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• WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter November 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear WebLogic partner community member Too many different product from Oracle, no idea how do they fit together? Get a copy of the Oracle catalog, an excellent overview of the Oracle middleware portfolio. If you have missed the Oracle OpenWorld WebLogic, Java and ExaLogic highlights - you can now watch our community webcast on-demand. To experience and learn more about WebLogic 12c, make sure you attend one of the upcoming WebLogic 12c bootcamps. We are continuously adding many more locations to our training road-show! If you like to suggest an additional location, Please feel free to write us @wlscommunity on twitter. The key presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012 are published at our WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required): Exalogic X3-2 launch (.pptx) & ExaLogic references 2012 (ppt) & General Session Building and Managing a Private Oracle Java & Experiences building JavaEE based PaaS Platform Compressed presentation & Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control Demo (Zip) & Coherence Past Present And Future (ppt)& Coherence Web Elastic Data on WebLogic 12c (zip) & Oracle Tuxedo What’s New in 12c (.pptx) & Tuxedo Java Services(.pptx). One of the newest product in the middleware family ADF Mobile & ADF Essentials is now available. Andrejus published an article on how to implement ADF Essentials on Glassfish. When you design mobile solutions, you might want to make use of the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns. We continue to promote and create joint partner marketing campaigns to upgrade iAS to WebLogic, please contact myself if you are interested! Critical patch updates have been also released for iAs and the whole middleware stack, please make sure that you implement them. Jürgen Kress Oracle WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/WebLogicnewsNovember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic Community newsletter,newsletter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing. The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. So what does this mean for you? Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them.  What does this mean for IT? Use software and technology as an enabler, not as a roadblock. Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options.  We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth. Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network. And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world. The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below. 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail. By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today. Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized. If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!) The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices. By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.  86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities. Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?

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• Move Data into the grid for scalable, predictable response times

  - by JuergenKress

  CloudTran is pleased to introduce the availability of the CloudTran Transaction and Persistence Manager for creating scalable, reliable data services on the Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG). Use of IMDG architectures has been key to handling today’s web-scale loads because it eliminates database latency by storing important and frequently access data in memory instead of on disk. The CloudTran product lets developers easily use an IMDG for full ACID-compliant transactions without having to be concerned about the location or spread of data. The system has its own implementation of fast, scalable distributed transactions that does NOT depend on XA protocols but still guarantees all ACID properties. Plus, CloudTran asynchronously replicates data going into the IMDG to back-end datastores and back-up data centers, again ensuring ACID properties. CloudTran can be accessed through Java Persistence API (JPA via TopLink Grid) and now, through a new Low-Level API, or LLAPI. This is ideal for use in SOA applications that need data reliability, high availability, performance, and scalability. It is still in its limited beta release, the LLAPI gives developers the ability to use standard put/remove logic available in Coherence and then wrap logic with simple Spring annotations or XML+AspectJ to start transactions. An important feature of LLAPI is the ability to join transactions. This is a common outcome for SOA applications that need to reduce network traffic by aggregating data into single cache entries and then doing SOA service processing in the node holding the data. This results in the need to orchestrate transaction processing across multiple service calls. CloudTran has the capability to handle these “multi-client” transactions at speed with no loss in ACID properties. Developing software around an IMDG like Oracle Coherence is an important choice for today’s web-scale applications and services. But this introduces new architectural considerations to maintain scalability in light of increased network loads and data movement. Without using CloudTran, developers are faced with an incredibly difficult task to ensure data reliability, availability, performance, and scalability when working with an IMDG. Working with highly distributed data that is entirely volatile while stored in memory presents numerous edge cases where failures can result in data loss. The CloudTran product takes care of all of this, leaving developers with the confidence and peace of mind that all data is processed correctly. For those interested in evaluating the CloudTran product and IMDGs, take a look at this link for more information: http://www.CloudTran.com/downloadAPI.ph , or send your questions to [email protected]. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: CloudTran,data grid,M,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Bitmap font rendering, UV generation and vertex placement

  - by jack

  I am generating a bitmap, however, I am not sure on how to render the UV's and placement. I had a thread like this once before, but it was too loosely worded as to what I was looking to do. What I am doing right now is creating a large 1024x1024 image with characters evenly placed every 64 pixels. Here is an example of what I mean. I then save the bitmap X/Y information to a file (which is all multiples of 64). However, I am not sure how to properly use this information and bitmap to render. This falls into two different categories, UV generation and kerning. Now I believe I know how to do both of these, however, when I attempt to couple them together I will get horrendous results. For example, I am trying to render two different text arrays, "123" and "njfb". While ignoring the texture quality (I will be increasing the texture to provide more detail once I fix this issue), here is what it looks like when I try to render them. http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/599/badfontrendering.png Now for the algorithm. I am doing my letter placement with both GetABCWidth and GetKerningPairs. I am using GetABCWidth for the width of the characters, then I am getting the kerning information for adjust the characters. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can implement my own bitmap font renderer? I am trying to do this without using external libraries such as angel bitmap tool or freetype. I also want to stick to the way the bitmap font sheet is generated so I can do extra effects in the future. Rendering Algorithm for(U32 c = 0, vertexID = 0, i = 0; c < numberOfCharacters; ++c, vertexID += 4, i += 6) { ObtainCharInformation(fontName, m_Text[c]); letterWidth = (charInfo.A + charInfo.B + charInfo.C) * scale; if(c != 0) { DWORD BytesReq = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, 0, 0, &mat); U8 * glyphImg= new U8[BytesReq]; DWORD r = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, BytesReq, glyphImg, &mat); for (int k=0; k<nKerningPairs; k++) { if ((kerningpairs[k].wFirst == previousCharIndex) && (kerningpairs[k].wSecond == m_Text[c])) { letterBottomLeftX += (kerningpairs[k].iKernAmount * scale); break; } } letterBottomLeftX -= (gm.gmCellIncX * scale); } SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 1); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 2); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID + 3); zFight -= 0.001f; float BottomLeftX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float BottomLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin + charInfo.charBitmapHeight) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopLeftX = BottomLeftX; float TopLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin + charInfo.B - charInfo.C) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightY = TopLeftY; float BottomRightX = TopRightX; float BottomRightY = BottomLeftY; SetTextureCoordinate(TopLeftX, TopLeftY, vertexID + 1); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomLeftX, BottomLeftY, vertexID + 0); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomRightX, BottomRightY, vertexID + 3); SetTextureCoordinate(TopRightX, TopRightY, vertexID + 2); /// index setting letterBottomLeftX += letterWidth; previousCharIndex = m_Text[c]; }

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• Responsive Design for your ADF Faces Web Applications

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  Responsive web applications are a common pattern for designing web pages that adjust their UI based on the device that access them. With the increase in the number of ADF applications that are being accessed from mobile phones and tablet we are getting more and more questions around this topic. Steven Davelaar wrote a comprehensive article covering key concepts in this area that you can find here. The article focuses on what I would refer to as server adaptive application, where the server adapts the UI it generates based on the device that is accessing the server. However there is one more technique that is not covered in that article and can be used with Oracle ADF - it is CSS manipulation on the client that can achieve responsive design. I'll cover this technique in this blog entry. The main advantage of this technique is that the UI manipulation does not require the server to send over a new UI when a change is needed. This for example allows your page to change immediately when you change the orientation of your device. (By the way this example was developed for one of the seminars in the upcoming Oracle ADF OTN Virtual Developer Day). In the demo that you'll see below you'll see a single page that changes the way it is displayed based on the orientation of the device. Here is the page with the tablet in landscape and portrait: To achieve this I'm using a CSS media query in my page template that changes the display property of a couple of style classes that are used in my page. The media query has this format: @media screen and (max-width:700px) {            .narrow {                display: inline;            }            .wide {                display: none;            }            .adjustFont {                font-size: small;            }            .icon-home {                font-size: 24px;            }        } This changes the properties of the same styleClasses that are defined in my application's skin. Here is a quick demo video that shows you the full application and explains how it works. For those looking to replicate this, here are the basic files: skin1.css @charset "UTF-8";/**ADFFaces_Skin_File / DO NOT REMOVE**/@namespace af "http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich";@namespace dvt "http://xmlns.oracle.com/dss/adf/faces";.wide {    display: inline;}.narrow {    display: none;}.adjustFont {    font-size: large;}.icon-home {        font-family: 'UIShellUGH';    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;        font-size: 36px;        color: #ffa000;} pageTemplate: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><af:pageTemplateDef xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich" var="attrs" definition="private"                    xmlns:afc="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich/component">    <af:xmlContent>        <afc:component>            <afc:description>A template that will work on phones and desktop</afc:description>            <afc:display-name>ResponsiveTemplate</afc:display-name>            <afc:facet>                <afc:facet-name>main</afc:facet-name>            </afc:facet>        </afc:component>    </af:xmlContent>    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>    <af:resource type="css">@media screen and (max-width:700px) {            .narrow {                display: inline;            }            .wide {                display: none;            }            .adjustFont {                font-size: small;            }            .icon-home {                font-size: 24px;            }        }@font-face {            font-family: 'UIShellUGH';            src: url(data:application/x-font-woff;charset=utf-8;base64,d09GRk9UVE8AA..removed code here...AzV6b1g==)format('truetype');            font-weight: normal;            font-style: normal;        }    </af:resource>    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl4" layout="vertical" styleClass="sizeStyle">        <af:panelGridLayout id="pt_pgl1">            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="40px" id="pt_gr1">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc1">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl3" halign="center" layout="horizontal">                        <af:outputText value="h" id="ot2" styleClass="icon-home"/>                        <af:outputText value="HR System" id="ot3" styleClass="adjustFont"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="auto" id="pt_gr2">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc2" halign="stretch">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl2" layout="scroll">                        <af:facetRef facetName="main"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>            <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="20px" marginBottom="5px" id="pt_gr3">                <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="100%" marginEnd="5px" id="pt_gc3">                    <af:panelGroupLayout id="pt_pgl5" layout="vertical" halign="center">                        <af:separator id="pt_s1"/>                        <af:outputText value="Copyright Oracle Corp. 2013" id="pt_ot1" styleClass="adjustFont"/>                    </af:panelGroupLayout>                </af:gridCell>            </af:gridRow>        </af:panelGridLayout>    </af:panelGroupLayout></af:pageTemplateDef> Example from the page:                         <af:gridRow id="gr3">                            <af:gridCell id="gc7" columnSpan="2">                                <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl8" styleClass="narrow">                                    <af:link text="Menu" id="l1">                                        <af:showPopupBehavior triggerType="action" popupId="p1" align="afterEnd"/>                                    </af:link>                                </af:panelGroupLayout>                                <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl7" styleClass="wide">                                    <af:navigationPane id="np1" hint="buttons">                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Departments" id="cni1"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Employees" id="cni2"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Salaries" id="cni3"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Jobs" id="cni4"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Services" id="cni5"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Support" id="cni6"/>                                        <af:commandNavigationItem text="Help" id="cni7"/>                                    </af:navigationPane>                                </af:panelGroupLayout>                            </af:gridCell>                        </af:gridRow>

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• EPM Planning (Hyperion) V11.1.2 Implementation Hands-On Boot-camp

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  5-Day Training for Partners: 29th October - 2nd November 2012, London (UK): REGISTER Here This FREE for Partners 5-day workshop is designed to provide implementation instruction on Oracle Hyperion EPM Planning.  This boot-camp is intended for prospective implementers of the Planning and Budgeting functionality of Oracle EPM or implementers that are currently familiar with the basics of EPM Planning and looking to strengthen their base of knowledge in the product. The class begins with an overview of Essbase, the foundation of Hyperion Planning. It provides a general overview of Planning and Planning terms, the architecture of all the Planning components, and how they are commonly used. The course goes over all the steps to create an application from scratch. This involves some preparation work outside of Planning and leads to developing the application in both the Planning Windows and Web clients. Participants will modify existing dimensions and build out the hierarchies using the Web client. Topics Covered The boot-camp shows developers how to build out dimensions using Classic Planning and by using EPMA. It covers the mechanics and cover strategies for automating the build process such as interface tables. It reviews data loads using Load Rules to load the Planning database. The course focuses on tasks that end-users must perform during the planning cycle. It walks students through creating and modifying forms, working with forms to enter data, adding annotations, and the rest of the form features such as running business rules and managing task lists. It covers how to use the forms in the Smart View client and finishes up the end-user perspective by going through Workflow Management and the process of submitting a plan for review. The final section of the course covers Security and other administration topics such as automation and deployment. Prerequisites Ideal participants are Oracle partners (SIs and resellers) with a background in business information systems and a clientele of customers with ongoing or prospective EPM initiatives. Alternatively, partners with the background described above and an interest in evolving their practice to a similar profile are suitable participants. Further online OPN guided learning path information and webinars are available at: Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials. Please note that attendees are required to bring a laptop. View here laptop requirements and detailed agenda. ·       REGISTER Here : acceptance is subject to availability and your place will be confirmed within two weeks  ( and for help see the Partner Registration Guide ). Training Location: Oracle Corporation UK Ltd Columbus Room Customer Visit Center 1 South Place London EC2M 2RB Training Dates: 29th October - 2nd November  9:30 am – 5:00 pm BST For more information please contact [email protected].

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• A Facelift for Fusion

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  It's simple. It's modern. It was the buzz at OpenWorld in San Francisco. See what the UX team has been up to and what customers are going to love. At OpenWorld 2012, the Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team unveiled the new face of Fusion Applications. You might have seen it in sessions presented by Chris Leone, Anthony Lye, Jeremy Ashley and others or you may have gotten a look on the demogrounds. Why are we delivering a new face for Fusion Applications? "Because," says Ashley, vice president of the Oracle Applications User Experience team, "we want to provide a simple, modern, productive way for users to complete their top quick-entry tasks. The idea is to provide a clear, productive user experience that is backed by the full functionality of Fusion Applications." The first release of the new face of Fusion focuses on three types of users. It provides a fully functional gateway to Fusion Applications for: ·         New and casual users who need quick access to self-service tasks ·         Professional users who need fast access to quick-entry, high-volume tasks ·         Users who are looking for a way to quickly brand their portal for employees The new face of Fusion allows users to move easily from navigation to action, Ashley said, and it has been designed for any device -- Mac, PC, iPad, Android, SmartBoard -- in the browser. How Did We Build It? The new face of Fusion essentially is a custom shell, developed by the Apps UX team, and a set of page templates that embodies a simple design aesthetic. It's repeatable, providing consistency across its pages, and the need for training is little to zero. More specifically, the new face of Fusion has been built on ADF. The Applications UX team created pages in JDeveloper using local tasks flows bound to existing view objects. Three new components were commissioned from ADF and existing Fusion components were re-skinned to deliver a simple, modern user experience. It really is that simple - and to prove that point, we've been sharing our new face of Fusion story on several Oracle channels such as this one. If you want to learn more, check OpenWorld presentation on the Fusion Learning Center.

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• Convert old AVI files to a modern format

  - by iWerner

  Hi, we have a collection of old home videos that were saved in AVI format a long time ago. I want to convert these files to a more modern format because the Totem Movie Player that comes with Ubuntu 10.4 seems to be the only program capable of playing them. The files seem to be encoded with a MJPEG codec, and playing them in VLC or Windows Media Player plays only the sound but there is no video. Avidemux was able to open the files, but the quality of the video is severely degraded: The video skips frames and is interlaced (it's not interlaced when playing it in Totem). Neither ffmpeg nor mencoder seems to be able to read the video stream. mencoder reports that it is using ffmpeg's codec. Here's a section from its output: ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family [mjpeg @ 0x92a7260]mjpeg: using external huffman table [mjpeg @ 0x92a7260]mjpeg: error using external huffman table, switching back to internal Unsupported PixelFormat -1 Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG) while running ffmpeg produces the following: $ ffmpeg -i input.avi output.avi FFmpeg version SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --extra-version=4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1 --prefix=/usr --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-vdpau --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-zlib --disable-stripping --disable-vhook --enable-runtime-cpudetect --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-x11grab --enable-libdc1394 --enable-shared --disable-static libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0 libavcodec 52.20. 1 / 52.20. 1 libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0 libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0 libavfilter 0. 4. 0 / 0. 4. 0 libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 built on Mar 4 2010 12:35:30, gcc: 4.4.3 [avi @ 0x87952c0]non-interleaved AVI Input #0, avi, from 'input.avi': Duration: 00:00:15.24, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 22447 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 720x544, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 1411 kb/s Output #0, avi, to 'output.avi': Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x544, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 90k tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 64 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press [q] to stop encoding frame= 0 fps= 0 q=0.0 Lsize= 143kB time=15.23 bitrate= 76.9kbits/s video:0kB audio:119kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 20.101777% So the problem is that output does not contain any video, as evidenced by the video:0kB at the end. In all of the above cases the audio comes out fine. So my question is: What can I do to convert these files to a more modern format with more modern codecs?

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• More Free Apps Bound for the Marketplace

  - by Scott Kuhl

  Microsoft has announced they are raising the limit of free applications a developer can submit from 5 to 100.  But what does that really mean? First, lets look at the reason for the limitation.  The iTunes Store and the Android Market both have a lot more applications available than the Windows Phone Marketplace.  But that says nothing about the quality of those applications.  I attended a couple of pre-launch events and Microsoft representatives were clearly told to send a message. We don’t want a bunch of junky applications that do nothing but spam the marketplace.  That was the reason for the 5 free application limit. Okay, so now what has the result been?  Well, there are still fart apps, but there is no sign of a developer flooding the marking with 1500 wallpaper applications or 1000 of the same application all pointed at different RSS feeds.   On the other hand there are developers who want to release real free apps but are constrained by the 5 app limit. So why did Microsoft change it’s mind?  Is it to get the count of applications up, or is to make developers happy?  Windows Phone Marketplace is growing fast but it’s a long way behind the other guys.   I don’t think Microsoft wants to have 100,000 apps show up in the next 3 months if they are loaded with copy cat apps.  Those numbers will get picked apart quickly and the press will start complaining about  the same problems the Android Market has.  I do think the bump was at developer request.  Microsoft is usually good about listening to developer feedback, but has been pretty slow about it at times.  And from a financial perspective, there will me more apps that Microsoft has to review that they will see no profit on.  At least not until they bake in a advertising model connected to Bing. Ultimately, what does this mean for the future? Well, there are developers out there looking to release more than 5 simple free apps, so I think we will see more hobby apps.  And there are developers out there trying to make money from advertising instead of sales, so I think we will see more of those also.  But the category that I think will grow the fastest is free versions of paid applications that are the same as the trial version of the application.  While technically that makes no sense, its purely a marketing move.  Free apps get downloaded a lot more than paid apps, even with a trial mode.  It always surprises me how little consumers are willing to spend on mobile apps.  How many reviews of applications have you seen that says something like “a bit pricey at $1.99”.  Really?  Have you looked at how much you spend on your phone and plan?  I always thought the trial mode baked into Windows Marketplace was a good idea.  So I’m not sure how the more open free market will play out. In the long run though, I won’t be surprised to see a Bing ad mobile ad model show up so Microsoft can capitalize on the more open and free Windows Marketplace. Bonus: The Oatmeal on How I Feel About Buying Apps

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• Virtualized data centre&ndash;Part four: The design

  - by marc dekeyser

  Welcome back to the fourth post in this series! Today we will have a look at what Microsoft recommends as a “private cloud design” and what I will make of it. Whilst my own solution is based of the reference architecture, it is quite different indeed! An important thing to know is that, whilst I am using the private cloud as a reference, I am skipping most of the steps in designing a private cloud. If that is why you are here, please read the links at the end of the article and skim through my own content. A private cloud is much more process driven than just building a virtual infrastructure… The architecture of it all… So imagine for a minute that you have unlimited funds to build this lab of yours… You’d want redundancy on all levels and separation of each network where possible! Unfortunately we don’t have that luxury and, as you saw me hinting at in the previous article, our own design will be more limited but still quite capable! Networking From the networking perspective I will not have a fully redundant network, after all, this is but a lab environment! Thanks to Server 2012 I will be able to use bonding on my NIC’s and use LACP to improve the performance on that part. Storage As I mentioned in the previous article a Synology DS1218+ will be used for iSCSI provisioning. This device has 2 NICs on-board which can be bonded in to one 2 Gbps interface giving me a decent throughput and making the disks the most limiting factor in the storage design. Domain controllers and extra infrastructure Server 2012 completely supports running domain controllers virtualized and has no need to actually have a reachable DC when booting… That being said I need a remote access machine to power on the hosts (I have no need for them running 24/7) and a possible System Center VMM 2012 box (although server 2012 is not supported until SP1 :( ). Undecided on if I am to install those boxes separately or as a virtual machine… Which amounts to… Something like this pretty picture!                   Sources Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions Repository (en-US) http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12131.microsoft-private-cloud-solutions-repository-en-us.aspx Reference  Architecture: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3819.reference-architecture-for-private-cloud.aspx Private Cloud Reference Model: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4399.private-cloud-reference-model.aspx

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• Oracle at HR Tech: What a Difference a Year Makes

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Last week, I had the privilege of attending the famous HR Technology Conference (HR Tech) in my new hometown of Chicago. This annual event, which draws the who of who in the world of HR technology, was by far the biggest.  It wasn't just the highest level of attendance that was mind blowing, but also the amazing quality of attendees. Kudos go to the organizers, especially Bill Kutik for pulling together such a phenomenal conference. Conference highlights included Naomi Bloom's (http://infullbloom.us) Masters Panel and Mark Hurd's General Session on the last day of the conference. Naomi managed to do the seemingly impossible -- get all of the industry heavyweights and fierce competitors to travel to Chicago for her panel. Here are the executives she hosted: Our own Steve Miranda Sanjay Poonen, President Global Solutions, SAP Stan Swete, CTO, Workday Mike Capone, VP for Product Development and CIO, ADP John Wookey, EVP, Social Applications, Salesforce.com Adam Rogers, CTO, Ultimate Software       I bet you think "WOW" when you look at these names. Just this panel by itself would have been enough of a draw for any tech conference, so Naomi and Bill really scored. TechTarget published a great review of the conference here.  And here are a few highlights from Steve. "Steve Miranda, EVP Apps Dev Oracle, said delivering software in the cloud helps vendors shape their products to customer needs more efficiently. "As vendors, we're able to improve the software faster," he said. "We can see in real time what customers are using and not using." Miranda underscored Oracle's commitment to socializing its HCM platform,and named recruiting as an area where social has had a significant impact. "We want to make social a part of the fabric, not a separate piece," he said. "Already, if you're doing recruiting without social, it probably doesn't make any sense."" Having Mark Hurd at the conference was another real treat and everyone took notice.  The Business of HR publication covered Mark's participation at HR Tech and the full article is available here. Here is what Business of HR had to say: "In truth, the story of Oracle today is a story similar to many of the current and potential customers they faced at the conference this week. Their business is changing and growing. They've dealt with acquisitions of their own and their competitors continue to nip at their heels. They are dealing with growth (and yes, they are hiring in case you're interested). They have concerns about talent as well. If Oracle feels as strongly about their products as they seem to be, they will be getting their co-president in front of a lot more groups of current and potential customers like they did at the HR Technology Conference this year. And here's hoping this is one executive who won't stop talking about the importance of talent just because he isn't at the HR tech conference anymore." Natalia RachelsonSenior Director, Oracle Applications

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• Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository by Link Consulting Team

  - by JuergenKress

  In the last 12 years Link Consulting has been making its presence in specific areas such as Governance and Architecture, both in terms of practices and methodologies, products, know-how and technological expertise. The Enterprise Architecture Management System - Oracle Enterprise Edition (EAMS - OER Edition) is the result of this experience and combines the architecture management solution with OER in order to deliver a product specialized for SOA Governance that gathers the better of two worlds in solution that enables SOA Governance projects, initiatives and programs. Enterprise Architecture Management System Enterprise Architecture Management System (EAMS), is an automation based solution that enables the efficient management of Enterprise Architectures. The solution uses configured enterprise repositories and takes advantages of its features to provide automation capabilities to the users. EAMS provides capabilities to create/customize/analyze repository data, architectural blueprints, reports and analytic charts. Oracle Enterprise Repository Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) is one of the major and central elements of the Oracle SOA Governance solution. Oracle Enterprise Repository provides the tools to manage and govern the metadata for any type of software asset, from business processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components, and models. OER maps the relationships and inter-dependencies that connect those assets to improve impact analysis, promote and optimize their reuse, and measure their impact on the bottom line. It provides the visibility, feedback, controls, and analytics to keep your SOA on track to deliver business value. The intense focus on automation helps to overcome barriers to SOA adoption and streamline governance throughout the lifecycle. Core capabilities of the OER include: Asset Management Asset Lifecycle Management Usage Tracking Service Discovery Version Management Dependency Analysis Portfolio Management EAMS - OER Edition The solution takes the advantages and features from both products and combines them in a symbiotic tool that enhances the quality of SOA Governance Initiatives and Programs. EAMS is able to produce a vast number of outputs by combining its analytical engine, SOA-specific configurations and the assets in OER and other related tools, catalogs and repositories. The configurations encompass not only the extendable parametrization of the metadata but also fully configurable blueprints, PowerPoint reports, charts and queries. The SOA blueprints The solution comes with a set of predefined architectural representations that help the organization better perceive their SOA landscape. More blueprints can be easily created in order to accommodate the organizations needs in terms of detail, audience and metadata. Charts & Dashboards The solution encompasses a set of predefined charts and dashboards that promote a more agile way to control and explore the assets. Time Based Visualization All representations are time bound, and with EAMS - OER you can truly govern SOA with a complete view of the Past, Present and Future; The solution delivers Gap Analysis, a project oriented approach while taking into consideration the As-Was, As-Is an To-Be. Time based visualization differentiating factors: Extensive automation and maintenance of architectural representations Organization wide solution. Easy access and navigation to and between all architectural artifacts and representations. Flexible meta-model, customization and extensibility capabilities. Lifecycle management and enforcement of the time dimension over all the repository content. Profile based customization. Comprehensive visibility Architectural alignment Friendly and striking user interfaces For more information on EAMS visit us here. For more information on SOA visit us here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Link Consulting,OER,OSR,SOA Governance,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) Designs May Improve End User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

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

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• SOA Community Newsletter September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA partner community member Are you ready for Oracle Open World 2012? If you are planning to attend, make sure that you prepare your trip to San Francisco. If you could not make it, watch the keynotes live on-demand. You can also plan and decide to visit the SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium 2012 and meet Tim Hall and Demed Lher from our product management team in London. As an Oracle partner you will get 50% discount on the conference pass, please use the code DJMXZ370 and avail your discount. The BPM Solution Catalogue is now live, make sure you use the process examples and contribute your processes. SOA Proactive support is the best resource to support your SOA implementations. To administrate your SOA systems Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is the best tool, you can now attend thefree on-demand training. EM12c, Real User Experience Insight 12R1 gives you all the details, checkout our new demo. The BPM11g demo for Oracle E-Business Suite has become available. A wonderful SOA demo case is the Fusion Order Demo, Antony Reynolds posted an article how to update it on SOA Suite PS5. If you do use Coherence e.g. for SOA Suite, checkout the extension from our partner CloudTran. In this edition to this you will also find articles from: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB By Jian Liang & Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository by Nicolás Fonnegra Martinez and Markus Lohn & Exploring MDS Explorer by Mark Nelson & Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL by Rajesh Raheja & Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence by Jan van Zoggel & Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux Lonneke Dikmans & Generating an EJB SDO Service Interface for Oracle SOA Suite by Edwin Biemond. Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsSeptember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• LDoms and Maintenance Mode

  - by Owen Allen

   I got a few questions about how maintenance mode works with LDoms. "I have a Control Domain that I need to do maintenance on. What does being put in maintenance mode actually do for a Control Domain?" Maintenance mode is what you use when you're going to be shutting a system down, or otherwise tinkering with it, and you don't want Ops Center to generate incidents and notification of incidents. Maintenance mode stops new incidents from being generated, but it doesn't stop polling, or monitoring, the system and it doesn't prevent alerts. "What does maintenance mode do with the guests on a Control Domain?" If you have auto recovery set and the Control Domain is a member of a server pool of eligible systems, putting the Control Domain in maintenance mode automatically migrates guests to an available Control Domain.  When a Control Domain is in maintenance mode, it is not eligible to receive guests and the placement policies for guest creation and for automatic recovery won't select this server as a possible destination. If there isn't a server pool or there aren't any eligible systems in the pool, the guests are shut down. You can select a logical domain from the Assets section to view the Dashboard for the virtual machine and the Automatic Recovery status, either Enabled or Disabled. To change the status, click the action in the Actions pane. "If I have to do maintenance on a system and I do not want to initiate auto-recovery, what do I have to do so that I can manually bring down the Control Domain (and all its Guest domains)?" Use the Disable Automatic Recovery action. "If I put a Control Domain into maintenance mode, does that also put the OS into maintenance mode?" No, just the Control Domain server. You have to put the OS into maintenance mode separately. "Also, is there an easy way to see what assets are in maintenance mode? Can we put assets into, or take them out of, maintenance mode on some sort of group level?" You can create a user-defined group that will automatically include assets in maintenance mode. The docs here explain how to set up these groups. You'll use a group rule that looks like this:

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• Visual Studio 2010 Launch Events

  - by Jim Duffy

  Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about the new features in Visual Studio 2010. Check out the MSDN Events page and find out when the talented folks of the Developer & Evangelism group will be visiting your city to prove to you that /*Life Runs On Code*/. I’ll be attending the Raleigh event June 2, 2010 from 1:00 - 5:00 PM. North Carolina State University, Jane S. McKimmon Conference Center 1101 Gorman St Raleigh North Carolina 27606 United States From the Raleigh Event page: Event Overview Learn about the rich application platforms that Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 supports, including Windows® 7, the Web, SharePoint®, Windows Azure™, SQL®, and Windows® Phone 7 Series. From tighter tester and dev collaboration to new ALM tools, there’s a lot that’s new. Here’s what you can expect: Windows Development with Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio has always been the best way to build compelling visual solutions for Windows. Visual Studio 2010 continues this trend with great new tooling support for Silverlight 4, WPF, and native development. In this demo heavy session, you’ll see how you can build rich Windows applications with Silverlight 4 using new trusted application features including out-of-browser execution, saving to the file system, and even COM Automation. You’ll also see how you can use the new Task Parallel Library from within a WPF application to take advantage of all those cores in today’s modern computers. Web and Cloud Development with Visual Studio 2010 If you build solutions for the web, then this session is for you. Come see how your existing skills move forward with Visual Studio 2010 both for in-house ASP.NET development and the new frontier of the Cloud. In this session, you’ll see improved designers, new HTML and JavaScript snippets, Web Forms enhancements, and how you can quickly build great web sites using Dynamic Data. You’ll see the changes made to testable web sites with MVC 2.0 and how we’ve integrated JQuery support into the platform. You’ll then see how easy it is to leverage your existing code and move to the cloud with Windows Azure. Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools and Platform Overview This session provides an overview of Visual Studio® 2010 for Windows Phone. Learn about the powerful capabilities of this new application platform and the developer tools experience including basic IDE usage, debugging, packaging, and deployment. This session also shows how you can use Microsoft Expression® Blend™ for Windows Phone to build great Silverlight applications. Have a day. :-|

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• Consolidating Oracle E-Business Suite R12 on Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster

  - by Giri Mandalika

  An Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) R12 12.1.3 is now available on oracle.com.     The Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite This solution was centered around the engineered system, SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. Check the business and technical white papers along with a bunch of relevant useful resources online at the above optimized solution page for EBS. What is an Optimized Solution? Oracle's Optimized Solutions are designed, tested and fully documented architectures that are tuned for optimal performance and availability. Optimized solutions are NOT pre-packaged, fully tuned, ready-to-install software bundles that can be downloaded and installed. An optimized solution is usually a well documented architecture that was thoroughly tested on a target platform. The technical white paper details the deployed application architecture along with various observations from installing the application on target platform to its behavior and performance in highly available and scalable configurations. Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Use Case Multiple E-Business Suite R12 12.1.3 application modules were tested in this optimized solution -- Financials (online - oracle forms & web requests), Order Management (online - oracle forms & web req uests) and HRMS (online - web requests & payroll batch). The solution will be updated with additional application modules, when they are available. Oracle Solaris Cluster is responsible for the high availability portion of the solution. Performance Data For the sake of completeness, test results were also documented in the optimized solution white paper. Those test results are mainly for educational purposes only. They give good sense of application behavior under the circumstances the application was tested. Since the major focus of the optimized solution is around highly available and scalable configurations, the application was configured to me et those criteria. Hence the documented test results are not directly comparable to any other E-Business Suite performance test results published by any vendor including Oracle. Such an attempt may lead to skewed, incorrect conclusions. Questions & Requests Feel free to direct your questions to the author of the white papers. If you are a potential customer who would like to test a specific E-Business Suite application module on any non-engineered syste m such as SPARC T4-X or engineered system such as SPARC SuperCluster, contact Oracle Solution Center.

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• Power Your Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware

  - by user753488

  Introducing the biggest and most strategic event for Fusion Middleware this year: Power your Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware. Running in over 50 cities across the globe, this event is aimed at Architects, IT Managers, and technical leaders like you who are using Fusion Middleware or trying to learn more about middleware in the context of Cloud computing. Join us for a special kickoff on Wednesday, June 29th in Chicago for the first event in North America. This event features an exclusive keynote from Rick Schultz, VP of Technology Product Marketing. Cloud is certainly all the rage. But what can we make of it? According to Alex Andrianopoulos, Vice President Product Marketing for Fusion Middleware states, “Not since Java was unveiled have we seen something so transformative hit the industry. The promised benefits of Cloud are many, significant, and deliver value to both IT organizations as well as the Line of Business. The benefits range from lower data center costs, to significantly reduced environmental impact, to the ability to capture more of the opportunities that market present through increased agility in resource deployment and dramatically reduced time to market.” With an ROI so promising, why isn’t everyone on Cloud already? It’s a question a lot of IT managers are struggling with. While the promised benefits of Cloud computing can be immense, achieving them requires much more than the adoption of a new architecture, or the virtualization of servers, or the outsourcing of some or all of the IT resources. These may be useful steps towards moving to a Cloud computing blueprint, but on their own do not deliver Cloud computing and its associated benefits to the enterprise. This is exactly what we’ll be addressing in the event series, ways you can leverage Complete, Open and Integrated capabilities of Oracle Fusion Middleware today to get one step closer to Cloud. Whether you’re: Leveraging Exalogic Elastic Cloud to consolidate your applications Improving agility with Oracle SOA to generate a foundation for shared data services Securing and managing your Cloud using Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Enterprise Manager Migrating from mainframe to Cloud using Oracle Tuxedo, Coherence and GoldenGate Building applications in the Cloud swiftly and easier with Oracle’s WebCenter Suite Join us for the first of its kind event in Chicago this week by registering now, or find an event near you. Learn more about Oracle Fusion Middleware and Cloud computing today on the Oracle.com website by going to http://www.Oracle.com/goto/Middleware4Cloud

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• Sustainability Activities at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  Close to 50,000 participants will come to San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne events, held September 30-October 4, 2012 at Moscone Center. Oracle is very conscious of the impact that these events have on the environment and, as part of its ongoing commitment to sustainability, has developed a sustainable event program-now in its fifth year-that aims to maximize positive benefits and minimize negative impacts in a variety of ways. Click here for more details. At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, there will be many sessions and even a hands-on lab which discuss the sustainability solutions that Oracle provides for our customers. I wanted to highlight a few of those sessions here so if you will be at Oracle OpenWorld, you can make sure to attend them. One of the most compelling sessions promises to be our “Eco-Enterprise Innovation Awards and the Business Case for Sustainability” session on Wednesday, October 3 from 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West 3005. Oracle Chairman of the Board Jeff Henley, Chief Sustainability Officer Jon Chorley, and other Oracle executives will honor select customers with Oracle's Eco-Enterprise Innovation award. This award recognizes customers and their respective partners who rely on Oracle products to support their green business practices in order to reduce their environmental impact, while improving business efficiencies and reducing costs. Another interesting session is the “Tracking, Reporting, and Reducing Environmental Impact with Oracle Solutions” which occurs on Monday, October 1 from 4:45 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. in Moscone West Room 2022. This session covers Oracle’s overall sustainability strategy as well as Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting (EA&R), which leverages Oracle ERP and BI solutions for accurate, efficient tracking of energy, emissions, and other environmental data. If you want more details, make sure to visit the hands-on lab titled “Oracle Environmental Accounting & Reporting for Integrated Sustainability Reporting”. This hour-long lab will take place on Tuesday, October 2 at 5:00 p.m. in the Marriott Marquis Hotel-Nob Hill CD. Here you can learn how to use Oracle EA&R to collect sustainability-related data in an efficient and reliable manner as part of existing business processes in Oracle E-Business Suite or JD Edwards Enterprise One. Register for this hands-on lab here.  

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Today I’m excited to share that the Windows Azure Mobile Services public preview is now available. This preview provides a turnkey backend cloud solution designed to accelerate connected client app development. These services streamline the development process by enabling you to leverage the cloud for common mobile application scenarios such as structured storage, user authentication and push notifications. If you’re building a Windows 8 app and want a fast and easy path to creating backend cloud services, this preview provides the capabilities you need. You to take advantage of the cloud to build and deploy modern apps for Windows 8 devices in anticipation of general availability on October 26th. Subsequent preview releases will extend support to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Features The preview makes it fast and easy to create cloud services for Windows 8 applications within minutes. Here are the key benefits:  Rapid development: configure a straightforward and secure backend in less than five minutes. Create modern mobile apps: common Windows Azure plus Windows 8 scenarios that Windows Azure Mobile Services preview will support include:  Automated Service API generation providing CRUD functionality and dynamic schematization on top of Structured Storage Structured Storage with powerful query support so a Windows 8 app can seamlessly connect to a Windows Azure SQL database Integrated Authentication so developers can configure user authentication via Windows Live Push Notifications to bring your Windows 8 apps to life with up to date and relevant information Access structured data: connect to a Windows Azure SQL database for simple data management and dynamically created tables. Easy to set and manage permissions. Pricing One of the key things that we’ve consistently heard from developers about using Windows Azure with mobile applications is the need for a low cost and simple offer. The simplest way to describe the pricing for Windows Azure Mobile Services at preview is that it is the same as Windows Azure Websites during preview. What’s FREE? Run up to 10 Mobile Services for free in a multitenant environment Free with valid Windows Azure Free Trial 1GB SQL Database Unlimited ingress 165MB/day egress  What do I pay for? Scaling up to dedicated VMs Once Windows Azure Free Trial expires - SQL Database and egress     Getting Started To start using Mobile Services, you will need to sign up for a Windows Azure free trial, if you have not done so already.  If you already have a Windows Azure account, you will need to request to enroll in this preview feature. Once you’ve enrolled, this getting started tutorial will walk you through building your first Windows 8 application using the preview’s services. The developer center contains more resources to teach you how to: Validate and authorize access to data using easy scripts that execute securely, on the server Easily authenticate your users via Windows Live Send toast notifications and update live tiles in just a few lines of code Our pricing calculator has also been updated for calculate costs for these new mobile services. Questions? Ask in the Windows Azure Forums. Feedback? Send it to [email protected].

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• JavaOne User Group Sunday

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Before any "official" sessions of JavaOne 2012, the Java community was already sizzling. User Group Sunday was a great success, with several sessions offered by Java community members for anyone wanting to attend. Sessions were both about Java and best practices for running a JUG. Technical sessions included "Autoscaling Web Java Applications: Handle Peak Traffic with Zero Downtime and Minimized Cost,"  "Using Java with HTML5 and CSS3," and "Gooey and Sticky Bits: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Java." Several sessions were about how to start and run a JUG, like "Getting Speakers, Finding Sponsors, Planning Events: A Day in the Life of a JUG" and "JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group." Badr ElHouari and Faiçal Boutaounte presented the session "Why Communities Are Important and How to Start One." They used the example of the Morocco JUG, which they started. Before the JUG, there was no "Java community," they explained. They shared their best practices, including: have fun, enjoy what you are doing get a free venue to have regular meetings, a University is a good choice run a conference, it gives you visibility and brings in new members students are a great way to grow a JUG Badr was proud to mention JMaghreb, a first-time conference that the Morocco JUG is hosting in November. They have secured sponsors and international speakers, and are able to offer a free conference for Java developers in North Africa. The session also included a free-flowing discussion about recruiters (OK to come to meetings, but not to dominate them), giving out email addresses (NEVER do without permission), no-show rates (50% for free events) and the importance of good content (good speakers really help!). Trisha Gee, member of the London Java Community (LJC) was one of the presenters for the session "Benefits of Open Source." She explained how open sourcing the LMAX Disruptor (a high performance inter-thread messaging library) gave her company LMAX several benefits, including more users, more really good quality new hires, and more access to 3rd party companies. Being open source raised the visibility of the company and the product, which was good in many ways. "We hired six really good coders in three months," Gee said. They also got community contributors for their code and more cred with technologists. "We had been unsuccessful at getting access to executives from other companies in the high-performance space. But once we were open source, the techies at the company had heard of us, knew our code was good, and that opened lots of doors for us." So, instead of "giving away the secret sauce," by going open source, LMAX gained many benefits. "It was a great day," said Bruno Souza, AKA The Brazilian Java Man, "the sessions were well attended and there was lots of good interaction." Sizzle and steak!

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• Gamification in the enterprise updates, September edition

  - by erikanollwebb

  Things have been a little busy here at GamifyOracle.  Last week, I attended a small conference in San Diego on Enterprise Gamification.  Mario Herger of SAP, Matt Landes of Google and I were on a panel discussion about how to introduce and advocate gamification in your organization.  I gave a talk as well as a workshop on gamification.  The workshop was a new concept, to take our Design Jam from Applications User Experience and try it with people outside of user experience.  I have to say, the whole thing was a great success, in great part because I had some expert help from Teena Singh from Apps UX.  We took a flow from expense reporting and created a scenario about sales reps who are on the road a lot and how we needed them to get their expense reports filed by the end of the fiscal year.  We divided the attendees into groups and gave them a little over two hours to work out how they might use game mechanics to gamify the flows.   We even took the opportunity to re-use the app our fab dev team in our Mexico Development Center put together to gamify the event including badges, points, prizes and a leaderboard.  Since I am a firm believer that you can't gamify everything (or at least, not everything well), I focused my talk prior to the workshop on when it works, and when it might not, including pitfalls to gamifying badly.  I was impressed that the teams all considered what might go wrong with gamifying expenses and built into their designs some protections against that.  I can't wait to take this concept on the road again, it really was a fun day. Now that we have gotten through that set of events, we're wildly working on our next project for next week.  I'm doing a focus group at Oracle OpenWorld on Gamification in the Enterprise.  To do that, Andrea Cantu and I are trying to kill as many trees as possible while we work out some gamification concepts to present (see proof below!).  It should be a great event and I'm hoping we learn a lot about what our customers think about the use of gamification in their companies and in the products they use. So that's the news so far from GamifyOracle land.  I'll try to get more out about those events and more after next week. And if you will be at OOW, ping me and we can discuss in person!  I'd love to know what everyone is thinking in the area.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for July 2, 2013

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing - July 9, 2013, Redwood Shores, CA. The first OTN Architect Day event of 2013 happens in just one week, on Tuesday July 9 at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, CA. Registration is free and you get three sessions by three experts on cloud computing in the real world — plus a panel Q&A for answers to all of your questions. Register now! Oracle Database 12c: Flashback Moving Forward | Lucas Jellema Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema's latest of several recent blog posts dealing with various aspects of the recently released Oracle Database 12c. Detroit, Embracing New Auto Technologies, Seeks App Builders This story from the New York Times paints a rosy picture indeed for app developers as the internet of things continues to evolve. Advanced View Criteria Implementation in ADF BC | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis' post focuses on advanced declarative View Criteria features. JDeveloper: Showing a Popup when Selecting an af:selectOneRadio | Timo Hahn Oracle ACE Timo Hahn illustrates a use case in which a popup is displayed each time the user clicks on one of the radio buttons of a button group. Can Technology Innovation Save The New York Times? One of the standout keynotes from the recent QCon New York event, this presentation by New York Times Sr. VP/CIO Marc Frons and CTO/VP Rajiv Pant paints a detailed portrait of the complete transformation of an organization -- not just the IT. Enterprise architects will find this particularly interesting. Video: Meet Growing IT Demand for Databases with Private DBaaS Do you understand the difference between traditional database deployment and database as a service? If not, you'll want to check out this video, which includes an overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager's capabilities for rapid deployment of DBaaS. S Webcast: Zero-Downtime Migration to Oracle Exadata Using Oracle GoldenGate: A Customer Case Study Presenters Alok Pareek (VP, Product Management/Development, Oracle Data Integration) and John F. Martin (CEO of Emerging Markets and CTO IQNavigator) discuss how IQNavigator is using Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Exadata. Free eBook: Building a Database Cloud for Dummies This free quick-reference guide, organized into six short chapters and supplemented with helpful illustrations, provides a clear overview of the cloud and step-by-step instructions on deploying database as a service. (Registration required.) Thought for the Day "My motto is: Live every day to the fullest – in moderation." — Lindsay Lohan (Born July 2, 1986) Source: brainyquote.com

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