockout! MVVM Style Web Applications with Charles Nurse Web Application Architecture – Lessons Learned from Adobe Brackets with Brian Rinaldi Demystifying Visual Studio 2012 Performance Tools with Martin Kulov SPvNext – A Look At All the Exciting And New Features In SharePoint with Sahil Malik Portable Libraries – Why You Should Care with Lino Tadros I missed some sessions because of some death march projects that are going and that I have to coordinate but it was not big loss as I had time to walk around in session venue neighborhood and see Sofia Business Park. Next year again! I will be there again next year and hopefully more guys from Estonia will join me. I think it’s good idea to take short vacation for DevReach time and do things like we did this time – Bucharest, Varna, Sofia. It’s only good idea to plan some more free time so we are not very much in hurry and also we have no work stuff to do on the trip. This far this trip has been one of best trips I have organized and I will go and meet all those guys in this region again! :)

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• How to Watch NCAA March Madness Online

  - by DigitalGeekery

  You’ve filled out your brackets and now you are ready for one of America’s most popular sporting events. But what if you are you stuck at work or away from your TV?  Or your local affiliate is showing a different game? Today we show how to catch all the March Madness online. March Madness on Demand You’ll need a broadband connection, 512 MB RAM or higher, with cookies and Javascript enabled in your browser. March Madness on Demand offers two viewing options, a Standard Player and a High Quality player. The High Quality player is not, unfortunately, high definition. Standard Player Requirements Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X IE 6+ (We also successfully tested it in Firefox, Chrome, & Opera) Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher High Quality Player Requirements 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 or Intel-based Macintosh Mac OS 10.4.8+ (Intel-based) Windows: XP SP2, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, Windows 7 Firefox 1.5+ or IE 6/7/8 Silverlight 3 browser plug-in Watching March Madness on Demand Go to the March Madness on Demand website. (Link below) Check the “Watch in High Quality” section to see if your browser is ready and compatible for the High Quality viewer. If not, you’ll see a message indicating either your browser and system are incompatible… Or that you need to install Silverlight. To install Silverlight, click on the “Get HQ” button and follow the prompts to download and install Silverlight. To launch the player, click the large red “Launch Player” button. At the top of the screen, you’ll see the current and upcoming games. Click on “Watch Now” below to begin watching. At the bottom left, is where you click to watch with the High Quality player. If to many people are watching the High Quality player, you’ll see the following message and have to go back to the Standard Player. At the lower right are volume controls, a “Full Screen” button, and a “Share” button which allows you to share the game you are watching on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps most importantly for those who want to steal a bit of viewing time while at work is the “Boss Button” at the top right. Clicking on the “Boss Button” will open a fake Office document so it may appear at first glance like you’re actually doing legitimate work. To return to the game, click anywhere on the screen with your mouse. You’ll be able to catch every single game of the tournament from the first round all the way through the championship with March Madness on Demand. If your computer and Internet connection can handle it, you can even watch multiple games at the same time by opening March Madness on Demand in multiple browser windows. Watch March Madness online Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Weekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTVWatch NFL Sunday Night Football On Your PCWatch TV On Your PC with FreeZ Online TVGeek Fun: Download Favorite NBC Programs for FreeDitch the RealPlayer Bloat with Real Alternative TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet

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• Make Text and Images Easier to Read with the Windows 7 Magnifier

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Do you have impaired vision or find it difficult to read small print on your computer screen? Today, we’ll take a closer look at how to magnify that hard to read content with the Magnifier in Windows 7. Magnifier was available in previous versions of Windows, but the Windows 7 version comes with some notable improvements. There are now three screen modes in Magnifier. Full Screen and Lens mode, however, require Windows Aero to be enabled. If your computer doesn’t support Aero, or if you’re not using am Aero theme, Magnifier will only work in Docked mode. Using Magnifier in Windows 7 You can find the Magnifier by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Ease of Access > Magnifier.   Alternately, you can type magnifier into the Search box in the Start Menu and hit Enter. On the Magnifier toolbar, choose your View mode by clicking Views and choosing from the available options. Clicking the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons will zoom in or zoom out. You can change the zoom in/out percentage by adjusting the slider bar. You can also enable color inversion and select tracking options. Click OK when finished to save your settings.   After a brief period, the Magnifier Toolbar will switch to a magnifying glass icon. Simply click the magnifying glass to display the Magnifier Toolbar again.   Docked Mode In Docked mode, a portion of the screen is magnified and docked at the top of the screen. The rest of your desktop will remain in it’s normal state. You can then control which area of the screen is magnified by moving your mouse.   Full Screen Mode This magnifies your entire screen and follows your mouse as you move it around. If you loose track of where you are on the screen, use the Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar shortcut to preview where your mouse pointer is on the screen.   Lens Mode The Lens screen mode is similar to holding a magnifying glass up to your screen. Full screen mode magnifies the area around the mouse. The magnified area moves around the screen with your mouse.    Shortcut Keys Windows key + (+) to zoom in Windows key + (-) to zoom out Windows key + ESC to exit Ctrl + Alt + F – Full screen mode Ctrl + Alt + L – Lens mode Ctrl + Alt + D – Dock mode Ctrl + Alt + R – Resize the lens Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar – Preview full screen Conclusion Windows Magnifier is a nice little tool if you have impaired vision or just need to make items on the screen easier to read. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips New Features in WordPad and Paint in Windows 7How-To Geek on Lifehacker: How to Make Windows Vista Less AnnoyingUsing Comments in Word 2007 DocumentsMake Your PC Look Like Windows Phone 7Use Image Placeholders to Display Documents Faster in Word TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide

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• New Release of Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)

  - by Theresa Hickman

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

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• PDF Converter Elite Giveaway – Lets you create, convert and edit any type of PDF with ease

  - by Gopinath

  Are you looking for a PDF editing software that lets you create, edit and convert  any type of PDF with ease? Then here is a chance for you to win a lifetime free license of PDF Converter Elite software. Tech Dreams in partnership with pdfconverter.com  brings a giveaway contest exclusively for our readers. Continue reading to know the features of the application and giveaway contest details Adobe Acrobat  is the best software for creating, editing and converting PDF files, but you need spend a lot of money to buy it. PDF Converter Elite, which is priced at $100 has a rich set of features that satisfies most of your PDF management needs. Here is a quick run down of the feature of the application Create PDF files from almost every popular Windows file format – You can create a PDF  from almost 300 popular file formats supported by Windows. Want to convert a word document to PDF? It’s just a click away. How about converting Excels, PowerPoint presentations, text files, images, etc? Yes, with a single click you will be able to turn them to PDF Files. Convert PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, HTML – This is one of the best features i liked in this software. You can convert a PDF to any MS Office file format without loosing alignment and quality of the document. The converted documents looks exactly same as your PDF documents and you would be surprised to see near 100% layout replication in the converted document. I feel in love with the perfection at which the files are converted. Edit PDF files easily – You can rework with your PDF documents by inserting watermarks, numbers, headers, footers and more. Also you will be able to merge two PDF files, overlay pages, remove unwanted pages, split a single PDF in to multiple files. Secure PDF files by setting password – You can secure PDF files by limiting how others can use them – set password to open the documents, restrict various activities like printing, copy & paste, screen reading, form filling, etc.. If you are looking for an affordable PDF editing application then PDF Converter Elite is there for you. 10 x PDF Converter Elite Licenses Giveaway Here comes the details on wining a free single user license for our readers – we have 10 PDF Converter Elite single user licenses worth of $100 each. To win a license all you need to do is Like Tech Dreams Fan page on Facebook Tweet or Like this post – buttons are available just below the post heading in the top section of this page Finally drop a comment on how you would like to use PDF Converter Elite We will choose 10 winners through a lucky draw and the licenses will be sent to them in a personal email. Names of the winners will also be announced on Tech Dreams. So are you ready to grab a free copy of PDF Converter worth of $100?

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• Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

  - by user462779

  Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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• The Java Community Process: What's Broken and How to Fix It

  - by Tori Wieldt

  In a panel discussion today at TheServerSide Java Symposium, Patrick Curran, Head of the Java Community Process, James Gosling, and ?Reza Rahman, member, Java EE 6 and EJB 3.1 expert groups, discussed the state of the JCP. Moderated by Cameron McKenzie, Editor of TheServerSide.com, they discussed what's wrong with JCP and ways to fix it.What's wrong with the JCP? Reza Rahman was quite supportive of the JCP. "I work as a consultant, and it's much better than getting a decision made a large company," Reza commented. He gave the JCP "Five stars" and explained that as an individual, he was able to have an impact on things that mattered to him. Cameron asked, "Now all these JCP problems came after Oracle acquired Sun, right?" To which the crowd had a good laugh, and the panel all agreed many of the JCP problems existed under Sun. How is the JCP handled differently under Oracle than Sun? "Pretty similar," said James. Oracle "tends more towards practicality" said Reza. "I'm glad to see things moving again, we've got several new JSRs filed," Patrick commented.How to Fix It?They all agreed greater transparency is a top issue. Without it, people assume sinister behavior whether it's there or not. Patrick said that currently spec leads are "encouraged" to be transparent, and the JCP office is planning to submit JSRs to change the JCP process so transparency is mandated, both for mailing lists and issue tracking. Shining a light on problems is the best way to fix them.Reza said the biggest problem is lack of a participation from the community. If more people are involved, a lot of the problems go away. "Developers are too non-chalant, they should realize what happens in the JCP has an direct impact on their career and they need to get involved." Reza commented.Got Involved!During Q&A, someone asked how a developer could get involved. They answered: Pick a JSR you are interested in and follow it. To start, you could read an article about the JSR and comment on the article (expert group members do read the comments). Or read the spec, discuss it with others and post a blog about it. Read the Expert Group proceedings. Join the JCP (free for individuals). Open source projects have code that you can download and play with, download it and provide feedback. Patrick mentioned that the JCP really wants more participation. "One way we are working on it is that we are encouraging JUGs to join the JCP as a group, and that makes all members of the JUG JCP members," Patrick said.They commented that most spec leads are desperate for feedback. "And, please get involved BEFORE the spec is finalized!" James declared. Someone from the audience said it's hard to put valuable time into something before it's baked. Patrick explained that Post Final Draft (PFD) is the time in the JCP process when the spec is mature enough to review but before the spec is finalized. The panel agreed the worst thing that could happen is that most people in the Java community just complain about the JCP without getting involved. Developer Sumit Goyal, conference attendee, thought it was a healthy discussion. "I got insights into how JSRs are worked on and finalized," he said.Key LinksThe Java Community Process Website  http://jcp.org/en/home/indexArticle: A Conversation with JCP Chair Patrick Curran Oracle Technology Network http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.htmlTheServerSide Java Symposium  http://javasymposium.techtarget.com/

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• Cloud Computing Architecture Patterns: Don’t Focus on the Client

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally I try to put topics in the positive in other words "Do this" not "Don't do that". Sometimes its clearer to focus on what *not* to do. Popular development processes often start with screen mockups, or user input descriptions. In a scale-out pattern like Cloud Computing on Windows Azure, that's the wrong place to start. Start with the Data    Instead, I recommend that you start with the data that a process requires. That data might be temporary or persisted, but starting with the data and its requirements helps to define not only the storage engine you need but also drives everything from security to the integrity of the application. For instance, assume the requirements show that the user must enter their phone number, and that this datum is used in a contact management system further down the application chain. For that datum, you can determine what data type you need (U.S. only or International?) the security requirements, whether it needs ACID compliance, how it will be searched, indexed and so on. From one small data point you can extrapolate out your options for storing and processing the data. Here's the interesting part, which begins to break the patterns that we've used for decades: all of the data doesn't have the same requirements. The phone number might be best suited for a list, or an element, or a string, with either BASE or ACID requirements, based on how it is used. That means we don't have to dump everything into XML, an RDBMS, a NoSQL engine, or a flat file exclusively. In fact, one record might use all of those depending on the use-case requirements. Next Is Data Management  With the data defined, we can move on to how to store the data. Again, the requirements now dictate whether we need a full relational calculus or set-based operations, or we can choose another method based on the requirements for the data. And breaking another pattern its OK to store in more than once, in more than one location. We do this all the time for reporting systems and Business Intelligence systems, so this is a pattern we need to think about even for OLTP data. Move to Data Transport How does the data get around? We can use a connection-based method, sending the data along a transport to the storage engine, but in some cases we may want to use a cache, a queue, the Service Bus, or Complex Event Processing. Finally, Data Processing Most RDBMS engines, NoSQL, and certainly Big Data engines not only store data, but can process and manipulate it as well. Its doubtful that you'll calculate that phone number right? Well, if you're the phone company, you most certainly will. And so we see that even once we've chosen the data type, storage and engine, the same element can have different computing requirements based on how it is used. Sure, We Need A Front-End At Some Point Not all data is entered by human hands in fact most data isn't. We don't really need a Graphical User Interface (GUI) we need some way for a GUI to get data into and out of the systems listed earlier.   But when we do need to allow users to enter or examine data, that should be left to the GUI that best fits the device the user has. Ever tried to use an application designed for a web browser on a phone? Or one designed for a tablet on a phone? Its usually quite painful. The siren song of "We'll just write one interface for all devices" is strong, and has beguiled many an unsuspecting architect. But they just don't work out.   Instead, focus on the data, its transport and processing. Create API calls or a message system that allows for resilient transport to the device or interface, and let it do what it does best. References Microsoft Architecture Journal:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx Patterns and Practices:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921345.aspx Windows Azure iOS, Android, Windows 8 Mobile Devices SDK: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started-ios/ Windows Azure Facebook SDK: http://ntotten.com/2013/03/14/using-windows-azure-mobile-services-with-the-facebook-sdk-for-windows-phone/

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• Persisting settings without using Options dialog in Visual Studio

  - by Utkarsh Shigihalli

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2013/11/02/persisting-settings-without-using-options-dialog-in-visual-studio.aspxIn one of my previous blog post we have seen persisting settings using Visual Studio's options dialog. Visual Studio options has many advantages in automatically persisting user options for you. However, during our latest Team Rooms extension development, we decided to provide our users; ability to use our preferences directly from Team Explorer. The main reason was that we had only one simple option for user and we thought it is cumbersome for user to go to Tools –> Options dialog to change this. Another reason was, we wanted to highlight this setting to user as soon as he is using our extension.   So if you are in such a scenario where you do not want to use VS options window, but still would like to persist the settings, this post will guide you through. Visual Studio SDK provides two ways to persist settings in your extensions. One is using DialogPage as shown in my previous post. Another way is to use by implementing IProfileManager interface which I will explain in this post. Please note that the class implementing IProfileManager should be independent class. This is because, VS instantiates this class during Tools –> Import and Export Settings. IProfileManager provides 2 different sets of methods (total 4 methods) to persist the settings. They are LoadSettingsFromXml and SaveSettingsToXml – Implement these methods to persist settings to disk from VS settings storage. The VS will persist your settings along with other options to disk. LoadSettingsFromStorage and SaveSettingsToStorage – Implement these methods to persist settings to local storage, usually it be registry. VS calls LoadSettingsFromStorage method when it is initializing the package too. We are going to use the 2nd set of methods for this example. First, we are creating a separate class file called UserOptions.cs. Please note that, we also need to implement IComponent, which can be done by inheriting Component along with IProfileManager. [ComVisible(true)] [Guid("XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX")] public class UserOptions : Component, IProfileManager { private const string SUBKEY_NAME = "TForVS2013"; private const string TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING = "TrayNotifications"; ... } Define the property so that it can be used to set and get from other classes. public bool TrayNotifications { get; set; } Implement the members of IProfileManager. public void LoadSettingsFromStorage() { RegistryKey reg = null; try { using (reg = Package.UserRegistryRoot.OpenSubKey(SUBKEY_NAME)) { if (reg != null) { // Key already exists, so just update this setting. TrayNotifications = Convert.ToBoolean(reg.GetValue(TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING, true)); } } } catch (TeamRoomException exception) { TrayNotifications = true; ExceptionReporting.Report(exception); } finally { if (reg != null) { reg.Close(); } } } public void LoadSettingsFromXml(IVsSettingsReader reader) { reader.ReadSettingBoolean(TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING, out _isTrayNotificationsEnabled); TrayNotifications = (_isTrayNotificationsEnabled == 1); } public void ResetSettings() { } public void SaveSettingsToStorage() { RegistryKey reg = null; try { using (reg = Package.UserRegistryRoot.OpenSubKey(SUBKEY_NAME, true)) { if (reg != null) { // Key already exists, so just update this setting. reg.SetValue(TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING, TrayNotifications); } else { reg = Package.UserRegistryRoot.CreateSubKey(SUBKEY_NAME); reg.SetValue(TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING, TrayNotifications); } } } catch (TeamRoomException exception) { ExceptionReporting.Report(exception); } finally { if (reg != null) { reg.Close(); } } } public void SaveSettingsToXml(IVsSettingsWriter writer) { writer.WriteSettingBoolean(TRAY_NOTIFICATIONS_STRING, TrayNotifications ? 1 : 0); } Let me elaborate on the method implementation. The Package class provides UserRegistryRoot (which is HKCU\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0 for VS2013) property which can be used to create and read the registry keys. So basically, in the methods above, I am checking if the registry key exists already and if not, I simply create it. Also, in case there is an exception I return the default values. If the key already exists, I update the value. Also, note that you need to make sure that you close the key while exiting from the method. Very simple right? Accessing and settings is simple too. We just need to use the exposed property. UserOptions.TrayNotifications = true; UserOptions.SaveSettingsToStorage(); Reading settings is as simple as reading a property. UserOptions.LoadSettingsFromStorage(); var trayNotifications = UserOptions.TrayNotifications; Lastly, the most important step. We need to tell Visual Studio shell that our package exposes options using the UserOptions class. For this we need to decorate our package class with ProvideProfile attribute as below. [ProvideProfile(typeof(UserOptions), "TForVS2013", "TeamRooms", 110, 110, false, DescriptionResourceID = 401)] public sealed class TeamRooms : Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Package { ... } That's it. If everything is alright, once you run the package you will also see your options appearing in "Import Export settings" window, which allows you to export your options.

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• IIS Logfile Visualization with XNA

  - by BobPalmer

  In my office, I have a wall mounted monitor who's whole purpose in life is to display perfmon stats from our various servers.  And on a fairly regular basis, I have folks walk by asking what the lines mean.    After providing the requisite explaination about CPU utilization, disk I/O bottlenecks, etc. this is usually followed by some blank stares from the user in question, and a distillation of all of our engineering wizardry down to the phrase 'So when the red line goes up that's bad then?'   This of course would not do.  So I talked to my friends and our network admin about an option to show something more eye catching and visual, with which we could catch at a glance a feel for what was up with our site.    He initially pointed me out to a video showing GLTail and Chipmunk done in Ruby.  Realizing this was both awesome, and that I needed an excuse to do something in XNA, I decided to knock out a proof of concept for something very similar, but with a few tweaks.   Here's a link to a video of the current prototype:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_PWZbtH2I   Essentially this app opens up a log file (even an active one) and begins pulling out the lines of text.  (Here's a good Code Project link that covers how to do tail reading from an active text file: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/files/tail.aspx).   As new data is added, a bubble is generated in the application - a GET statement comes from the left, and a POST from the right.  I then run it through a series of expression checkers, and based on the kind of statement and the pattern, a bubble of an appropriate color is generated.   For example, if I get a 500, a huge red bubble pops out.  Others are based on the part of the system the page is from - i.e. green bubbles are from our claims management subsystem, and blue bubbles are from the pages our scheduling staff use to schedule patients.  Others include the purple bubbles for security and login, and yellow bubbles for some miscellaneous pages.   The little grey bubbles represent things like images, JS, CSS, etc - and their small size makes them work like grease to keep the larger page bubbles moving.   The app is also smart enough that if it is starting to bog down with handling the physics and interactions, it will suspend new bubbles until enough have dropped off that performance can resume (you can see this slight stuttering in the sample video).   The net result is that anyone will be able to look up on the wall monitor, and instantly get a quick feel for how things are going on the floor.  Website slow?  You can get a feel for both volume and utilized modules with one glance.  Website crashing?  Look for a wall of giant red bubbles.  No activity at all?  Maybe the site is down.  Now couple this with utilization within a farm, and cross referenced with a second app showing the same kind of data from your SQL database...   As for the app itself, it's a windows XNA project with the code in C#.   The physics are handled by the Farseer physicis eingine for XNA (http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics) which is just pure goodness.  The samples are great, and I had the app up and working in two evenings (half of that was fine tuning, and the other was me coding with a kid in my lap).   My next steps include wiring this to SQL (I have some ideas...), and adding a nice configuration module.  For example, you could use polygons, etc to tie to your regex - or more entertaining things like having a little human ragdoll to represent a user login.     Once that's wrapped up and I have a chance to complete some hardening, I will be releasing the whole thing into the wild as opensource.     Feel free to ping me if you have any questions! -Bob

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• Where should I start with debugging my exchange server?

  - by joadha

  I'm (foolishly?) attempting to install Exchange on top of Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) over Virtual Box running on Mac OSX Lion. Everything went smoothly until I got to the "Readiness Checks" tab. Readiness failed spectacularly on Hub Transport Role and Mailbox Role prereqs. Before I go too far down the rabbit hole in attempting to remedy this, I was hoping I could get some input on where to start in all of this. I already set up the following Active Directory roles, but it didn't seem to help: Active Directory Domain Services Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services I also enabled an Application Server role. Those three are the only roles I've set up-- I cannot locate within Server Manager the Organization Manager role or any of the other roles referenced in the list of borkedness below. Is this a typical experience in Exchange installation? Is there a tutorial created by somebody outside of Microsoft? Here's the output from Readiness Checks: Summary: 5 item(s). 2 succeeded, 3 failed. Elapsed time: 00:00:53 Configuring Prerequisites Completed Elapsed Time: 00:00:00 Languages Prerequisites Completed Elapsed Time: 00:00:09 Hub Transport Role Prerequisites Failed Error: Active Directory does not exist or cannot be contacted. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/? linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=51e5500d-8b18-4eee-bb8e-925d063b60a1 Error: You must be a member of the 'Organization Management' role group or 'Enterprise Admins' group to continue. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=1d750594-9222-44d7-8f80-45e522e889e6 Error: Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active Directory: Could not find information about the local domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: You must be logged on as an Exchange organization administrator to install or upgrade the first Hub Transport server role in the topology. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=e58f51fd-2c66-4a4b-914a-628dccf9a09f Error: The 'IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility' component is not installed. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=0a71c4f6-68de-40f7-94cf-74b73cbda37b Error: The 'IIS 7 Basic Authentication' component required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Windows Authentication' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 .NET Extensibility' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=5f29a861-f472-4f11-a23a-04155373f5ed Error: This computer is not part of a Windows domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: The user is not logged on to a Windows domain Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Warning: This computer requires the Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs. Please install the software from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=191548 Warning: The 'IIS 6 Management Console' component is recommended as it allows for the administration of all server roles. Install the component via Server Manager. Warning: Setup cannot verify that the 'Host' (A) record for this computer exists within the DNS database on server 10.1.10.1. Elapsed Time: 00:00:15 Client Access Role Prerequisites Failed Error: Active Directory does not exist or cannot be contacted. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=51e5500d-8b18-4eee-bb8e-925d063b60a1 Error: Unable to read data from the Metabase. Ensure that Microsoft Internet Information Services is installed. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=a4a4d339-4009-4fb7-b842-ca2ba79f13f0 Error: The World Wide Web (W3SVC) service is either disabled or not installed on this computer. You must exit Setup, install the required component, then restart the Setup process. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=9eeaa77f-4d46-4d9a-9c36-f262a075392b Error: You must be a member of the 'Organization Management' role group or 'Enterprise Admins' group to continue. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=1d750594-9222-44d7-8f80-45e522e889e6 Error: Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active Directory: Could not find information about the local domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: You must be logged on as an Exchange organization administrator to install or upgrade the first Client Access server role in the topology. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=e58f51fd-2c66-4a4b-914a-628dccf9a09f Error: The 'IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility' component is not installed. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=0a71c4f6-68de-40f7-94cf-74b73cbda37b Error: The 'IIS 6 Management Console' component is not installed. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=0a71c4f6-68de-40f7-94cf-74b73cbda37b Error: The 'IIS 7 Dynamic Content Compression' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/? linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Static Content Compression' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Basic Authentication' component required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Windows Authentication' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Digest Authentication' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 .NET Extensibility' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=5f29a861-f472-4f11-a23a-04155373f5ed Error: This computer is not part of a Windows domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: The user is not logged on to a Windows domain Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Warning: Setup cannot verify that the 'Host' (A) record for this computer exists within the DNS database on server 10.1.10.1. Elapsed Time: 00:00:14 Mailbox Role Prerequisites Failed Error: Active Directory does not exist or cannot be contacted. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=51e5500d-8b18-4eee-bb8e-925d063b60a1 Error: Unable to read data from the Metabase. Ensure that Microsoft Internet Information Services is installed. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=a4a4d339-4009-4fb7-b842-ca2ba79f13f0 Error: The World Wide Web (W3SVC) service is either disabled or not installed on this computer. You must exit Setup, install the required component, then restart the Setup process. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=9eeaa77f-4d46-4d9a-9c36-f262a075392b Error: You must be a member of the 'Organization Management' role group or 'Enterprise Admins' group to continue. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=1d750594-9222-44d7-8f80-45e522e889e6 Error: Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active Directory: Could not find information about the local domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: You must be logged on as an Exchange organization administrator to install or upgrade the first Mailbox server role in the topology. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=e58f51fd-2c66-4a4b-914a-628dccf9a09f Error: The 'IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility' component is not installed. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=0a71c4f6-68de-40f7-94cf-74b73cbda37b Error: The 'IIS 6 Management Console' component is not installed. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=0a71c4f6-68de-40f7-94cf-74b73cbda37b Error: The 'IIS 7 Basic Authentication' component required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 Windows Authentication' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=41a25c5e-0d39-4e55-a1f0-7be885982236 Error: The 'IIS 7 .NET Extensibility' component is required. Install the component via Server Manager. Click here for help... http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=30939&l=en&v=ExBPA.14&id=5f29a861-f472-4f11-a23a-04155373f5ed Error: This computer is not part of a Windows domain. Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Error: The user is not logged on to a Windows domain Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&e=ms.exch.err.Ex28883C&l=0&cl=cp Warning: This computer requires the Microsoft Office 2010 Filter Packs. Please install the software from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=191548 Warning: Setup cannot verify that the 'Host' (A) record for this computer exists within the DNS database on server 10.1.10.1. Elapsed Time: 00:00:14

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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• Oracle Social Network and the Flying Monkey Smart Target

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I teased this before OpenWorld, and for those of you who didn’t make it to the show or didn’t come by the Office Hours to take the Oracle Social Network Technical Tour Noel (@noelportugal) ran, I give you the Flying Monkey Smart Target. In brief, Noel built a target, about two feet tall, which when struck, played monkey sounds and posted a comment to an Oracle Social Network Conversation, all controlled by a Raspberry Pi. He also connected a Dropcam to record the winner just prior to the strike. I’m not sure how it all works, but maybe Noel can post the technical specifics. Here’s Noel describing the Challenge, the Target and a few other tidbit in an interview with Friend of the ‘Lab, Bob Rhubart (@brhubart). The monkey target bits are 2:12-2:54 if you’re into brevity, but watch the whole thing. Here are some screen grabs from the Oracle Social Network Conversation, including the Conversation itself, where you can see all the strikes documented, the picture captured, and the annotation capabilities: #gallery-1 { margin: auto;? } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; }    That’s Diego in one shot, looking very focused, and Ernst in the other, who kindly annotated himself, two of the development team members. You might have seen them in the Oracle Social Network Hands-On Lab during the show. There’s a trend here. Not by accident, fun stuff like this has becoming our calling card, e.g. the Kscope 12 WebCenter Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots. Not only are these entertaining demonstrations, but they showcase what’s possible with RESTful APIs and get developers noodling on how easy it is to connect real objects to cloud services to fix pain points. I spoke to some great folks from the City of Atlanta about extending the concepts of the flying monkey target to physical asset monitoring. Just take an internet-connected camera with REST APIs like the Dropcam, wire it up to Oracle Social Netwok, and you can hack together a monitoring device for a datacenter or a warehouse. Sure, it’s easier said than done, but we’re a lot closer to that reality than we were even two years ago. Another noteworthy bit from Noel’s interview, beginning at 2:55, is the evolution of social developer. Speaking of, make sure to check out the Oracle Social Developer Community. Look for more on the social developer in the coming months. Noel has become quite the Raspberry Pi evangelist, and why not, it’s a great tool, a low-power Linux machine, cheap ($35!) and highly extensible, perfect for makers and students alike. He attended a meetup on Saturday before OpenWorld, and during the show, I heard him evangelizing the Pi and its capabilities to many people. There is some fantastic innovation forming in that ecosystem, much of it with Java. The OTN gang raffled off five Pis, and I expect to see lots of great stuff in the very near future. Stay tuned this week for posts on all our Challenge entrants. There’s some great innovation you won’t want to miss. Find the comments. Update: I forgot to mention that Noel used Twilio, one of his favorite services, during the show to send out Challenge updates and information to all the contestants.

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• Oracle Products Reflect Key Trends Shaping Enterprise 2.0

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Following up on his predictions for 2011, we asked Enterprise 2.0 veteran Andy MacMillan to map out the ways Oracle solutions are at the forefront of industry trends--and how Oracle customers can benefit in the coming year. 1. Increase organizational awareness | Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a unique set of capabilities to drive organizational awareness. In particular, the expansive activity graph connects users directly to key enterprise applications, activities, and interests. In this way, applicable and critical business information is automatically and immediately visible--in the context of key tasks--via real-time dashboards and comprehensive reporting. Oracle WebCenter Suite also integrates key E2.0 services, such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, into critical business processes, including back-office systems of records such as ERP and CRM systems. 2. Drive online customer engagement | Oracle Real-Time Decisions With more and more business being conducted on the Web, driving increased online customer engagement becomes a critical key to success. This effort is usually spearheaded by an increasingly important executive role, the Head of Online, who usually reports directly to the CMO. To help manage the Web experience online, Oracle solutions are driving a new kind of intelligent social commerce by combining Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions with leading e-commerce and product recommendations. Oracle Real-Time Decisions provides multichannel recommendations for content, products, and services--including seamless integration across Web, mobile, and social channels. The result: happier customers, increased customer acquisition and retention, and improved critical success metrics such as shopping cart abandonment. 3. Easily build composite applications | Oracle Application Development Framework Thanks to the shared user experience strategy across Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Fusion Applications and many other Oracle Applications, customers can easily create real, customer-specific composite applications using Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Application Development Framework. Oracle Application Development Framework components provide modular user interface components that can build rich, social composite applications. In addition, a broad set of components spanning BPM, SOA, ECM, and beyond can be quickly and easily incorporated into composite applications. 4. Integrate records management into a global content platform | Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g provides leading records management capabilities as part of a unified ECM platform for managing records, documents, Web content, digital assets, enterprise imaging, and application imaging. This unique strategy provides comprehensive records management in a consistent, cost-effective way, and enables organizations to consolidate ECM repositories and connect ECM to critical business applications. 5. Achieve ECM at extreme scale | Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Exadata To support the high-performance demands of a unified and rationalized content platform, Oracle has pioneered highly scalable and high-performing ECM infrastructures. Two innovations in particular helped make this happen. The core ECM platform itself moved to an Enterprise Java architecture, so organizations can now use Oracle WebLogic Server for enhanced scalability and manageability. Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g can leverage Oracle Exadata for extreme performance and scale. Likewise, Oracle Exalogic--Oracle's foundation for cloud computing--enables extreme performance for processor-intensive capabilities such as content conversion or dynamic Web page delivery. Learn more about Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

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• Technology vs. Antiquated Methods

  - by AreYouSerious

  So Here I am talking with my Program lead, about technology, and how while my father is the VP of a major company, he still doesn't have a blackberry, or a smart phone. and I think it's funny. Most people would say it's a generational thing. That because he's older, he dosen't accept technology, and that's why. I have trouble swallowing that because this is the same man, who bought a satellite radio for his car, and made sure that the printer for the house was networked so that his and my mom's laptop could print wirelessly from the living room through their wireless network. I think it has to do with more with necessity, and partially with finical responsibility. My father is very financially conciencious. Think about it yourself. you pay for internet at your home. You have internet access at your office. But if you get a smart phone you're going to pay almost the same amount just for that access. A lot of people take it as just another fixed cost... I'm one of those. I don't even think about it, as I check my facebook from the bus, train, or even while sitting in traffic... The convience of having connection everywhere outweigh the financial responsible person screaming at in the back of my mind. However This conversation lead us to another venue of discussion.... what happens when the power dies. if you left your charger at home, or you phone or navi just stops working... are you going to be able to continue on as you did when it was working... let take the navi as an example... if your navi stops working, how many of you know how to use a map, and navigate? can you even find where you are on a map using the cross streets that your stopped at? This is a skill that unfortunatelly is overlooked these days in the child rearing process. Most people don't see the value, while some others can't do it themselves, so how can they teach their offspring? Take another example.... what if your phone gets lost... or stolen, or you drive over it? do you have the numbers in their memorized? are they recorded somewhere? I know that if it weren't for google sync I wouldn't have them backed up... not sufficiently. And what good does that do if you're in timbuckto and your phone dies, think you can get on the internet to look up those numbers? Don't get me wrong. I'm the first to see the value in technology, and am willing to pay the price to not have to wait for prices to come down. I will pay extra to have that newest thing right now. but let me tell you what.... I know that should I ever procreate it will be a requirement for my offspring (children) to learn how to do something manually before I'll let them use technology. Food for thought?? Let everyone else know what you think.... just sayin'

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• Silverlight Cream for January 08, 2011 -- #1023

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Heavy and yet incomplete Issue: Mike Wolf, Walter Ferrari, Colin Eberhardt, Mathew Charles, Don Burnett, Senthil Kumar, cherylws, Rob Miles, Derik Whittaker, Thomas Martinsen(-2-), Jason Ginchereau, Vishal Nayan, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight)" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf" Rob Miles Sharepoint/Silverlight: "Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight - Part 1" Walter Ferrari Shoutouts: Dave Isbitski has announced a WP7 Firestarter, check for your local MS office: Announcing the “Light up your Silverlight Applications for Windows 7 Firestarter” From SilverlightCream.com: Leveraging Silverlight in the USA TODAY Windows 7-Based Slate App Mike Wolf has a post up about Cynergy's release of the new USA TODAY software for Windows 7 Slate devices, and gives a great rundown of all the resources, and how specific Silverlight features were used... tons of outstanding external links here! Discover Sharepoint with Silverlight - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has tutorial up at SilverlightShow... looks like the first in a series on Silverlight and Sharepoint... lots of low-level info about the internals and using them. Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight) Colin Eberhardt has a really cool AutoTooltip attached behavior that gives a tooltip of the actual text if text is trimmed ... and has an active demo on the post... very cool. RIA Services Output Caching Mathew Charles digs into a RIA feature that hasn't gotten any blog love: output caching, describing all the ins and outs of improving the performance of your app using caching. Emailing your Files to Box.net Cloud Storage with WP7 Don Burnett details out everything you need to do to get Box.Net and your WP7 setup to talk to each other. Shortcuts keys for Developing on Windows Phone 7 Emulator Senthil Kumar has some good WP7 posts up ... this one is a cheatsheet list of Function-key assignements for the WP7 emulator... another sidebar listint Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines – Cheat Sheet cherylws has a great Guideline list/Cheat Sheet up for reference while building a WP7 app... this is a great reference... I'm adding it to the Right-hand sidebar of WynApse.com Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf Rob Miles has added another book and color to his collection of both -- Windows Phone Programming in C#, also known as the Windows Phone Blue Book... get a copy from the links he gives, and check out his other free books as well. Navigating to an external URL using the HyperlinkButton Derik Whittaker has a post up discussing the woes (and error messages) of trying to navigate to an external URL with the Hyperlink button in WP7, plus his MVVM-friendly solution that you can download. Set Source on Image from code in Silverlight Thomas Martinsen has a couple posts up... first is this quick one on the code required to set an image source. Show UI element based on authentication Thomas Martinsen's latest is one on a BoolToVisibilityConverter allowing a boolean indicator of Authentication to be used to control the visibility of a button (in the sample) WP7 ReorderListBox improvements: rearrange animations and more Jason Ginchereau has updated his ReorderListBox from last week to add some animations (fading/sliding) during the rearrangement. Navigation in Silverlight Without Using Navigation Framework Vishal Nayan has a post that attracted my attention... Navigation by manipulating RootVisual content... I've been knee-deep in similar code in Prism this week (and why my blogging is off) ... Creating a WP7 Custom Control in 7 Steps WindowsPhoneGeek creates a simple custom control for WP7 before your very eyes in his latest post, focusing on the minimum requirements necessary for writing a Custom Control. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• ORACLE is WEB 2.0

  - by anca.rosu

  You never know what to expect in life, where it can take you and what kind of fulfillment it can offer you. It’s just like an amazing lottery with millions of winning tickets. My name is Paula, I am an Online Marketing Specialist at Oracle University and this is my story. Having graduated from a technical profile college, it seemed almost normal to follow the same career path. But I said no. I wanted to try something else, so I took an Advertising Masters Program and I really became in love with this entire industry. Advertising and the new impact of the Internet through social networking is my current fascination. I knew I had to work to incorporate both my skills intro one dream job. I want to believe that I have come to work at Oracle as part of a great plan that life has for me. It’s not the most glamorous job in advertising or in the fashion industry, but it’s everything you need to start investing in your development and to build relationships. A normal day at work begins at 9.30 at our Oracle Office in Bucharest. After a short chit-chat, coffee and some conference calls, marketing gets to work! Some of the members of my team are working besides me but others are based all over Europe. This is extremely useful when coordinating the EMEA Marketing for Oracle University, because this way it’s easier to keep an eye on these various locations. Even though it’s a team play, you need to speak up and make your mark. I am the kind of person that never stands-by and waits to be given directions, I am curious and intuitive. This makes things easier. In Oracle you really need to find your own way and to discover how to organize your time and how to get involved with people. People to people, this is the focus. But everything is up to you and it strongly depends on the type of personality that you have. I try to get involved in various activities, participate in Oracle Days Events, interact and meet all kinds of people. For those who are newly graduates or interns, Oracle has lots of trainings and webcasts you can attend to help you develop your career shape and to understand better the way the business works. You can also be awarded for ideas and setting the trends so that makes it worth it. What I like most about my job is the fact that I can come with ideas and bring them to life. For example Oracle University has a special seminar program called “Celebrity Seminars” where top industry speakers teach 1-day or 2-day condensed seminars. We thought of creating something exclusive and a video was the best idea. So my colleague and I became reporters for a day and interviewed this well-known speaker regarding his seminar. I think this is a good way to market this business. Live footage is a very good marketing tool so we are planning to use the video to target our online audiences via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This can even go in the newsletters that marketing sends regarding the Celebrity Seminars. This is what I meant when I said Oracle is a free spirited organization and you can surely find your place here among us. The best way to describe my job is WEB 2.0. The modern online approach comes to life while we are trying to sell our business. We need to be out there and we are responsible of spreading the buzz regarding our training offerings and our official courseware materials. There are so many new ways to interact with the target audience nowadays and I am so eager to discover the best online techniques! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: WEB 2.0,Online Marketing,Oracle University,Bucharest,events,graduates,interns,training,webcast,seminar,newsletters,business,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn

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• Oracle Fusion CRM Implementation Bootcamp for EMEA Systems Integrators - Paris July 24-26th

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  To support partner success and increase win potential with Fusion CRM, we are organizing a unique bootcamp on Fusion CRM intended for Oracle EMEA partners on July 24th to 26th. Join us for this outstanding Bootcamp and learn from Oracle Corporation in-depth know-how on Fusion CRM. The official announcement will be forthcoming, yet we wanted you to determine the appropriate candidate to attend this workshop. Further to this we will send the actual invitation to the selected candidate. Due to the limited number of seats, we will be limiting the number of registrations per SI company and will be selecting the participants. If you are interested to have one or more representatives of your company to attend this bootcamp, please send an email to [email protected] by June 18th indicating the name and email address of the participants you would like to nominate, ranked by priority. What will we cover: This Bootcamp presents the fundamental concepts of the Oracle Fusion CRM applications. It introduces you to each functional area of the product, how it is used, and what you need to consider when implementing it for an organization. While we do examine implementation considerations, we do not address the detailed steps of implementation. Instead, we direct you to the relevant resources to learn more. Topics covered: Fusion CRM Introduction Fusion CRM Security Introduction Fusion Functional Setup Manager Introduction Customer Model Introduction Customer Center Introduction Customer Data Management Introduction Marketing & Campaigns Introduction Lead Management Introduction Territory Management Introduction Territory Modeling Introduction with Exercise Opportunity Management Introduction Forecasting Introduction Analytics Introduction CRM For Microsoft Outlook Introduction Customizing with Composers Introduction Roundtable Discussions, and time for hands-on labs (day 2, 3, 4) Next Steps, available resources, ongoing learning path, partner environments, keeping in touch and feedback Bootcamp Goals: Enable a new Fusion CRM implementation team member to: Describe the scope of Oracle Fusion CRM applications Describe the basic security model Describe the customer model Perform common sales and marketing user transactions Access and navigate the Functional Setup Manager Model territories in Fusion CRM using sample business requirements Do necessary planning before implementing the offerings and options Describe the analytics available with the Fusion CRM product Describe the basic page customizations that can be done to meet business requirements Find documentation and other courses to assist in performing setup tasks Expectations: This Bootcamp program should prime the SI organization implementation consultants to attain the basic skills necessary to support a consulting practice in the delivery, scoping, pricing, and planning of your Fusion CRM Implementations. Oracle University will begin to offer additional deep skill training, starting this summer, designed to follow the Introduction Bootcamp. Participants will be expected to participate in labs, exercises, workshops and roundtable discussions with the Oracle Product Managers. Who should attend: This class is designed for your lead CRM Implementation consultants, those who will support your Fusion CRM consulting practice as it grows. These individuals may be members of a centre of excellence, or skills leadership office. The individual who is attending the bootcamp must have prior experience implementing a CRM solution. Intended Audience: Oracle Diamond, Platinum and Gold Level SIs (Top SIs) with specialization in Oracle Applications CRM implementations, with a commitment to achieving Fusion CRM Implementation Specialization. Commitment expressed through an investment in a Center of Excellence/Innovation Center for Fusion CRM Applications. Individuals who will support the implementation practice as it is forming and will deliver Fusion CRM On Premise and Cloud Services implementations. Functional practice leaders, the future Fusion Application Wizards within the SI's organization. This Bootcamp is designed for people who: Will deliver Fusion CRM implementations Have had little or no exposure to Fusion CRM applications Are familiar with at least one other CRM application Have a business analyst level of technical background Prerequisites: Please note, that participants will be asked to take self-service-trainings (video format) and pass the related assessments prior to joining the Bootcamp. Fees: This event is FREE of charge for Oracle partners. When: 24 July – 26 July, 2012 (8:30 - 18:00 each day, including the last day; with recommended but optional evening events on all three days from 18:00 - 20:00 hrs) Where: Paris, France (Location to be defined) Travel: To make your travel hassel free, we kindly suggest you to plan your arrival to Paris on July 23rd and your departure on the 27th. Agenda: The final agenda and registration details will be issued closer to the event date.  

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• Combine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  The Search Bar in Firefox is very useful for finding additional information or images while browsing but the UI space it takes up can be frustrating at times. Now you can reclaim that UI space and still have access to all that searching goodness with the Foobar extension. Note: This is about the Foobar Firefox extension and not to be confused with Foobar2000 the open source music player. Before If you have the “Search Bar” displayed there is no doubt that it is taking up valuable space in your browser’s UI. What you need is the ability to reclaim that UI space and still have the same access to your search capability as before…no more sacrificing one for a gain with the other. After As soon as you have installed the extension you can see that the top part of your browser will look much sleeker without the “Search Bar” to clutter it up. The “Search Engine Icon” will now be visible inside of your “Address Bar” as seen here. You will be able to access the same “Search Engine Menu” as before by clicking on the “Search Engine Icon”. There are two display modes for search results (setting available in the “Options”). The first one shown here is “Simple Mode” where all results are in a condensed format. Notice that not only are there search suggestions but also “Bookmarks & History” listings as well. You can literally get the best of both when conducting a search. Note: The number of entries for search suggestions and bookmark/history listings can be adjusted higher or lower in the “Options”. The second one is “Rich Mode” where the results are shown with more details. Choose the “mode” that best suits your personal style. For our first example you can see the results when we conducted a quick search on “Windows 7” (using the first of the three offerings shown from Bing). Our second example was a search for “Flowers” using our Photobucket search engine. Once again nice results opened in a new tab for us. Options The options are easy to go through. It is really nice to be able to choose the number of results that you want displayed and the format that you want them shown in. Note: Changing the “Suggestion popup style” will require a browser restart to take effect. Conclusion If you love using the “Search Bar” in Firefox but want to reclaim the UI space then you will definitely want to add this extension to your browser. The ability to customize the number of results and choose the formatting make this extension even better. Links Download the Foobar extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Combine the Address Bar and Progress Bar Together in FirefoxHide Some or All of the GUI Bars in FirefoxEnable Partial Match AutoComplete in the Firefox Address BarQuick Firefox UI TweaksAdd Search Forms to the Firefox Search Bar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor Add Multiple Tabs to Office Programs The Wearing of the Green – St. Patrick’s Day Theme (Firefox) Perform a Background Check on Yourself

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Texas Industries, Inc.

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. TXI is based in Dallas and employs around 2,000 employees. The customer had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. TXI implemented a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging, a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition to send  the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing.  TXI significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing,  increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average. Company OverviewTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. With operating subsidiaries in six states, TXI is the largest producer of cement in Texas and a major producer in California. TXI is a major supplier of stone, sand, gravel, and expanded shale and clay products, and one of the largest producers of bagged cement and concrete  products in the Southwest. Business ChallengesTXI had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually.  Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. Their business objectives were: Increase the efficiency of core business processes, such as invoice processing, to support the organization’s desire to maintain its role as the Southwest’s leader in delivering high-quality, low-cost products to the construction industry Meet the audit and regulatory requirements for achieving Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance Streamline entry of 180,000 invoices annually to accelerate processing, reduce errors, cut invoice storage and routing costs, and increase visibility into payables liabilities Solution DeployedTXI replaced a resource-intensive, paper-based, decentralized process for invoice entry with a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g. They worked with the Oracle Partner Keste LLC to develop a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and then uses Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition and the Oracle WebCenter Imaging workflow to send the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing. Business Results Significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing through centralization and improved efficiency  Enabled the company to process invoices faster and pay bills earlier, allowing it to take advantage of additional vendor discounts Tracked to increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average Achieved a 25% reduction in paper invoice storage costs now that invoices are captured digitally, and enabled a 50% reduction in shipping costs, as the company no longer has to send paper invoices between headquarters and production facilities for approvals “Entering and manually processing more than 180,000 vendor invoices annually was time and labor intensive. With Oracle Imaging and Process Management, we have automated and centralized invoice entry and processing at our corporate office, improving productivity by 80% and reducing invoice processing cycle times by 84%—a very important efficiency gain.” Terry Marshall, Vice President of Information Services, Texas Industries, Inc. Additional Information TXI Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition

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• Share Folders & Files Between Vista and XP Machines

  - by Mysticgeek

  Since Microsoft has three operating systems in use, chances are you’ll find yourself needing to share files between XP, Vista, Windows 7, or some combination of the three. Here we take a look at sharing between a Vista and XP on your home network. Share Without Password Protected Sharing If you’re not worried about who’s accessing the files and folders, the easiest method is to disable Password Protected Sharing. So on the Vista machine open Network and Sharing Center. Under Sharing and Discovery make sure Network Discovery, File Sharing, and, Public Folder Sharing are turned on. Also turn off Password Protected Sharing… Now go into the Vista Public folder, located in C:\Users\Public, and add what you want to share or create a new folder. In this example we created a new folder called XP_Share and added some files to it. On the XP machine go into My Network Places and under Network Tasks click on View Workgroup Computers. Now you’ll see all of the computers on your network which should be part of the same Workgroup. Here we need to double-click on the Vista computer. And there we go…no password to enter so we can access the XP_Share folder or anything else that is located in the Public folder. Share with Password Protected Sharing If you want to keep Password Protected Sharing turned on, then we need to do things a little different. When it’s turned on and you try to access the Vista machine from XP, you’re prompted for a password, and no matter what you think the credentials are, you can’t get access…very annoying. So what we need to do is add the XP Machine as a user. Right-click on Computer from the Start Menu or desktop icon and select Manage from the context menu. The Computer Management screen opens up and you want to expand Local Users and Groups, then the Users folder. Then right-click any open area an select New User. Now create a new user name and password, you can also fill in the other fields if you want. Then make sure to uncheck User must change password at next logon and check the box next to Password never expires. Click the Create button and close out of the New User screen. You’ll then see the new user we created in the list and you can close out of the Computer Management window. Now back on the XP computer when you double-click on the Vista machine, your prompted to log in. Just type in the username and password you just created. Now you’ll have access to the Public folder contents. Set up Sharing on XP If you want to access a shared folder from the Vista computer located on the XP machine, it’s the same process in reverse. On the XP computer in Shared Documents, right-click on the folder you want to share and select Sharing and Security. Then select the radio button next to Share this folder and click Ok. Go into Computer Management and create a new user… Now from the Vista machine double click on the XP machine icon, enter the password, then access the folders and files you need. If you have multiple versions of Windows on your home network, you’ll now be able to access files and folders from each of them. If you want to share between Windows 7 and XP check out our article on how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP. You might also want to check out our article on how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and Vista. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Hidden Files and Folders in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and VistaShare Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XPHow To Share a Folder the XP Way in Windows VistaMoving Your Personal Data Folders in Windows Vista the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor Add Multiple Tabs to Office Programs The Wearing of the Green – St. Patrick’s Day Theme (Firefox) Perform a Background Check on Yourself

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