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• Oracle Buys Compendium - Adds Leading Content Marketing Platform to Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  News Facts Oracle today announced that it has acquired Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing provider that helps companies plan, produce and deliver engaging content across multiple channels throughout their customers’ lifecycle. Compendium’s data-driven approach aligns relevant content with customer data and profiles to help companies more effectively attract prospects, engage buyers, accelerate conversion of prospects to opportunities, increase adoption, and drive revenue growth. Compendium’s innovative solution complements Oracle’s industry leading Eloqua Marketing Cloud which is a part of Oracle’s comprehensive Customer Experience solution. The combination of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud with Compendium is expected to enable modern marketers to align persona-based content to customers’ digital body language to increase “top-of-funnel” customer engagement, improve the quality of sales leads, realize the highest return on their marketing investment, and increase customer loyalty. More information on this announcement can be found at http://www.oracle.com/compendium. Supporting Quotes “As customers increasingly access information through online and mobile channels, the buying process is shifting from sales-driven to marketing-driven. Now, more than ever, marketers are challenged to deliver relevant and engaging content across multiple channels and throughout the customer lifecycle,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “By adding Compendium’s content marketing platform to Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud, customers will be able to capture more prospects, improve the customer experience and drive top line revenue.” “Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud is uniquely positioned to capture a prospect’s digital body language to help companies know each buyer’s demographics, behaviors and influencers,” said Chris Baggott, Compendium CEO. “By combining this buyer profile with Compendium’s data-driven content marketing platform, marketers will be able to deliver the right content, to the right individual across the right channel at the right time. We are very excited to now be a part of the industry’s most complete marketing cloud solution, giving us a global stage to deliver innovative content marketing solutions.” Supporting Resources About Oracle and Compendium General Presentation Customer and Partner Letter FAQ

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• CX en la nube

  - by Noelia Gomez

  Las organizaciones con más éxito del mundo optan por ofrecer un servicio al cliente en la nube. Echa un vistazo a esta infografía para saber por qué 1024x768 Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Si quieres saber más sobre la experiencia del cliente: · Customer Concepts Magazine · Customer Concepts Exchange in LinkedIn · Customer Concepts Web TV · Customer Experience @ Oracle.com · Customer Experience Facebook Hub · Customer Experience YouTube Channel · Customer Experience Twitter

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• Linq to Sql saying that item by 'Customer' already exists. Choose a different name.

  - by Anthony Potts

  I have been going round and round with a linq to sql file while using svn for quite some time. The latest is that my dbml file shows as having an error which states that An item named "Customer" already exists. Please choose a different name. And then it repeats that again. In fact, it says it for almost every object. What is my fix? I have tried renaming the one named Customer, but that didn't fix it. I don't know where to go to fix this. I went to the .dbml file and don't see any duplication, and I went to the .dbml.layout file and didn't see any duplication there either.

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• query to return three records for each customer application based on the options declared in the pre

  - by kumarreddy

  tables look like this table1---customer application columns--- application id--primary key, name, ssn, ... ... table2----balance(actually its a view) columns--- amount balance, application id ...... ...... table3 ---- options columns--- optionid, option value(1,2,3,4), ...... ........ .... table4 ----- ratios columns--- ratios id, option value, ratio value, applicationid(have to think about it), ........ table 4(detail) option value, Ratios 1 ----- 30 1 ----- 40 1 ----- 30 2 ---- 100 2 ----- 0 2 ------ 0 3 ---- 60 3 ------ 30 3 ----- 10 4 ---- 50 4 ----- 30 4 ----- 20 as is the case...now i need to get three records for each customer application with varying balances in proportion of ratios declared in table 4 corresponding to option values...... plz let me know where i was unclear about returning records thanks in advance

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• how to create stub DNS zone for emulating my customer production environment ?

  - by Albert Widjaja

  Hi All, Is it possible to emulate my customer production environment inside my AD domain by just creating the same domain inside my primary DNS server ? Can I created mycustomer.com DNS zone (STUB) just for the sake of listing few database servers and application servers and then for the other DNS records eg. MX, NS and the other refer to the REAL MX record entry so that my Exchange Server email flow is unaffected to mycustomer.com ? because if I just create A record in my current domain for some of the servers, the FQDN is not exactly what I want. Thanks.

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• Why doesnt file uploads work for a specific customer?

  - by nimo9367

  We have for some time now experienced some unexplainable behavior when a certain customer is trying to upload files to our web based application using a standard web form. It's a CGI based application and the server is running IIS6. However it works fine for all of our other customers using the same server and application so this must be a client side related issue? The request basically times out and you get to "page cannot be displayed". Does anyone have any idea of what might be the source of this problem?

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• Resolve Instructional Webcast Series

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document Catch the Express—Register for an Instructional Webcast Oracle Proactive Support’s ‘Get Proactive’ message to customers underscores the benefits they’ll obtain by leveraging the Prevent, Resolve and Upgrade capabilities available across the suite of Oracle Products. Our goal in Proactive Support is to show customers how to ‘Get Proactive’ and achieve success by leveraging the latest tools, knowledge, and best practices available to manage your applications and technology more proactively. Most importantly, we want to ensure that customers are proficient in the use of these proactive capabilities. To help you gain this proficiency, we’ve recently launched a series of instructional webcasts that we call the “Resolve Series.” This series consists of both live and on-demand webcasts, and features some of the key proactive capabilities that customers can leverage to resolve their own problems. We launched the first phase of the series in July, and focused on finding answers using the My Oracle Support portal. Among the topics covered in those sessions were best practices for searching the knowledge base, leveraging communities to find answers faster, and other proactive features of My Oracle Support The second phase of the series is set to kick off in September. This phase will include product specific sessions designed to provide customers who use the product with the skills and knowledge required to leverage some of the most important capabilities found under the “RESOLVE” category of our proactive portfolio on My Oracle Support. These webcasts will feature Subject Matter Experts demonstrating how to use the tools and capabilities, discussing best practices, and providing answers to any questions you might have. In addition, hands-on labs will be included in some of the sessions, allowing you to practice applying what you’ve just learned. Whether you are a new customer or you’ve worked with Oracle Support for years, you’ll discover new information and techniques to help you work more efficiently and keep your systems running smoothly. Leverage this opportunity to learn best practices and get the inside track on finding answers fast by using the right tools at the right time. Make sure to take advantage of these webcasts and maximize the value you receive from your Oracle Premier Support investment. See the full schedule of events and register for sessions.

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• What I like about WIF&rsquo;s Claims-based Authorization

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In “traditional” .NET with its IPrincipal interface and IsInRole method, developers were encouraged to write code like this: public void AddCustomer(Customer customer) {     if (Thread.CurrentPrincipal.IsInRole("Sales"))     {         // add customer     } } In code reviews I’ve seen tons of code like this. What I don’t like about this is, that two concerns in your application get tightly coupled: business and security logic. But what happens when the security requirements change – and they will (e.g. members of the sales role and some other people from different roles need to create customers)? Well – since your security logic is sprinkled across your project you need to change the security checks in all relevant places (and make sure you don’t forget one) and you need to re-test, re-stage and re-deploy the complete app. This is clearly not what we want. WIF’s claims-based authorization encourages developers to separate business code and authorization policy evaluation. This is a good thing. So the same security check with WIF’s out-of-the box APIs would look like this: public void AddCustomer(Customer customer) {     try     {         ClaimsPrincipalPermission.CheckAccess("Customer", "Add");           // add customer     }     catch (SecurityException ex)     {         // access denied     } } You notice the fundamental difference? The security check only describes what the code is doing (represented by a resource/action pair) – and does not state who is allowed to invoke the code. As I mentioned earlier – the who is most probably changing over time – the what most probably not. The call to ClaimsPrincipalPermission hands off to another class called the ClaimsAuthorizationManager. This class handles the evaluation of your security policy and is ideally in a separate assembly to allow updating the security logic independently from the application logic (and vice versa). The claims authorization manager features a method called CheckAccess that retrieves three values (wrapped inside an AuthorizationContext instance) – action (“add”), resource (“customer”) and the principal (including its claims) in question. CheckAccess then evaluates those three values and returns true/false. I really like the separation of concerns part here. Unfortunately there is not much support from Microsoft beyond that point. And without further tooling and abstractions the CheckAccess method quickly becomes *very* complex. But still I think that is the way to go. In the next post I will tell you what I don’t like about it (and how to fix it).

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• How to model a many to many from a DDD perspective in UML?

  - by JD01

  I have a two entity objects Site and Customer where there is a many to many relationship. I have read you try not to model this in DDD as it is in the data model and go for a unidirectional flow. If I wanted to show this in UML, would I show it as it is in the data model: Site * ----->*Customer but the direction arrow gives the flow? or as following Site ----->*Customer But then this would imply that Customer can only go in one site.

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• MVC Razor Engine For Beginners Part 1

  - by Humprey Cogay, C|EH, E|CSA

  I. What is MVC? a. http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/older-versions/overview/asp-net-mvc-overview II. Software Requirements for this tutorial a. Visual Studio 2010/2012. You can get your free copy here Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 b. MVC Framework Option 1 - Install using a standalone installer http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30683 Option 2 - Install using Web Platform Installer http://www.microsoft.com/web/handlers/webpi.ashx?command=getinstallerredirect&appid=MVC4VS2010_Loc III. Creating your first MVC4 Application a. On the Visual Studio click file new solution link b. Click Other Project Type>Visual Studio Solutions and on the templates window select blank solution and let us name our solution MVCPrimer. c. Now Click File>New and select Project d. Select Visual C#>Web> and select ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application and Enter MyWebSite as Name e. Select Empty, Razor as view engine and uncheck Create a Unit test project f. You can now view a basic MVC 4 Application Structure on your solution explorer g. Now we will add our first controller by right clicking on the controllers folder on your solution explorer and select Add>Controller h. Change the name of the controller to HomeController and under the scaffolding options select Empty MVC Controller. i. You will now see a basic controller with an Index method that returns an ActionResult j. We will now add a new View Folder for our Home Controller. Right click on the views folder on your solution explorer and select Add> New Folder> and name this folder Home k. Add a new View by right clicking on Views>Home Folder and select Add View. l. Name the view Index, and select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, All checkbox should be unchecked for now and click add. m. Relationship between our HomeController and Home Views Sub Folder n. Add new HTML Contents to our newly created Index View o. Press F5 to run our MVC Application p. We will create our new model, Right click on the models folder of our solution explorer and select Add> Class. q. Let us name our class Customer r. Edit the Customer class with the following code s. Open the HomeController by double clickin HomeController of our Controllers folder and edit the HomeControllerusing System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Mvc;   namespace MyWebSite.Controllers {     public class HomeController : Controller     {         //         // GET: /Home/           public ActionResult Index()         {             return View();         }           public ActionResult ListCustomers()         {             List<Models.Customer> customers = new List<Models.Customer>();               //Add First Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()                     {                         Id = 1,                         CompanyName = "Volvo",                         ContactNo = "123-0123-0001",                         ContactPerson = "Gustav Larson",                         Description = "Volvo Car Corporation, or Volvo Personvagnar AB, is a Scandinavian automobile manufacturer founded in 1927"                     });                 //Add Second Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()                     {                         Id = 2,                         CompanyName = "BMW",                         ContactNo = "999-9876-9898",                         ContactPerson = "Franz Josef Popp",                         Description = "Bayerische Motoren Werke AG,  (BMW; English: Bavarian Motor Works) is a " +                                       "German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1917. "                     });                 //Add Third Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()             {                 Id = 3,                 CompanyName = "Audi",                 ContactNo = "983-2222-1212",                 ContactPerson = "Karl Benz",                 Description = " is a multinational division of the German manufacturer Daimler AG,"             });               return View(customers);         }     } } t. Let us now create a view for this Class, But before continuing Press Ctrl + Shift + B to rebuild the solution, this will make the previously created model on the Model class drop down of the Add View Menu. Right click on the views>Home folder and select Add>View u. Let us name our View as ListCustomers, Select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, Put a check mark on Create a strongly-typed view, and select Customer (MyWebSite.Models) as model class. Slect List on the Scaffold Template and Click OK. v. Run the MVC Application by pressing F5, and on the address bar insert Home/ListCustomers, We should now see a web page similar below.   x. You can edit ListCustomers.CSHTML to remove and add HTML codes @model IEnumerable<MyWebSite.Models.Customer>   @{     Layout = null; }   <!DOCTYPE html>   <html> <head>     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />     <title>ListCustomers</title> </head> <body>     <h2>List of Customers</h2>     <table border="1">         <tr>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.CompanyName)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.Description)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactPerson)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactNo)             </th>         </tr>         @foreach (var item in Model) {         <tr>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.CompanyName)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.Description)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactPerson)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactNo)             </td>                   </tr>     }         </table> </body> </html> y. Press F5 to run the MVC Application   z. You will notice some @HTML.DisplayFor codes. These are called HTML Helpers you can read more about HTML Helpers on this site http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/mvc_htmlhelpers.asp   That’s all. You now have your first MVC4 Razor Engine Web Application . . .

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• “It Isn’t Easy At All; Otherwise, Everyone Would Be Doing It”

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A few months ago, JP Saunders (pictured left), who leads the go-to-market initiatives for the Oracle CX Service offering, kicked off a series of articles about modern customer service. He contends that to take care of customers?and the people that support those customers?companies need to make it easy to deliver consistently great experiences. But it’s not easy; it’s an art. The six posts in The Art of Easy series will help you better understand some of the customer service challenges you face and how to avoid common pitfalls. We pulled them all together here in one post for continuity and easy access. Saunders introduces the series with The Art of Easy: Make It Easy To Deliver Great Customer Service Experiences (Part 1). The Art of Easy: Offer Self Service With the Emphasis on Service (Part 2) by David Fulton (pictured left): David Fulton, Director of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud, shares five tenets of customer self service that move an organization closer to becoming a modern customer service business. Easy Decisions For Complex Problems (Part 3) by Heike Lorenz (pictured right): Heike Lorenz, Director of Global Product Marketing, Policy Automation, writes about automating service policies to ensure that the correct decisions are being applied to the right people. The goal is to nurture the trusted relationships with customers during complex decision-making processes. Moving at the Speed of Easy (Part 4) by Chris Ulmand (pictured left): Chris Omland, Director of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud, addresses the need for speed to keep up with customers’ expectations. His advice—start with a platform that enables agile innovation, respects a company’s unique needs, and has proven reliability to protect customer relationships. Knowledge Makes It Easy For Everyone (Part 5) by Nav Chakravarti (pictured rig: Vice President Nav Chakravarti, Oracle Service Cloud, talks about managing the knowledge that customers need and want. He coaches readers on delivering answers to customers’ questions easily, in context, with relevance, reliably, and accurately. Making Easy, Both Effective and Efficient (Part 6) by Melinda Uhland (pictured left): Melinda Uhland, Oracle CX Product Management teaches us that happy agents produce happy customers. A Modern Customer Service organization is one that invests in its agents and empowers them with tools to make them efficient and effective, which, in turn, improves customer results.

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• Understanding When Social Interactions Should Be Resolved in Another Channel

  - by Christina McKeon

  Guest Blogger: Aphrodite Brinsmead, Senior Analyst at Ovum Agents need to respond to customers’ social comments and questions quickly and in the right tone. But more importantly, they need to offer resolutions. Customers care most about how long it takes to find information rather than which channel they are using. They choose to use social media because they are comfortable with the channel and it offers a convenient way to communicate. Ideally agents will resolve questions within social media, but they need guidance as to how and when to escalate interactions to a more private channel. First, businesses should assess the way in which customers are using social media to communicate with them and categorize posts into groups: complaints, feedback, technical queries or more general support questions. They should then consider the types of interactions that can easily be handled within social media and those that need to be followed up in another channel. This will be very dependent on the industry. Examples of queries that can be resolved in social media include Shipping pricing and timeframes Outage updates and resolution plans Flight status information Product stock check Technical support videos or forum posts Availability of facilities Both customers and agents need to be educated about the types of questions they can expect to resolve within social media. As the channel matures as a customer service tool, it needs to have value other than just as a forum for complaints. Social customer service agents need the power to start a web chat or phone call Any questions where customers need to divulge personal details in order to get a resolution will need to be addressed in a private channel: a private social message, web chat, email or phone call. Customers should never disclose their date of birth, social security, credit card number, or healthcare records in a public forum. Flight issues, changes to a booking, billing queries or account updates will all need to be completed via a private interaction. Agents responding to questions on social media need the ability to start a web chat or phone call with the customer. The customer doesn’t want to have to repeat their question and the agent should be empowered to connect customer records and access account or billing information. These agents will need to be trained across different channels and should be able to view all customer communications in one application. They also need to follow up questions that began on a public forum in the initial channel to make it clear that the issue was addressed. In order to make this possible, social media needs to be integrated as part of a broader customer service strategy. Irrespective of how many channels are used to complete an interaction, businesses should prioritize customer satisfaction and issue resolution. They need a clear strategy and trained agents that can handle and respond to social interactions. Follow me on Twitter @diteb. 

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• New hire expectations... (Am I being unreasonable?)

  - by user295841

  I work for a very small custom software shop. We currently consist me and my boss. My boss is an old FoxPro DOS developer and OOP makes him uncomfortable. He is planning on taking a back seat in the next few years to hopefully enjoy a “partial retirement”. I will be taking over the day to day operations and we are now desperately looking for more help. We tried Monster.com, Dice.com, and others a few years ago when we started our search. We had no success. We have tried outsourcing overseas (total disaster), hiring kids right out of college (mostly a disaster but that’s where I came from), interns (good for them, not so good for us) and hiring laid off “experienced” developers (there was a reason they were laid off). I have heard hiring practices discussed on podcasts, blogs, etc... and have tried a few. The “Fizz Buzz” test was a good one. One kid looked physically ill before he finally gave up. I think my problem is that I have grown so much as a developer since I started here that I now have a high standard. I hear/read very intelligent people podcasts and blogs and I know that there are lots of people out there that can do the job. I don’t want to settle for less than a “good” developer. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable. I expect any good developer (entry level or experienced) to be billable (at least paying their own wage) in under one month. I expect any good developer to be able to be productive (at least dangerous) in any language or technology with only a few days of research/training. I expect any good developer to be able to take a project from initial customer request to completion with little or no help from others. Am I being unreasonable? What constitutes a valuable developer? What should be expected of an entry level developer? What should be expected of an experienced developer? I realize that everyone is different but there has to be some sort of expectations standard, right? I have been giving the test project below to potential canidates to weed them out. Good idea? Too much? Too little? Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Project ID: T00001 Description: Order Entry System Deadline: 1 Week Scope The scope of this project is to develop a fully function order entry system. Screen/Form design must be user friendly and promote efficient data entry and modification. User experience (Navigation, Screen/Form layouts, Look and Feel…) is at the developer’s discretion. System may be developed using any technologies that conform to the technical and system requirements. Deliverables Complete source code Database setup instructions (Scripts or restorable backup) Application installation instructions (Installer or installation procedure) Any necessary documentation Technical Requirements Server Platform – Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 / SBS Client Platform – Windows XP Web Browser (If applicable) – IE 8 Database – At developer’s discretion (Must be a relational SQL database.) Language – At developer’s discretion All data must be normalized. (+) All data must maintain referential integrity. (++) All data must be indexed for optimal performance. System must handle concurrency. System Requirements Customer Maintenance Customer records must have unique ID. Customer data will include Name, Address, Phone, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on the Customer table. User must be able to enter a specific Customer ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a customer to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Customer record cannot be deleted if the customer has an order in the system. (++) Inventory Maintenance Part records must have unique ID. Part data will include Description, Price, UOM (Unit of Measure), etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the part table. User must be able to enter a specific Part ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a part to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Part record cannot be deleted if the part has been used in an order. (++) Order Entry Order records must have a unique auto-incrementing key (Order Number). Order data must be split into a header/detail structure. (+) Order can contain an infinite number of detail records. Order header data will include Order Number, Customer ID (++), Order Date, Order Status (Open/Closed), etc. Order detail data will include Part Number (++), Quantity, Price, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the order tables. User must be able to enter a specific Order Number to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find an order to edit. User must be able to print an order form from within the order entry form. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Reports Customer Listing – All Customers in the system. Inventory Listing – All parts in the system. Open Order Listing – All open orders in system. Customer Order Listing – All orders for specific customer. All reports must include sorts and filter functions where applicable. Ex. Customer Listing by range of Customer IDs. Open Order Listing by date range.

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• Revamping an old and unstable IT-solution for a customer?

  - by cmbrnt

  I've been given the cumbersome task to totally redo the IT-infrastructure for a customer's office. They are currently running Windows XP all over, with one computer acting as a file server with no control over which users have access to which files, and so on. To top it off, this file server also functions as a workstation, which means it gets rebooted every time the user notices some sluggish behavior or experiences problems with flash games. To say the least, this isn't working for them. Now - I've got a very slim budget, but I need to set up a new server, and I wish to run Windows Server 2008 on it. I also need the ability to access the network remotely via VPN. Would it be a good idea to install VMware ESXi 4.1 onto the new server, and then run Windows Server 2008 as well as a separate Debian install for openvpn on it? I don't like the Domain Controller for the future AD to also run a VPN-server, because of stability issues when something goes to hell with either of them. There will be no redundancy though. However, I'm not sure if there is something to gain by installing a VPN solution on the Windows Server itself, when it comes to accessing file shares on the network via VPN. I don't know how to enable users logging in via the VPN to access the remote files, since they will be accessing the network from their own home computers (which is indeed a really bad idea, but this is what I've got to work with). They won't be logged in to the windows Domain, but rather their home workgroups. I need to be able to grant access to files in certain directories based on the logged in AD-user, but every computer won't necessarily be configured to log into the domain. I'm not sure how to explain this in a good way, but I'd be happy to clarify if somethings not clear. Any help would be great, because I've got a feeling that I can't do this without introducing a bunch of costly new rules when it comes to their IT-solution. I'd rather leave that untouched and go on my merry way to the next assignment.

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• Your Day-by-Day Guide to Agile PLM at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Kerrie Foy

  This year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference is nearly here, and we’re all excited about what we have planned! With five days of activities and customer presenters from market leaders and top innovators like The Coca-Cola Company, Starbucks, JDSU, Facebook, GlobalFoundries, and more, this is an event you don't want to miss. I've compiled this day-by-day guide to help anyone keep track of all the “Product Lifecycle Management and Product Value Chain” sessions and activities at OpenWorld 2012, September 30 – October 4 in San Francisco, California.  Monday, October 1 There are great networking activities on Sunday September 30, but PLM specific sessions start after general conference keynotes on Monday, October 1 at 10:45 a.m. at the InterContinental Hotel in room Telegraph Hill. In fact, most of our sessions this year will be held in this room, which is still close to the conference keynotes in Moscone, but just far enough away to allow some focused networking and discussions.   This first session, 10:45 – 11:45 a.m. is a joint session with the Agile and AutoVue teams, entitled “Streamline PLM Design-to-Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Soltuions” featuring presenters from Oracle as well as joint AutoVue and Agile PLM customer GlobalFoundries. In the following 12:15 – 1:15 p.m. slot, there are two sessions to choose from, so if you have a team of representatives attending OpenWorld, you may consider splitting up to catch both of these: a) Our General Session will be held in the InterContinental Hotel Ballroom C, which will cover our complete enterprise PLM strategy, product updates, and roadmaps. It’s our pleasure to feature a customer keynote presentation from Chris Bedi, CIO, and Rajeev Sethi, Director IT Business Engagement, of JDSU. b) A focused session on integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems will be held on the second floor of Moscone West (next to the InterContinental) in room 2022. Join to discover how these types of integrations help companies manage common and integrated design information across all MCAD, ECAD, and software components. After a lunch break and perhaps a visit to the Demogrounds in Moscone West, select from two product roadmap sessions in the next time slot (3:15 – 4:15 p.m.): an Agile 9.3.x session located in the InterContinental’s Ballroom C, and an Agile PLM for Process session located back in the InterContinental’s Telegraph Room. Both sessions will have strong content around each product line’s latest releases, vision, and customer examples. We are very pleased to feature Daniel Soosai of Facebook in the A9 session and Vinnie D’Agostino of The Coca-Cola Company in the PLM for Process session. Afterwards, hang in there for one last session of the day from 4:45 – 5:45 p.m.; it’s an insightful discussion on leveraging Agile PLM as the Foundation for Enterprise Quality Management, and it’s sure to be one of the best. In the Telegraph Room, this session will feature Oracle experts, partner co-presenter David Bartlett from CPG Solutions, and customer co-presenter Thomas Crowe, CIO of PL Developments. Hear their experience around implementing collaborative, integrated solutions to ensure effective knowledge transfer throughout an organization, and how to perform analysis in real time to resolve product quality issues swiftly and efficiently. On Monday evening there will be plenty of industry, product, and partner dinners, so take advantage of all the networking opportunities and catch some great tunes at the 5 day Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival! Tuesday, October 2 Tuesday starts early with a special PLM Networking Brunch, sponsored by several partners, from 8:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. at the B Restaurant that sits atop Yerba Buena Gardens. You’ll have the unique opportunity to meet with like-minded industry peers and a PLM partner to discuss a topic of your choosing while enjoying a delicious meal. Registration is required, so to inquire about attending this brunch, please email Terri.Hiskey-AT-oracle.com. After wrapping up your conversations over brunch, head over to the Marriott Marquis in the Nob Hill CD room for a chance to experience the Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics solution in a Hands-On Lab, open from 10:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Experts will be there to answer your questions. Back in the InterContinental Hotel’s Telegraph room, the session on “Ideation and Requirements Management: Capturing the Voice of the Customer” begins at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. This may be the session for you if you’re struggling with challenges like too many repositories of customer needs, requests, and ideas; limited visibility into which ideas are being advanced by customers and field resources; or if you’re unable to leverage internal expertise to expose effort and potential risks. This session will discuss how Agile PLM can help you overcome ideation challenges to deliver the right products to their targeted markets and fulfill customer desires. Next, from 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us for a session on Managing Profitable Innovation with Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics. If you missed the Hands-on Lab, have more questions, or simply want to be inspired by the product’s forward-thinking vision and capabilities, this is a great opportunity to meet the progressive-minded executives behind the application. After this session, it may be a good opportunity to swing by the Demogrounds in Moscone West and visit the Agile PLM demos at exhibit booths #81 for Agile PLM for Discrete Manufacturing, #70 for Agile PLM for Process, and #82 for AutoVue and Agile PLM Enterprise Visualization. Check out the related Supply Chain Management booths close by if you’re interested - here's the map. There’s always lots to see and do around the exhibit area. But don’t forget the last session of the day from 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. in Telegraph Hill on Managing Product Innovation and Compliance in Life Science Companies, a “must-see” if you’re in this industry. Launching innovative products quickly is already a high-stakes challenge, but companies in the life sciences industry face uniquely severe consequences when new products don’t perform or comply as required. In recent years, more and more regulations have become mandatory, and new ones, such as REACH, are currently going into effect for several companies. Customer presenters from pharmaceutical leader Eli Lilly will share how they’ve leveraged Agile PLM to deliver high-quality, innovative products in a fast-paced, heavily regulated market environment. Tuesday evening unwind at the Supply Chain Management Reception from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the premier boutique Roe Nightclub and Lounge, which is located about three blocks down on Howard Street (on the other side of Moscone from the InterContinental Hotel). Registration is required. Click here for the details.   Wednesday, October 3 We have another full line-up on Wednesday, so be ready for an action-packed day. We start with a session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in the Telegraph Room where we have a session on “PLM for Consumer Products: Building an Engine for Quality and Innovation” with featured presenters from Starbucks and partner Kalypso. This is a rare opportunity to learn directly from Starbucks how they instill quality and innovation throughout their organization, products, and processes, leveraging PLM disciplines with strong support from their partner.  If you’re not in the consumer products industry, we recommend attending another session at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West room 3005: “Eco-Enterprise Innovation Awards and the Business Case for Sustainability” featuring Jeff Henley, Oracle’s Chairman of the Board and Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer. Oracle will honor select customers with Oracle’s Eco-Enterprise Innovation award, which recognizes customers and their respective partners who rely on Oracle products to support their green business practices to reduce their environmental impact while improving business efficiencies and reducing costs. The awards presentation is followed by a panel discussion with customers and Oracle executives, who describe how these award-winning organizations are embracing environmental initiatives as a central part of their business strategy and how information technology plays a pivotal role. Next at 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. in Telegraph Hill attend our session devoted to exploring Product Lifecycle Management’s role in Software Lifecycle Management. This is a thought leadership session with Oracle experts in the field on the importance of change management, and we’ll discuss how Oracle has for years leveraged Agile PLM to develop Agile PLM. If software lifecycle management doesn’t apply to your business or you’d rather engage in some lively one-on-one discussions, we also have a “Supply Chain Meet the Experts” session in Moscone West Room 2001A. Product experts, thought leaders and executives will be on hand to discuss your questions/topics, so come prepared. This session tends to fill up fast so try to get in early. At 1:15 – 2:15 p.m. join us back in Telegraph Hill for a session focused on leveraging the Agile Product Portfolio Management application as the Product Development Master Schedule to improve efficiencies, optimize resources, and gain visibility across projects enterprise-wide to improve portfolio profitability. Customer presenters from Broadcom will explain how they’ve leveraged the product to enable a master schedule with enterprise-level, phase-gate program and project collaboration and resource optimization. Again in Telegraph Hill from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. we have an interesting session with leading semiconductor customer LSI and partner Kalypso on how LSI leveraged Agile PLM to advance from homegrown applications to complete Product Value Chain Management. That type of transition can be challenging, and LSI details how they were able to achieve their goals and the value they gained along the journey – a fascinating account for any company interested in leveraging best practices to innovate their business processes and even end products. Lastly, we’ll wrap up in Telegraph Hill from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. with a session on “Ensuring New Product Success by Achieving Excellence in New Product Introduction.” This is a cross-industry session, guaranteed to deliver insight in the often elusive practice of creating winning products, and we’re very excited about. According to IDC Manufacturing Insights analyst Joe Barkai, “Product Failures are not necessarily a result of bad ideas…they are a result of suboptimal decisions.” We’ll show you how to wire your business processes to enhance decision-making and maximize product potential. Now, quickly hit your hotel room to freshen up and then catch one of the many complimentary shuttles to the much-anticipated Oracle Customer Appreciation Event on Treasure Island. We have a very exciting show planned – check out what’s in store here. Thursday, October 4 PLM has a light schedule on Thursday this year with just one session, but this again is one of our best sessions on managing the Product Value Chain: at 11:15 a.m – 12:15 p.m.in Telegraph Hill, it’s a customer and partner driven session with Sonoco Products and Deloitte telling their story about how to achieve integrated change control by interfacing Agile PLM with Oracle E-Business Suite. Sonoco Products, a global manufacturer of consumer and industrial packaging materials, with its systems integrator, Deloitte, is doing this by implementing prebuilt integration (Oracle Design-to-Release Integration Pack for Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process and Oracle Process) to integrate Agile with Oracle Product Hub/Oracle Product Information Management and Oracle E-Business Suite. This session presents a case study of how Sonoco is leveraging this solution to improve data quality and build a framework for stronger master data governance. Even though that ends our PLM line-up at OpenWorld, there will still be many sessions and activities at the conference, so visit the Oracle OpenWorld website to review agendas and build your schedule. And of course, download and bring this guide and the latest version of the Agile PLM Focus-On Document (available soon!). San Francisco is a wonderful city to explore, and we’re glad you’re considering joining the Agile PLM team at Oracle OpenWorld!  I hope to see you there! Follow me before the conference and on site for real-time updates about #OOW12 on Twitter @Kerrie_Foy or @AgilePLM.

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• Install Oracle Configuration Manager's Standalone Collector

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Untitled Document The Why and the How If you have heard of Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM), but haven’t installed it, I’m guessing this is for one of two reasons. Either you don’t know how it helps you or you don’t know how to install it. I’ll address both of those reasons today. First, let’s take a quick look at how My Oracle Support and the Oracle Configuration Manager work together to gain a good understanding of what their differences and roles are before we tackle the install.   Oracle Configuration Manger is the tool that actually performs the data collection task. You deploy this lightweight piece of software into your system to collect configuration information about the system and OCM uploads that data to Oracle’s customer configuration repository. Oracle Support Engineers then have the configuration data available when you file a service request. You can also view the data through My Oracle Support. The real value is that the data Oracle Configuration Manager collects can help you avoid problems and get your Service Requests solved more quickly. When you view the information in My Oracle Support’s user interface to OCM, it may help you avoid situations that create problems. The proactive tools included in Oracle Configuration Manager help you avoid issues before they occur. You also save time because you didn’t need to open a service request. For example, you can use this capability when you need to compare your system configuration at two points in time, or monitor the system health. If you make the configuration data available to Oracle Support Engineers, when you need to open a Service Request the data helps them diagnose and resolve your critical system issues more quickly, which means you get answers more quickly too. Quick Installation Process Overview Before we dive into the step-by-step details, let me provide a quick overview. For some of you, this will be all you need. Log in to My Oracle Support and download the data collector from Collector tab. If you don’t see the Collector tab, click the More tab gain access. On the Collector tab, you will find a drop-down list showing which platforms are available. You can also see more ways to the Collector can help you if you click through the carousel of benefits. After you download the software for your platform, use FTP to move that file (.zip) from your PC to the server that hosts the Oracle software. Once you have that file on the server, locate the $ORACLE_HOME directory, and unzip the file within that directory. You can then use the command line tool to start the installation process. The installation process requires the My Oracle Support credential (Support Identifier, username, and password) Proxy specification (Host IP Address, Port number, username and password) Installation Step-by-Step Download the collector zip file from My Oracle Support and place it into your $Oracle_Home Unzip the zip file you downloaded from My Oracle Support – this will create a directory named CCR with several subdirectories Using the command line go to “$ORACLE_HOME/CCR/bin” and run the following command “setupCCR” Provide your My Oracle Support credential: login, password, and Support Identifier The installer will start deploying the collector application You have installed the Collector Post Installation Now that you have installed successfully, the scheduler is ready to collect configuration information for the software available in your Oracle Home. By default, the first collection will take place the day after the installation. If you want to run an instrumentation script to start the configuration collection of your Oracle Database server, E-Business Suite, or Enterprise Manager, you will find more details on that in the Installation and Administration Guide for My Oracle Support Configuration Manager. Related documents available on My Oracle Support Oracle Configuration Manager Installation and Administration Guide [ID 728989.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Prerequisites [ID 728473.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Network Connectivity Test [ID 728970.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Collection Overview [ID 728985.5] Oracle Configuration Manager Security Overview [ID 728982.5] Oracle Software Configuration Manager: Disconnected Mode Collection [ID 453412.1]

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• A Guide to Fusion SCM at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Pam Petropoulos

  Are you attending next week’s Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference? Then you won’t want to miss the Fusion SCM activities and customer presenters from leading companies like Boeing and Fideltronik. Below you’ll find a day by day guide of the various Fusion SCM sessions, demos and activities during OpenWorld 2012, September 30 – October 4 in San Francisco, CA. Tuesday, October 2 All of the Fusion SCM sessions during OpenWorld will take place in various rooms at Moscone West, a convenience you are sure to appreciate, as will your feet.   The first session at 10:15 – 11:15 am (Moscone West, Room 2006), entitled “Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap”, provides an overview of Fusion Supply Chain Management applications and will discuss Fusion SCM strategy, future roadmap, and highlights of customer examples. The next session at 11:45 am – 12:45 pm (Moscone West, Room 2022), entitled “Enabling Trusted Enterprise Product Data with Oracle Fusion Product Hub”, may be the session for you if you’re struggling with achieving consistent, high-quality product data that provides significant business value. This session will discuss how Oracle Fusion Product Hub and Oracle Enterprise Data Quality can help you to achieve this vision. A customer presenter from Fideltronik will share their experiences with Oracle Fusion Product Hub. At the end of the day unwind at the Supply Chain Management customer reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm at the Roe Lounge, located at 651 Howard Street. Registration is required. Click here for details. Wednesday, October 3 Wednesday is a busy day with three Fusion SCM sessions on the agenda. Start your day at 10:15 am at the “Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management: Customer Adoption and Experiences” session (Moscone West, Room 2003).  This must see session will showcase customer speakers from The Boeing Company and Fideltronik, each of whom will share their company’s experiences in selecting and implementing Fusion SCM applications. If you’re wondering how Fusion SCM applications can co-exist with your existing Oracle applications, then you’ll want to sit in on the 3:30 pm session entitled “Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management: Coexistence with Other Oracle Applications” (Moscone West, Room 2003). Stick around until 5:00 pm for the final Fusion SCM session of the day entitled “Responsive Fulfillment with Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management” (Moscone West, Room 2001).  This session will showcase Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Oracle Fusion Global Order Promising and how they are changing the way companies manage order fulfillment in environments. In addition to discussing the current business challenges, product capabilities, value propositions, industry applicability, and future roadmap this session will also feature a customer presenter from The Boeing Company. Thursday, October 4 If you are a retail customer we highly recommend that you attend the final Fusion SCM session of the week at 12:45 pm, entitled “Multichannel Fulfillment Excellence in the Direct-to-Consumer Market” (Moscone West, Room 2024).  Retailers will learn how they can transform their supply chains to meet the ever-increasing demands of buy anywhere/get anywhere cross-channel requirements with Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Oracle Fusion Product Hub. Throughout the week, you’ll also want to visit the Fusion SCM demo pods at the Demogrounds in Moscone West so you can see demos of these Fusion applications. Visit pod W-005 for Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration, W-008 for Fusion Inventory and Cost Management, and W-006 for Fusion Product Hub. Click here for the Demogrounds map. A reminder that you can also pre-register for these sessions to secure your spot. Visit the Schedule Builder to pre-enroll for these sessions. Finally, you'll also want to check out the Fusion SCM FocusOn document which includes additional keynote and general sessions that you may want to attend throughout the week.   We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco next week.

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• Welcome to the Oracle Retail International Blog

  - by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

  Welcome to the first post of the new Oracle Retail International Blog. Retail is an international business and today's successful retailers view themselves in the context of a global market. A niche fashion business in Tokyo will learn marketing strategies from the luxury brands of Milan, an independent grocer in Oslo will source the same global brands as a supermarket in Oklahoma, and every retailer in the world will measure their multi-channel operation against the international e-commerce giant Amazon.  Why? Because today's customer is a global customer with unparalleled expectations on choice, price and service. Today's consumers have access to more information on retail than ever before. Technology allows people to shop from their home, their office or from the phone in their pocket, wherever they are and at whatever time suits them. Customers are using the web to search for products and promotions. They are also using the web to develop their voice in commenting on products and services that have delighted or disappointed. In an information rich industry, this customer element creates a new world of data. The best retailers are developing eagle eyes for reading customer activity and turning it into profitable decisions. Ultimately, whether you choose to compete or shop on price, service, product innovation, excellent operations or all of the above - the international world of retail has become an inspiration for all - retailer and consumer alike.  Retail as an industry is growing and diversifying at a faster rate than ever before. Yet it is still the customer who picks the winners and the losers on the retail field. Economic circumstances transform the rules, but it is still the customer who dictates the game, the pace, the price, and the perception of the brand. Wise retailers never rest on their laurels. They are always shopping for ideas on how to improve and differentiate the offer at every touch point to meet the customer's needs better than anyone else and to gain each customer's loyalty at a time when loyalty can be cheap. With this blog, I hope that we might provide a hub for discussion around what unifies retail and how technology supports both the retailer and customer experience. Despite the competitive nature of this market, we hope that this will provide an opportunity to share experiences and lessons learnt with a view that knowledge can only help this industry to grow and develop. At Oracle we've been supporting retailers for many years. Many of us have worked within retail organisations all over the world, myself included. With this in mind, I don't feel it is too bold a statement to say that Oracle understands retail. We wouldn't be so heavily integrated in some of the biggest and most well-known names in retail if we didn't. With this blog, we intend to create a community of international retailers that can exchange ideas and experiences, debate collective challenges and drive a better understanding of this continually evolving industry. Events such as the World Retail Congress and NRF's Big Show bring enormous value to the retail industry providing platforms for discussion and learning but they happen once a year. We wanted to create a platform for discussion on a different level and that like retail, is always on. We hope not only to bring commitment to being not only the infrastructure that brings all of their systems together within a retail business, but an infrastructure that supports the industry internationally to grow and flourish through creating a platform for networking, discussion, creativity, vision and strategy. Please feel free to ask questions or comment using the comments functionality.  You might also want to visit our other Oracle Retail social media sites: Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/oracleretail YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/oracleretail Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/oracleretailInsight-Driven Retailing Blog - http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/

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• The Future of Air Travel: Intelligence and Automation

  - by BobEvans

  Remember those white-knuckle flights through stormy weather where unexpected plunges in altitude result in near-permanent relocations of major internal organs? Perhaps there’s a better way, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Pilots of a Honeywell International Inc. test plane stayed on their initial flight path, relying on the company's latest onboard radar technology to steer through the worst of the weather. The specially outfitted Boeing 757 barely shuddered as it gingerly skirted some of the most ferocious storm cells over Fort Walton Beach and then climbed above the rest in zero visibility.” Or how about the multifaceted check-in process, which might not wreak havoc on liver location but nevertheless makes you wonder if you’ve been trapped in some sort of covert psychological-stress test? Another WSJ article, called “The Self-Service Airport,” says there’s reason for hope there as well: “Airlines are laying the groundwork for the next big step in the airport experience: a trip from the curb to the plane without interacting with a single airline employee. At the airport of the near future, ‘your first interaction could be with a flight attendant,’ said Ben Minicucci, chief operating officer of Alaska Airlines, a unit of Alaska Air Group Inc.” And in the topsy-turvy world of air travel, it’s not just the passengers who’ve been experiencing bumpy rides: the airlines themselves are grappling with a range of challenges—some beyond their control, some not—that make profitability increasingly elusive in spite of heavy demand for their services. A recent piece in The Economist illustrates one of the mega-challenges confronting the airline industry via a striking set of contrasting and very large numbers: while the airlines pay $7 billion per year to third-party computerized reservation services, the airlines themselves earn a collective profit of only $3 billion per year. In that context, the anecdotes above point unmistakably to the future that airlines must pursue if they hope to be able to manage some of the factors outside of their control (e.g., weather) as well as all of those within their control (operating expenses, end-to-end visibility, safety, load optimization, etc.): more intelligence, more automation, more interconnectedness, and more real-time awareness of every facet of their operations. Those moves will benefit both passengers and the air carriers, says the WSJ piece on The Self-Service Airport: “Airlines say the advanced technology will quicken the airport experience for seasoned travelers—shaving a minute or two from the checked-baggage process alone—while freeing airline employees to focus on fliers with questions. ‘It's more about throughput with the resources you have than getting rid of humans,’ said Andrew O'Connor, director of airport solutions at Geneva-based airline IT provider SITA.” Oracle’s attempting to help airlines gain control over these challenges by blending together a range of its technologies into a solution called the Oracle Airline Data Model, which suggests the following steps: • To retain and grow their customer base, airlines need to focus on the customer experience. • To personalize and differentiate the customer experience, airlines need to effectively manage their passenger data. • The Oracle Airline Data Model can help airlines jump-start their customer-experience initiatives by consolidating passenger data into a customer data hub that drives realtime business intelligence and strategic customer insight. • Oracle’s Airline Data Model brings together multiple types of data that can jumpstart your data-warehousing project with rich out-of-the-box functionality. • Oracle’s Intelligent Warehouse for Airlines brings together the powerful capabilities of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Airline Data Model to give you real-time strategic insights into passenger demand, revenues, sales channels and your flight network. The airline industry aside, the bullet points above offer a broad strategic outline for just about any industry because the customer experience is becoming pre-eminent in each and there is simply no way to deliver world-class customer experiences unless a company can capture, manage, and analyze all of the relevant data in real-time. I’ll leave you with two thoughts from the WSJ article about the new in-flight radar system from Honeywell: first, studies show that a single episode of serious turbulence can wrack up $150,000 in additional costs for an airline—so, it certainly behooves the carriers to gain the intelligence to avoid turbulence as much as possible. And second, it’s back to that top-priority customer-experience thing and the value that ever-increasing levels of intelligence can deliver. As the article says: “In the cabin, reporters watched screens showing the most intense parts of the nearly 10-mile wide storm, which churned some 7,000 feet below, in vibrant red and other colors. The screens also were filled with tiny symbols depicting likely locations of lightning and hail, which can damage planes and wreak havoc on the nerves of white-knuckle flyers.”  (Bob Evans is senior vice-president, communications, for Oracle.)  

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• Get More From Your Service Request

  - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

  Leveraging Service Request Best Practices Use best practices to get there faster. In the daily conversations I have with customers, they sometimes express frustration over their Service Requests. They often feel powerless to make needed changes, so their sense of frustration grows. To help you avoid some of the frustration you might feel in dealing with your Service Requests (SR), here are a few pointers that come from our best practice discussions. Be proactive. If you can anticipate some of the questions that Support will ask, or the information they may need, try to provide this up front, when you log the SR. This could be output from the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA), if this is a database issue, or the output from another diagnostic tool, if you’re an EBS customer. Any information you can supply that helps us understand the situation better, helps us resolve the issue sooner. As you use some of these tools proactively, you might even find the solution to the problem before you log an SR! Be right. Make sure you have the correct severity level. Since you select the initial severity level, it’s easy to accept the default without considering how significant this may be. Business impact is the driving factor, so make sure you take a moment to select the severity level that is appropriate to the situation. Also, make sure you ask us to change the severity level, should the situation dictate. Be responsive! If this is an important issue to you, quickly follow up on any action plan submitted to you by Oracle Support. The support engineer assigned to your Service Request will be able to move the issue forward more aggressively when they have the needed information. This is crucial in resolving your issues in a timely manner. Be thorough. If there are five questions in the action plan, make sure you provide an answer for all five questions in one response, rather than trickling them in one at a time. This will allow the engineer to look at all of the information as a whole and to avoid multiple trips to your SR, saving valuable time and getting you a resolution sooner. Be your own advocate! You know your situation best; make sure Oracle Support understands both how and why this issue is important to you and your company. Use the escalation process if you're concerned that your SR isn't going the right direction, the right pace, or through the right person. Don't wait until you're frustrated and angry. An escalation is as simple as a quick conversation on the phone and can be amazingly effective in getting your issues back on track. The support manager you speak with is empowered to make any needed changes. Be our partner. You can make your support experience better. When your SR has been resolved, you may receive a survey request. This is intended to get your feedback about how your SR went and what we can do to improve your overall support experience. Oracle Support is here to help you. Our goal with any Service Request is to provide the best possible solution as quickly as possible. With your help, we’ll be able to do this with your Service Request too.  

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• C# Chain-of-responsibility with delegates

  - by nettguy

  For my understanding purpose i have implemented Chain-Of-Responsibility pattern. //Abstract Base Type public abstract class CustomerServiceDesk { protected CustomerServiceDesk _nextHandler; public abstract void ServeCustomers(Customer _customer); public void SetupHadler(CustomerServiceDesk _nextHandler) { this._nextHandler = _nextHandler; } } public class FrontLineServiceDesk:CustomerServiceDesk { public override void ServeCustomers(Customer _customer) { if (_customer.ComplaintType == ComplaintType.General) { Console.WriteLine(_customer.Name + " Complaints are registered ; will be served soon by FrontLine Help Desk.."); } else { Console.WriteLine(_customer.Name + " is redirected to Critical Help Desk"); _nextHandler.ServeCustomers(_customer); } } } public class CriticalIssueServiceDesk:CustomerServiceDesk { public override void ServeCustomers(Customer _customer) { if (_customer.ComplaintType == ComplaintType.Critical) { Console.WriteLine(_customer.Name + "Complaints are registered ; will be served soon by Critical Help Desk"); } else if (_customer.ComplaintType == ComplaintType.Legal) { Console.WriteLine(_customer.Name + "is redirected to Legal Help Desk"); _nextHandler.ServeCustomers(_customer); } } } public class LegalissueServiceDesk :CustomerServiceDesk { public override void ServeCustomers(Customer _customer) { if (_customer.ComplaintType == ComplaintType.Legal) { Console.WriteLine(_customer.Name + "Complaints are registered ; will be served soon by legal help desk"); } } } public class Customer { public string Name { get; set; } public ComplaintType ComplaintType { get; set; } } public enum ComplaintType { General, Critical, Legal } void Main() { CustomerServiceDesk _frontLineDesk = new FrontLineServiceDesk(); CustomerServiceDesk _criticalSupportDesk = new CriticalIssueServiceDesk(); CustomerServiceDesk _legalSupportDesk = new LegalissueServiceDesk(); _frontLineDesk.SetupHadler(_criticalSupportDesk); _criticalSupportDesk.SetupHadler(_legalSupportDesk); Customer _customer1 = new Customer(); _customer1.Name = "Microsoft"; _customer1.ComplaintType = ComplaintType.General; Customer _customer2 = new Customer(); _customer2.Name = "SunSystems"; _customer2.ComplaintType = ComplaintType.Critical; Customer _customer3 = new Customer(); _customer3.Name = "HP"; _customer3.ComplaintType = ComplaintType.Legal; _frontLineDesk.ServeCustomers(_customer1); _frontLineDesk.ServeCustomers(_customer2); _frontLineDesk.ServeCustomers(_customer3); } Question Without breaking the chain-of-responsibility ,how can i apply delegates and events to rewrite the code?

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• Using Entity Framework 4.0 with Code-First and POCO: How to Get Parent Object with All its Children

  - by SirEel

  I'm new to EF 4.0, so maybe this is an easy question. I've got VS2010 RC and the latest EF CTP. I'm trying to implement the "Foreign Keys" code-first example on the EF Team's Design Blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2009/10/12/code-only-further-enhancements.aspx. public class Customer { public int Id { get; set; public string CustomerDescription { get; set; public IList<PurchaseOrder> PurchaseOrders { get; set; } } public class PurchaseOrder { public int Id { get; set; } public int CustomerId { get; set; } public Customer Customer { get; set; } public DateTime DateReceived { get; set; } } public class MyContext : ObjectContext { public RepositoryContext(EntityConnection connection) : base(connection){} public IObjectSet<Customer> Customers { get {return base.CreateObjectSet<Customer>();} } } I use a ContextBuilder to configure MyContext: { var builder = new ContextBuilder<MyContext>(); var customerConfig = _builder.Entity<Customer>(); customerConfig.Property(c => c.Id).IsIdentity(); var poConfig = _builder.Entity<PurchaseOrder>(); poConfig.Property(po => po.Id).IsIdentity(); poConfig.Relationship(po => po.Customer) .FromProperty(c => c.PurchaseOrders) .HasConstraint((po, c) => po.CustomerId == c.Id); ... } This works correctly when I'm adding new Customers, but not when I try to retrieve existing Customers. This code successfully saves a new Customer and all its child PurchaseOrders: using (var context = builder.Create(connection)) { context.Customers.AddObject(customer); context.SaveChanges(); } But this code only retrieves Customer objects; their PurchaseOrders lists are always empty. using (var context = _builder.Create(_conn)) { var customers = context.Customers.ToList(); } What else do I need to do to the ContextBuilder to make MyContext always retrieve all the PurchaseOrders with each Customer?

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• Creating multiple SFTP users for one account

  - by Tom Marthenal

  I'm in the process of migrating an aging shared-hosting system to more modern technologies. Right now, plain old insecure FTP is the only way for customers to access their files. I plan on replacing this with SFTP, but I need a way to create multiple SFTP users that correspond to one UNIX account. A customer has one account on the machine (e.g. customer) with a home directory like /home/customer/. Our clients are used to being able to create an arbitrary number of FTP accounts for their domains (to give out to different people). We need the same capability with SFTP. My first thought is to use SSH keys and just add each new "user" to authorized_keys, but this is confusing for our customers, many of whom are not technically-inclined and would prefer to stick with passwords. SSH is not an issue, only SFTP is available. How can we create multiple SFTP accounts (customer, customer_developer1, customer_developer2, etc.) that all function as equivalents and don't interfere with file permissions (ideally, all files should retain customer as their owner)? My initial thought was some kind of PAM module, but I don't have a clear idea of how to accomplish this within our constraints. We are open to using an alternative SSH daemon if OpenSSH isn't suitable for our situation; again, it needs to support only SFTP and not SSH. Currently our SSH configuration has this appended to it in order to jail the users in their own directories: # all customers have group 'customer' Match group customer ChrootDirectory /home/%u # jail in home directories AllowTcpForwarding no X11Forwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp # force SFTP PasswordAuthentication yes # for non-customer accounts we use keys instead Our servers are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

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• Silverlight 4, combobox databinding problem

  - by synergetic

  In my Silverlight 4 app, CustomerView (UserControl) shows Customer object as it's DataContext. Customer object has IndustryCode string property. I created combobox called cboIndustryCode and bind it to the IndustryCode property the following way: <ComboBox x:Name="cboIndustryCode" SelectedValue="{Binding IndustryCode, Mode=TwoWay}" ... /> In code-behind I populate cboIndustryCode with List of Industry object, which has Code and Name properties: cboIndustryCode.ItemsSource = industries; //which is of List<Industry> type Now, to show everything properly, in XAML I added the following: <ComboBox x:Name="cboIndustryCode" SelectedValue="{Binding IndustryCode, Mode=TwoWay}" DisplayMemberPath="Name" SelectedValuePath="Code" ... /> So, when I get a customer class from my data layer and set the DataContext to this customer instance, the cboIndustryCode properly displays industry name. But, then I edit customer (not necessarily IndustryCode) and save the object (which resets DataContext = new Customer()) and retrieve the customer again from database, and I see that cboIndustryCode no longer working. It just displays nothing, and if I select new value from the list, it does not update underlying customer object's IndustryCode property. The problem goes away, if I put the following code in the place where I set DataContext to a instance of customer, retrieved from database: Binding binding = new Binding("IndustryCode"); binding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay; cboIndustryCode.SetBinding(ComboBox.SelectedValueProperty, binding); So, in short, combobox's binding is reset somehow every time I save my data. Can someone tell me the reason?

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