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  • Nginx and client certificates from hierarchical OpenSSL-based certification authorities

    - by Fmy Oen
    I'm trying to set up root certification authority, subordinate certification authority and to generate the client certificates signed by any of this CA that nginx 0.7.67 on Debian Squeeze will accept. My problem is that root CA signed client certificate works fine while subordinate CA signed one results in "400 Bad Request. The SSL certificate error". Step 1: nginx virtual host configuration: server { server_name test.local; access_log /var/log/nginx/test.access.log; listen 443 default ssl; keepalive_timeout 70; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:RC4-MD5; ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/server.key; ssl_client_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem; ssl_verify_client on; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 5m; location / { proxy_pass http://testsite.local/; } } Step 2: PKI infrastructure organization for both root and subordinate CA (based on this article): # mkdir ~/pki && cd ~/pki # mkdir rootCA subCA # cp -v /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf rootCA/ # cd rootCA/ # mkdir certs private crl newcerts; touch serial; echo 01 > serial; touch index.txt; touch crlnumber; echo 01 > crlnumber # cp -Rvp * ../subCA/ Almost no changes was made to rootCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/rootca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/rootca.key # The private key and to subCA/openssl.cnf: [ CA_default ] dir = . # Where everything is kept ... certificate = $dir/certs/subca.crt # The CA certificate ... private_key = $dir/private/subca.key # The private key Step 3: Self-signed root CA certificate generation: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/rootca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -x509 -new -key ./private/rootca.key -out certs/rootca.crt -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:rootca Email Address []: Step 4: Subordinate CA certificate generation: # cd ../subCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/subca.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/subca.key -out subca.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/subca.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:subca Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: Step 5: Subordinate CA certificate signing by root CA certificate: # cd ../rootCA/ # openssl ca -in ../subCA/subca.csr -extensions v3_ca -config openssl.cnf Using configuration from openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/rootca.key: Check that the request matches the signature Signature ok Certificate Details: Serial Number: 1 (0x1) Validity Not Before: Feb 4 10:49:43 2013 GMT Not After : Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT Subject: countryName = AU stateOrProvinceName = Some-State organizationName = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd commonName = subca X509v3 extensions: X509v3 Subject Key Identifier: C9:E2:AC:31:53:81:86:3F:CD:F8:3D:47:10:FC:E5:8E:C2:DA:A9:20 X509v3 Authority Key Identifier: keyid:E9:50:E6:BF:57:03:EA:6E:8F:21:23:86:BB:44:3D:9F:8F:4A:8B:F2 DirName:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca serial:9F:FB:56:66:8D:D3:8F:11 X509v3 Basic Constraints: CA:TRUE Certificate is to be certified until Feb 4 10:49:43 2014 GMT (365 days) Sign the certificate? [y/n]:y 1 out of 1 certificate requests certified, commit? [y/n]y ... # cd ../subCA/ # cp -v ../rootCA/newcerts/01.pem certs/subca.crt Step 6: Server certificate generation and signing by root CA (for nginx virtual host): # cd ../rootCA # openssl genrsa -out ./private/server.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/server.key -out server.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:test.local Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in server.csr -out certs/server.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 7: Client #1 certificate generation and signing by root CA: # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client1.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client1.key -out client1.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client1.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #1 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client1.csr -out certs/client1.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 8: Client #1 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client1.p12 -inkey private/client1.key -in certs/client1.crt -certfile certs/rootca.crt Step 9: Client #2 certificate generation and signing by subordinate CA: # cd ../subCA/ # openssl genrsa -out ./private/client2.key -des3 2048 # openssl req -new -key ./private/client2.key -out client2.csr -config openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/client2.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Locality Name (eg, city) []: Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Client #2 Email Address []: Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []: An optional company name []: # openssl ca -in client2.csr -out certs/client2.crt -config openssl.cnf Step 10: Client #2 certificate converting to PKCS12 format: # openssl pkcs12 -export -out certs/client2.p12 -inkey private/client2.key -in certs/client2.crt -certfile certs/subca.crt Step 11: Passing server certificate and private key to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cd ../rootCA/ # cp -v certs/server.crt /etc/nginx/ssl/ # cp -v private/server.key /etc/nginx/ssl/ Step 12: Passing root and subordinate CA certificates to nginx (performed with OS superuser privileges): # cat certs/rootca.crt > /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem # cat ../subCA/certs/subca.crt >> /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem client.pem file look like this: # cat /etc/nginx/ssl/client.pem -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 1 (0x1) ... -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID4DCCAsigAwIBAgIBATANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTA0OTQzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- It looks like everything is working fine: # service nginx reload # Reloading nginx configuration: Enter PEM pass phrase: # nginx. # Step 13: Installing *.p12 certificates in browser (Firefox in my case) gives the problem I've mentioned above. Client #1 = 200 OK, Client #2 = 400 Bad request/The SSL certificate error. Any ideas what should I do? Update 1: Results of SSL connection test attempts: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/rootCA/certs/client1.crt -key ~/pki/rootCA/private/client1.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client1.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIDpjCCAo6gAwIBAgIBAjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBWMQswCQYDVQQGEwJBVTET MBEGA1UECBMKU29tZS1TdGF0ZTEhMB8GA1UEChMYSW50ZXJuZXQgV2lkZ2l0cyBQ dHkgTHRkMQ8wDQYDVQQDEwZyb290Y2EwHhcNMTMwMjA0MTEwNjAzWhcNMTQwMjA0 ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- 1 s:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca i:/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAJ/7VmaN048RMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMFYxCzAJBgNV BAYTAkFVMRMwEQYDVQQIEwpTb21lLVN0YXRlMSEwHwYDVQQKExhJbnRlcm5ldCBX aWRnaXRzIFB0eSBMdGQxDzANBgNVBAMTBnJvb3RjYTAeFw0xMzAyMDQxMDM1NTda ... -----END CERTIFICATE----- --- Server certificate subject=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=test.local issuer=/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca --- Acceptable client certificate CA names /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca /C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca --- SSL handshake has read 3395 bytes and written 2779 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 2048 bit Secure Renegotiation IS supported Compression: zlib compression Expansion: zlib compression SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : AES256-SHA Session-ID: 15BFC2029691262542FAE95A48078305E76EEE7D586400F8C4F7C516B0F9D967 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: 23246CF166E8F3900793F0A2561879E5DB07291F32E99591BA1CF53E6229491FEAE6858BFC9AACAF271D9C3706F139C7 Key-Arg : None PSK identity: None PSK identity hint: None SRP username: None TLS session ticket: 0000 - c2 5e 1d d2 b5 6d 40 23-b2 40 89 e4 35 75 70 07 .^...m@#[email protected]. 0010 - 1b bb 2b e6 e0 b5 ab 10-10 bf 46 6e aa 67 7f 58 ..+.......Fn.g.X 0020 - cf 0e 65 a4 67 5a 15 ba-aa 93 4e dd 3d 6e 73 4c ..e.gZ....N.=nsL 0030 - c5 56 f6 06 24 0f 48 e6-38 36 de f1 b5 31 c5 86 .V..$.H.86...1.. ... 0440 - 4c 53 39 e3 92 84 d2 d0-e5 e2 f5 8a 6a a8 86 b1 LS9.........j... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989684 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- Everything seems fine with Client #2 and root CA certificate but request returns 400 Bad Request error: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/rootca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359989989 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Server: nginx/0.7.67 Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:00:43 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 231 Connection: close <html> <head><title>400 The SSL certificate error</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <center>The SSL certificate error</center> <hr><center>nginx/0.7.67</center> </body> </html> closed Verification fails with Client #2 certificate and subordinate CA certificate: # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/subCA/certs/subca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain verify return:0 ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990354 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 19 (self signed certificate in certificate chain) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Still getting 400 Bad Request error with concatenated CA certificates and Client #2 (but still everything ok with Client #1): # cat certs/rootca.crt ../subCA/certs/subca.crt > certs/concatenatedca.crt # openssl s_client -connect test.local:443 -CAfile ~/pki/rootCA/certs/concatenatedca.crt -cert ~/pki/subCA/certs/client2.crt -key ~/pki/subCA/private/client2.key -showcerts Enter pass phrase for tmp/testcert/client2.key: CONNECTED(00000003) depth=1 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = rootca verify return:1 depth=0 C = AU, ST = Some-State, O = Internet Widgits Pty Ltd, CN = test.local verify return:1 --- ... Compression: 1 (zlib compression) Start Time: 1359990772 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ... Update 2: I've managed to recompile nginx with enabled debug. Here is the part of successfull conection by Client #1 track: 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 accept: <MY IP ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 event timer add: 3: 60000:2856497512 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU /ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 verify:1, error:0, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #1",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http process request line 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 14:08:23 [debug] 38701#0: *119 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" And here is the part of unsuccessfull conection by Client #2 track: 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 accept: <MY_IP_ADDRESS> fd:3 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 event timer add: 3: 60000:2855488975 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 kevent set event: 3: ft:-1 fl:0025 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28805200:660 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 malloc: 28834400:1024 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 posix_memalign: 28860000:4096 @16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http check ssl handshake 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 https ssl handshake: 0x16 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL server name: "test.local" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL handshake handler: 0 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:20, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:0, error:27, depth:1, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=rootca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 verify:1, error:27, depth:0, subject:"/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=Client #2",issuer: "/C=AU/ST=Some-State/O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd/CN=subca" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_do_handshake: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL: TLSv1, cipher: "AES256-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AES(256) Mac=SHA1" 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http process request line 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: 524 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_read: -1 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 SSL_get_error: 2 2013/02/05 13:51:34 [debug] 38701#0: *112 http request line: "GET / HTTP/1.1" So I'm getting OpenSSL error #20 and then #27. According to verify documentation: 20 X509_V_ERR_UNABLE_TO_GET_ISSUER_CERT_LOCALLY: unable to get local issuer certificate the issuer certificate could not be found: this occurs if the issuer certificate of an untrusted certificate cannot be found. 27 X509_V_ERR_CERT_UNTRUSTED: certificate not trusted the root CA is not marked as trusted for the specified purpose.

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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • ScriptAlias makes requests match too many Location blocks. What is going on?

    - by brain99
    We wish to restrict access on our development server to those users who have a valid SSL Client certificate. We are running Apache 2.2.16 on Debian 6. However, for some sections (mainly git-http, setup with gitolite on https://my.server/git/) we need an exception since many git clients don't support SSL client certificates. I have succeeded in requiring client cert authentication for the server, and in adding exceptions for some locations. However, it seems this does not work for git. The current setup is as follows: SSLCACertificateFile ssl-certs/client-ca-certs.crt <Location /> SSLVerifyClient require SSLVerifyDepth 2 </Location> # this works <Location /foo> SSLVerifyClient none </Location> # this does not <Location /git> SSLVerifyClient none </Location> I have also tried an alternative solution, with the same results: # require authentication everywhere except /git and /foo <LocationMatch "^/(?!git|foo)"> SSLVerifyClient require SSLVerifyDepth 2 </LocationMatch> In both these cases, a user without client certificate can perfectly access my.server/foo/, but not my.server/git/ (access is refused because no valid client certificate is given). If I disable SSL client certificate authentication completely, my.server/git/ works ok. The ScriptAlias problem Gitolite is setup using the ScriptAlias directive. I have found that the problem occurs with any similar ScriptAlias: # Gitolite ScriptAlias /git/ /path/to/gitolite-shell/ ScriptAlias /gitmob/ /path/to/gitolite-shell/ # My test ScriptAlias /test/ /path/to/test/script/ Note that /path/to/test/script is a file, not a directory, the same goes for /path/to/gitolite-shell/ My test script simply prints out the environment, super simple: #!/usr/bin/perl print "Content-type:text/plain\n\n"; print "TEST\n"; @keys = sort(keys %ENV); foreach (@keys) { print "$_ => $ENV{$_}\n"; } It seems that if I go to https://my.server/test/someLocation, that any SSLVerifyClient directives are being applied which are in Location blocks that match /test/someLocation or just /someLocation. If I have the following config: <LocationMatch "^/f"> SSLVerifyClient require SSLVerifyDepth 2 </LocationMatch> Then, the following URL requires a client certificate: https://my.server/test/foo. However, the following URL does not: https://my.server/test/somethingElse/foo Note that this only seems to apply for SSL configuration. The following has no effect whatsoever on https://my.server/test/foo: <LocationMatch "^/f"> Order allow,deny Deny from all </LocationMatch> However, it does block access to https://my.server/foo. This presents a major problem for cases where I have some project running at https://my.server/project (which has to require SSL client certificate authorization), and there is a git repository for that project at https://my.server/git/project which cannot require a SSL client certificate. Since the /git/project URL also gets matched agains /project Location blocks, such a configuration seems impossible given my current findings. Question: Why is this happening, and how do I solve my problem? In the end, I want to require SSL Client certificate authorization for the whole server except for /git and /someLocation, with as minimal configuration as possible (so I don't have to modify the configuration each time something new is deployed or a new git repository is added). Note: I rewrote my question (instead of just adding more updates at the bottom) to take into account my new findings and hopefully make this more clear.

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  • Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

    - by Maria Forney
    Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

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  • Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

    - by Michelle Kimihira
    By Maria Forney Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

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  • Windows Azure Use Case: Web Applications

    - by BuckWoody
    This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: Many applications have a requirement to be located outside of the organization’s internal infrastructure control. For instance, the company website for a brick-and-mortar retail company may want to post not only static but interactive content to be available to their external customers, and not want the customers to have access inside the organization’s firewall. There are also cases of pure web applications used for a great many of the internal functions of the business. This allows for remote workers, shared customer/employee workloads and data and other advantages. Some firms choose to host these web servers internally, others choose to contract out the infrastructure to an “ASP” (Application Service Provider) or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. In any case, the design of these applications often resembles the following: In this design, a server (or perhaps more than one) hosts the presentation function (http or https) access to the application, and this same system may hold the computational aspects of the program. Authorization and Access is controlled programmatically, or is more open if this is a customer-facing application. Storage is either placed on the same or other servers, hosted within an RDBMS or NoSQL database, or a combination of the options, all coded into the application. High-Availability within this scenario is often the responsibility of the architects of the application, and by purchasing more hosting resources which must be built, licensed and configured, and manually added as demand requires, although some IaaS providers have a partially automatic method to add nodes for scale-out, if the architecture of the application supports it. Disaster Recovery is the responsibility of the system architect as well. Implementation: In a Windows Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment, many of these architectural considerations are designed into the system. The Azure “Fabric” (not to be confused with the Azure implementation of Application Fabric - more on that in a moment) is designed to provide scalability. Compute resources can be added and removed programmatically based on any number of factors. Balancers at the request-level of the Fabric automatically route http and https requests. The fabric also provides High-Availability for storage and other components. Disaster recovery is a shared responsibility between the facilities (which have the ability to restore in case of catastrophic failure) and your code, which should build in recovery. In a Windows Azure-based web application, you have the ability to separate out the various functions and components. Presentation can be coded for multiple platforms like smart phones, tablets and PC’s, while the computation can be a single entity shared between them. This makes the applications more resilient and more object-oriented, and lends itself to a SOA or Distributed Computing architecture. It is true that you could code up a similar set of functionality in a traditional web-farm, but the difference here is that the components are built into the very design of the architecture. The API’s and DLL’s you call in a Windows Azure code base contains components as first-class citizens. For instance, if you need storage, it is simply called within the application as an object.  Computation has multiple options and the ability to scale linearly. You also gain another component that you would either have to write or bolt-in to a typical web-farm: the Application Fabric. This Windows Azure component provides communication between applications or even to on-premise systems. It provides authorization in either person-based or claims-based perspectives. SQL Azure provides relational storage as another option, and can also be used or accessed from on-premise systems. It should be noted that you can use all or some of these components individually. Resources: Design Strategies for Scalable Active Server Applications - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972349.aspx  Physical Tiers and Deployment  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx

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  • Big Data – Beginning Big Data – Day 1 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    What is Big Data? I want to learn Big Data. I have no clue where and how to start learning about it. Does Big Data really means data is big? What are the tools and software I need to know to learn Big Data? I often receive questions which I mentioned above. They are good questions and honestly when we search online, it is hard to find authoritative and authentic answers. I have been working with Big Data and NoSQL for a while and I have decided that I will attempt to discuss this subject over here in the blog. In the next 21 days we will understand what is so big about Big Data. Big Data – Big Thing! Big Data is becoming one of the most talked about technology trends nowadays. The real challenge with the big organization is to get maximum out of the data already available and predict what kind of data to collect in the future. How to take the existing data and make it meaningful that it provides us accurate insight in the past data is one of the key discussion points in many of the executive meetings in organizations. With the explosion of the data the challenge has gone to the next level and now a Big Data is becoming the reality in many organizations. Big Data – A Rubik’s Cube I like to compare big data with the Rubik’s cube. I believe they have many similarities. Just like a Rubik’s cube it has many different solutions. Let us visualize a Rubik’s cube solving challenge where there are many experts participating. If you take five Rubik’s cube and mix up the same way and give it to five different expert to solve it. It is quite possible that all the five people will solve the Rubik’s cube in fractions of the seconds but if you pay attention to the same closely, you will notice that even though the final outcome is the same, the route taken to solve the Rubik’s cube is not the same. Every expert will start at a different place and will try to resolve it with different methods. Some will solve one color first and others will solve another color first. Even though they follow the same kind of algorithm to solve the puzzle they will start and end at a different place and their moves will be different at many occasions. It is  nearly impossible to have a exact same route taken by two experts. Big Market and Multiple Solutions Big Data is exactly like a Rubik’s cube – even though the goal of every organization and expert is same to get maximum out of the data, the route and the starting point are different for each organization and expert. As organizations are evaluating and architecting big data solutions they are also learning the ways and opportunities which are related to Big Data. There is not a single solution to big data as well there is not a single vendor which can claim to know all about Big Data. Honestly, Big Data is too big a concept and there are many players – different architectures, different vendors and different technology. What is Next? In this 31 days series we will be exploring many essential topics related to big data. I do not claim that you will be master of the subject after 31 days but I claim that I will be covering following topics in easy to understand language. Architecture of Big Data Big Data a Management and Implementation Different Technologies – Hadoop, Mapreduce Real World Conversations Best Practices Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer one of the very essential questions – What is Big Data? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Cox Communications' Strategic Approach to Enterprise User Experience: How Change Management and Usab

    - by Applications User Experience
    Author: Anna Wichansky, Senior Director, Applications User Experience, and Chair, Oracle Usability Advisory Board As part of our work in the User Experience group, our teams often go to Customer events such as the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) conference, Alliance 2010. This year's event was held in San Antonio, Texas, and was attended by hundreds of higher education, government, and public sector users of Oracle applications. The User Assistance team used this opportunity to reach out to customers in the Educational and Government sectors to better understand how their organizations are currently approaching help, messages, and other forms of user assistance. What is User Assistance? For us, user assistance is more than the old books of users' manuals and documentation. User assistance is anything that helps users get their jobs done quickly and efficiently. Instead of expecting users to stop and look through a guide or manual, we have been developing solutions that are embedded within the interface. We know that when people are having difficulty with a task, they want to be able to search efficiently for solutions and collaborate with coworkers. We know that they want to find their answers right there, right then, so that they can get on with their work. In our interviews at Alliance, we wanted to learn what the participants could tell us about what was happening on their campuses and in their institutions. Figure 1. For Oracle User Assistance, it's not just about books any more. So what did we do? Off to Texas, we recruited 10 people from nine different government and education organizations to come to our Oracle User Experience Onsite Usability Labs. We conducted one-hour interviews with these folks and asked them all about User Assistance--what people are doing, what they would like to do, what technologies they are using, what they would like to use, and ultimately what should we as a company be planning for our future products. We used this as an opportunity also to show them some of our design concepts for Fusion User Assistance, our next generation of user assistance based on the best of our user assistance in other products. Figure 2. Interviewing a technical user at Alliance. What we learned... People are not using paper or online manuals anymore. They don't want to see a manual that is written for technical users and that doesn't make sense to the ordinary end user. They really don't want to have to flip through a manual trying to find an answer to their question. Even when the answer might be tailored to their organization, they don't want to dig through documentation. When they need an answer now, they don't have the patience to dig for something that might or might not be clearly written. What does it mean to an organization when users don't want to deal with documentation? In many cases, it means that frustrated users make phone calls to try to find the answers that they need immediately. Phone calls are expensive to an organization and frustrating to the technical support staff who have provided documentation that no one wants to read anymore. If they don't call, they email for help often, and many users are asking for the same information. The bottom line is that if they could get that help immediately in the interface, they wouldn't have to make those calls or send those emails -- and that saves time and money. Our Fusion User Assistance options to customize help and get help for the task immediately were seen as an opportunity by these technical users to build the solutions that their users need and want. Figure 3. Joyce Ohgi and Laurie Pattison of Applications UX. Chicken Fried Steak. That was huge. But then, this was Texas, where we discovered a lot of things come very big. Drinks are served in quart-size glasses and dishes like Chicken Fried Steaks are served on platters not plates. We saw three-pound cinnamon rolls that you down with tea sweet enough to curl your hair. Deep in the heart of Texas, we learned a lot, and we ate even more.

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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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  • Three Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.   By [email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself. How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration? Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits. Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes.  This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants.  In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture. Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue.  The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time".  Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes.  The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving. Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record.  Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread.  This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities. Excelling in the Unstructured Future We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations.  Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise. Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.   The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached.  Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business. How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration. Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise. 

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  • Do MORE with WebCenter

    - by Michael Snow
    WEBCAST THURSDAY!! 03/22/12 Do you need to lower costs? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Improve Online Engagement? But you’re still stuck with Documentum? Step away from the ledge – there is hope – let us help you. Top 4 Content Imperatives · Lower Costs - Reduce labor, maintenance fees, storage and electrical consumption · Raise Productivity - Automation and integration, communication, findability · Foster Innovation - Enable collaboration, expertise location · Improve Online Engagement – enable user-driven, dynamic marketing initiatives With the coming technology wave we see four content imperatives. Every organization has had to reduce costs, cost cutting has become a way of life. Everyone is working three jobs as positions are eliminated. And so we have to reduce labor, reduce maintenance, and reduce money we are wasting on things like storing content that is redundant or no longer useful. We also, to fill that gap, need to raise productivity. Knowledge workers represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce, accounting for 40%-75% of the employees at organizations in sectors like financial services, life sciences, healthcare and retail.  What’s more, their wages total 18 percent of the United States GDP. And so we can’t afford information systems that don’t let our top performers be the best they can be. We look to automate the content processes, provide ways to integrate that content into our processes, provide communication to make decisions, and to make content more findable so people can make the right decision and move the process forward. And really to get ourselves out of the current financial status, we can only cut costs so far. We have to innovate out of economic tough times – to find new products and new markets. And to enable the innovation process, we have to enable collaboration and expertise location. So much of innovation is about building on innovations that have come before. To solve problems, we have to be able to find what our organization has already created. We find that problems we need to solve have already been solved if we can find the right document, the right person. So we have to provide systems that enable us to stand on the shoulders of our organization’s accomplishments. Good content drives great marketing. Online engagement is growing as an absolute necessity for modern growing marketing organizations that require the business users be enabled for dynamic marketing content creation, updates and targeted content creation and management. Unfortunately – if you are currently stuck with Documentum, you are really lacking in your Web Experience Management capabilities. Documentum previously used FatWire for web publishing. Now FatWire is part of Oracle. Oracle provides powerful web engagement capabilities: Increase sales and loyalty by optimizing online engagement Create, manage and moderate contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experiences Optimize customer engagement across, web, mobile and social channels Manage large scale multichannel global online presence with integration to enterprise applications Enable business users to control their content and make their own updates Publish content from native files – enable navigation of project documents, procedures, policy information Enable content display and updates from existing web applications – one click to drag and drop content management functionality So you get the ability to self-publish information and make it navigable, to move the process of publishing from IT to business users, and the ability to address a whole new area of user engagement with web experience management. So… if you are still stuck with Documentum and don’t know what to do – contact us – not only will Oracle help you step away from the ledge, but also with the MoveOff Documentum program, we are offering you a way – trade-in your Documentum licenses for a 100% credit on Oracle WebCenter. How’s that for a nice bonus? It’s time to stop maintaining Documentum, and to start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. Learn More Here! To learn more about what Oracle WebCenter can offer you today – join us for a webcast – your eyes will be opened to all that’s possible. Do More with WebCenter: Extend Beyond Content Management

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