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• Java Spotlight Episode 57: Live From #Devoxx - Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg of the London JUG with Yara Senger of SouJava

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet Live from Devoxx 11,  an interview with Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg from the London JUG along with  Yara Senger from the SouJava JUG on the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 248, and Adopt-a-JSR program. Both the London JUG and SouJava JUG are JCP Standard Edition Executive Committee Members. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manger in Oracle Developer Tools; Stephen Chin, Java Champion and Java FX expert; and Antonio Goncalves, Paris JUG leader. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Netbeans 7.1 JDK 7 upgrade tools Netbeans First Patch Program OpenJFX approved as an OpenJDK project Devoxx France April 18-20, 2012 Events Nov 22-25, OTN Developer Days in the Nordics Nov 22-23, Goto Conference, Prague Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Feature interview Ben Evans has lived in "Interesting Times" in technology - he was the lead performance testing engineer for the Google IPO, worked on the initial UK trials of 3G networks with BT, built award-winning websites for some of Hollywood's biggest hits of the 90s, rearchitected and reimagined technology helping some of the most vulnerable people in the UK and has worked on everything from some of the UKs very first ecommerce sites, through to multi-billion dollar currency trading systems. He helps to run the London Java Community, and represents the JUG on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. His first book "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" (with Martijn Verburg) has just been published by Manning. Martijn Verburg (aka 'the Diabolical Developer') herds Cats in the Java/open source communities and is constantly humbled by the creative power to be found there. Currently he resides in London where he co-leads the London JUG (a JCP EC member), runs a couple of open source projects & drinks too much beer at his local pub. You can find him online moderating at the Javaranch or discussing (ranting?) subjects on the Prgorammers Stack Exchange site. Most recently he's become a regular speaker at conferences on Java, open source and software development and has recently wrapped up his first Manning title - "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" with his co-author Ben Evans. Yara Senger is the partner and director of teacher education and Globalcode, graduated from the University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, has significant experience in Brazil and abroad in developing solutions to critical Java. She is the co-creator of Java programs Academy and Academy of Web Developer, accumulating over 1000 hours in the classroom teaching Java. She currently serves as the President of Sou Java. In this interview Ben, Martijn, and Yara talk about the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 348, and the Adopt-a-JSR program. Mail Bag What's Cool Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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• Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining weight: Examples of certified add-on's

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  The Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining traction. Please find below few examples of the partners having certified their add-on's to seamlessly work on top of Oracle Fusion CRM. For more information, please contact [email protected] ·         Opportunity-to-Quote.  Big Machines now integrates seamlessly to Oracle Fusion CRM, enabling customers with complex products and services and multiple sales channels to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote process, including product selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, and approval workflows.  Create a custom hyperlink in the Opportunity to invoke Big Machines CPQ application to create a quote and sync up with the Fusion CRM custom quote object using the CRUD operations. The quote can be updated using the custom button in the custom tab in the opportunity details. See: http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php  ·         SaaS Billing and Subscription Management.  Is your prospect/customer asking whether top billing partners support Fusion CRM?  Positioning an integrated CRM solution for billing usage and subscription based services?  Need to implement a billable solution on the Oracle Java Cloud Service?  Aria Systems and Zuora have recently engaged with Oracle to deepen their integrations to Fusion CRM and team with Oracle for joint opportunities.  ·         Google Apps, SharePoint, Email-CRM Integrations o   Do your prospects use Google Apps in their business operations?  A “Best of AppExchange” award winner recently completed their integration for Fusion CRM.  CirrusInsight plugs Fusion CRM web services directly into Gmail, allowing you to search existing opportunity or contact, provide account information, and create an interaction such as phone call, appointment, or email against a customer or contact in Fusion CRM directly from Gmail.  o   An EMEA / France based partner, Aryvart provides bi-directional synchronization of appointments and tasks between Google calendar and Oracle Fusion CRM. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to use Google calendar for appointments. o   Looking to lower the barrier and expand in SharePoint accounts?  InFact Group (EMEA / France & Germany) provides Microsoft SharePoint Connector for Oracle Fusion CRM. With this solution, you can store documents attached to an opportunity, into Microsoft SharePoint repository. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to collaborate across existing content management infrastructure. o   Need to connect to MacMail, GroupWise, or Outlook/Exchange?  Omni Technology is a partner whose Riva CRM Integration recently engaged for support Fusion CRM as a key platform. Migration Tools from competitive CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  Data Migration Tools from legacy CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  A partner with the tools and techniques to speed adoption, Conemis provides data integration tools to export data from legacy CRM, and import into Oracle Fusion CRM via WebServices APIs. For customers, it means reducing cost of data migration from legacy CRM system into Oracle Fusion CRM. 

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• SQLAuthority News – Windows Efficiency Tricks and Tips – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  This is the second post in my series about my favorite Technology Tips, and I wanted to focus on my favorite Microsoft product.  Choosing just one topic to cover was too hard, though.  There are so many interesting things I have to share that I am forced to turn this second installment into a five-part post.  My five favorite Windows tips and tricks. 1) You can open multiple applications using the task bar. With the new Windows 7 taskbar, you can start navigating with just one click.  For example, you can launch Word by clicking on the icon on your taskbar, and if you are using multiple different programs at the same time, you can simply click on the icon to return to Word.  However, what if you need to open another Word document, or begin a new one?  Clicking on the Word icon is just going to bring you back to your original program.  Just click on the Word icon again while holding down the shift key, and you’ll open up a new document. 2) Navigate the screen with the touch of a button – and not your mouse button. Yes, we live in a pampered age.  We have access to amazing technology, and it just gets better every year.  But have you ever found yourself wishing that right when you were in the middle of something, you didn’t have to interrupt your work flow be reaching for your mouse to navigate through the screen?  Yes, we have all been guilty of this pampered wish.  But Windows has delivered!  Now you can move your application window using your arrow keys. Lock the window to the left, right hand screen: Win+left Arrow and Win+right Arrow Maximize & minimize: Win+up arrow and Win+down arrow Minimize all items on screen: Win+M Return to your original folder, or browse through all open windows: Alt+up arrow, Alt+Left Arrow, or Alt+right arrow Close down or reopen all windows: win+home 3) Are you one of the few people who still uses Command Prompt? You know who you are, and you aren’t ashamed to still use this option that so many people have forgotten about it.  You can easily access it by holding down the shift key while RIGHT clicking on any folder. 4) Quickly select multiple files without using your mouse. We all know how to select multiple files or folders by Ctrl-clicking or Shift-clicking multiple items.  But all of us have tried this, and then accidentally released Ctrl, only to lose all our precious work.  Now there is a way to select only the files you want through a check box system.  First, go to Windows Explorer, click Organize, and then “Folder and Search Options.”  Go to the View tab, and under advanced settings, you can find a box that says “Use check boxes to select items.”  Once this has been selected, you will be able to hover your mouse over any file and a check box will appear.  This makes selecting multiple, random files quick and easy. 5) Make more out of remote access. If you work anywhere in the tech field, you are probably the go-to for computer help with friends and family, and you know the usefulness of remote access (ok, some of us use this extensively at work, as well, but we all have friends and family who rely on our skills!).  Often it is necessary to restart a computer, which is impossible in remote access as the computer will not show the shutdown menu.  To force the computer to do your wishes, we return to Command Prompt.  Open Command Prompt and type “shutdown /s” for shutdown, or “shutdown /r” for restart. I hope you will find above five tricks which I use in my daily use very important. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Personal Technology

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• Fusion Concepts: Fusion Database Schemas

  - by Vik Kumar

  You often read about FUSION and FUSION_RUNTIME users while dealing with Fusion Applications. There is one more called FUSION_DYNAMIC. Here are some details on the difference between these three and the purpose of each type of schema. FUSION: It can be considered as an Administrator of the Fusion Applications with all the corresponding rights and powers such as owning tables and objects, providing grants to FUSION_RUNTIME.  It is used for patching and has grants to many internal DBMS functions. FUSION_RUNTIME: Used to run the Applications.  Contains no DB objects. FUSION_DYNAMIC: This schema owns the objects that are created dynamically through ADM_DDL. ADM_DDL is a package that acts as a wrapper around the DDL statement. ADM_DDL support operations like truncate table, create index etc. As the above statements indicate that FUSION owns the tables and objects including FND tables so using FUSION to run applications is insecure. It would be possible to modify security policies and other key information in the base tables (like FND) to break the Fusion Applications security via SQL injection etc. Other possibilities would be to write a logon DB trigger and steal credentials etc. Thus, to make Fusion Applications secure FUSION_RUNTIME is granted privileges to execute DMLs only on APPS tables. Another benefit of having separate users is achieving Separation of Duties (SODs) at schema level which is required by auditors. Below are the roles and privileges assigned to FUSION, FUSION_RUNTIME and FUSION_DYNAMIC schema: FUSION It has the following privileges: Create SESSION Do all types of DDL owned by FUSION. Additionally, some specific priveleges on other schemas is also granted to FUSION. EXECUTE ON various EDN_PUBLISH_EVENT It has the following roles: CTXAPP for managing Oracle Text Objects AQ_SER_ROLE and AQ_ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE for managing Advanced Queues (AQ) FUSION_RUNTIME It has the following privileges: CREATE SESSION CHANGE NOTIFICATION EXECUTE ON various EDN_PUBLISH_EVENT It has the following roles: FUSION_APPS_READ_WRITE for performing DML (Select, Insert, Delete) on Fusion Apps tables FUSION_APPS_EXECUTE for performing execute on objects such as procedures, functions, packages etc. AQ_SER_ROLE and AQ_ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE for managing Advanced Queues (AQ) FUSION_DYNAMIC It has following privileges: CREATE SESSION, PROCEDURE, TABLE, SEQUENCE, SYNONYM, VIEW UNLIMITED TABLESPACE ANALYZE ANY CREATE MINING MODEL EXECUTE on specific procedure, function or package and SELECT on specific tables. This depends on the objects identified by product teams that ADM_DDL needs to have access  in order to perform dynamic DDL statements. There is one more role FUSION_APPS_READ_ONLY which is not attached to any user and has only SELECT privilege on all the Fusion objects. FUSION_RUNTIME does not have any synonyms defined to access objects owned by FUSION schema. A logon trigger is defined in FUSION_RUNTIME which sets the current schema to FUSION and eliminates the need of any synonyms.   What it means for developers? Fusion Application developers should be using FUSION_RUNTIME for testing and running Fusion Applications UI, BC and to connect to any SQL front end like SQL *PLUS, SQL Loader etc. For testing ADFbc using AM tester while using FUSION_RUNTIME you may hit the following error: oracle.jbo.JboException: JBO-29000: Unexpected exception caught: java.sql.SQLException, msg=invalid name pattern: FUSION.FND_TABLE_OF_VARCHAR2_255 The fix is to add the below JVM parameter in the Run/Debug client property in the Model project properties -Doracle.jdbc.createDescriptorUseCurrentSchemaForSchemaName=true More details are discussed in this forum thread for it.

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• HTML Presence Controls for Communications Server 14 CodePlex Project

  Showing Presence on the Web If youre running Office Communicator Server 2007 R2, you know that your only out-of-the-box option for showing presence on the web is to use the NameControl ActiveX control that ships as part of Office.  Being an ActiveX control, this obviously means that youre limited to Internet Explorer.  Also, nobody likes ActiveX controls What if you want to show the presence of users in a pure ASP.NET or HTML application and cant assume that the user has Communicator installed you need anASP.NET or HTML presence control.  HTML Presence Controls for Microsoft Communications Server 14 We recently worked with the UC team at Microsoft on a keynote demo for TechEd 2010 in New Orleans.  The demo was for a fictitious airline Fabrikam Airlines that wanted to show the presence of customer service and reservations agents on its website.  Customers could also start an instant message conversation with the agents using a Silverlight web chat window that used WCF to communicate with the backend UCMA application. We built HTML Presence Controls that use AJAX to poll a REST-based WCF service running in IIS and hosting a UCMA 3.0 presence subscription application.   Microsoft has graciously allowed us to publish these on CodePlex so that the development community can benefit from them:  http://htmlpresencecontrols.codeplex.com/ We will be maintaining the CodePlex project as new builds of UCMA 3.0 become available.  Check out the project home page on CodePlex for some more in-depth details on how the controls are implemented. ASP.NET Server Control Implementation Were providing an ASP.NET Server Control implementation that you can use stand-alone or in a GridView or Repeater (or other layout control).  The control has properties that allow you to control its appearance, e.g. you can choose whether or not to show the contacts name or availability text. You can also use the server control in a layout control such as a GridView by putting it in a TemplateColumn and binding to the Sip Uri in the data source. Disclaimer Once we started working on these, we realized why Microsoft hasnt shipped such controls as part of the product.  There are some tradeoffs you have to be aware of when using these controls, heres the high level. Privacy The backend UCMA 3.0 application that subscribes to presence of contacts runs as a trusted application and can thus retrieve the presence of any user in the organization.  Theres currently no good way in UCMA to apply any privacy rules to ensure that the consumer of the presence controls has permission to see the presence of the contacts that the controls are bound to.  Just to be absolutely crystal clear These controls provide a way to query the presence of any user in the organization, regardless of the privacy relationship between the person consuming the controls and the contacts whose presence is being displayed. Were exploring options for a design pattern that would allow you to inject some privacy controls.  Keep in mind though that you would most likely be responsible for implementing this logic, as there is currently no functionality in UCMA that allows you to do that. Polling the WCF REST Service The controls poll the backend WCF service to retrieve the presence of contacts - you can control the refresh interval so that they poll less often. We implemented a caching layer so that the WCF service is always communicating with a presence cache it never communicates directly with Communications Server.  For example, if your web page is showing the presence of sip:[email protected] and 500 people have the page open, the presence cache only contains one instance of the subscription Communications Server is not being polled 500 times for the presence of that contact. Once the presence of a contact changes, it is updated in the cache.  There are some server-based push mechanisms that would work nicely here, such as the one that Outlook Web Access 2010 uses.  Unfortunately we didnt have time to explore these options. Community Contribution Take a look at the project Issue Tracker, there are a couple of things we can use some help with.  Shoot me a note if youre interested in contributing to the project. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; OLAP and Simba

  - by David Allan

  Oracle Warehouse Builder was the first ETL product to provide a single integrated and complete environment for managing enterprise data warehouse solutions that also incorporate multi-dimensional schemas. The OWB 11gR2 release provides Oracle OLAP 11g deployment for multi-dimensional models (in addition to support for prior releases of OLAP). This means users can easily utilize Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see here for details and cost) which allows you to use the powerful and popular ad hoc query and analysis capabilities of Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts® with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data. The extensions to the dimensional modeling capabilities have been built on established relational concepts, with the option to seamlessly move from a relational deployment model to a multi-dimensional model at the click of a button. This now means that ETL designers can logically model a complete data warehouse solution using one single tool and control the physical implementation of a logical model at deployment time. As a result data warehouse projects that need to provide a multi-dimensional model as part of the overall solution can be designed and implemented faster and more efficiently. Wizards for dimensions and cubes let you quickly build dimensional models and realize either relationally or as an Oracle database OLAP implementation, both 10g and 11g formats are supported based on a configuration option. The wizard provides a good first cut definition and the objects can be further refined in the editor. Both wizards let you choose the implementation, to deploy to OLAP in the database select MOLAP: multidimensional storage. You will then be asked what levels and attributes are to be defined, by default the wizard creates a level bases hierarchy, parent child hierarchies can be defined in the editor. Once the dimension or cube has been designed there are special mapping operators that make it easy to load data into the objects, below we load a constant value for the total level and the other levels from a source table.   Again when the cube is defined using the wizard we can edit the cube and define a number of analytic calculations by using the 'generate calculated measures' option on the measures panel. This lets you very easily add a lot of rich analytic measures to your cube. For example one of the measures is the percentage difference from a year ago which we can see in detail below. You can also add your own custom calculations to leverage the capabilities of the Oracle OLAP option, either by selecting existing template types such as moving averages to defining true custom expressions. The 11g OLAP option now supports percentage based summarization (the amount of data to precompute and store), this is available from the option 'cost based aggregation' in the cube's configuration. Ensure all measure-dimensions level based aggregation is switched off (on the cube-dimension panel) - previously level based aggregation was the only option. The 11g generated code now uses the new unified API as you see below, to generate the code, OWB needs a valid connection to a real schema, this was not needed before 11gR2 and is a new requirement since the OLAP API which OWB uses is not an offline one. Once all of the objects are deployed and the maps executed then we get to the fun stuff! How can we analyze the data? One option which is powerful and at many users' fingertips is using Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts®, which can be used with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data by utilizing Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see Simba site for details of cost). I'll leave the exotic reporting illustrations to the experts (see Bud's demonstration here), but with Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP its very simple to easily access the analytics stored in the database (all built and loaded via the OWB 11gR2 release) and get the regular features of Excel at your fingertips such as using the conditional formatting features for example. That's a very quick run through of the OWB 11gR2 with respect to Oracle 11g OLAP integration and the reporting using Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. Not a deep-dive in any way but a quick overview to illustrate the design capabilities and integrations possible.

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• SQL SERVER – What is SSRS and Why SSRS is asked for in many Job Opening?

  - by Pinal Dave

  This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. This will be a 5 day blog post in getting started with SSRS. Today will show the importance of SSRS in the business. Why is SSRS asked for in so many job openings? If you talk to an SSRS expert it’s very clear to them exactly why companies really need this invention and how it saves time and adds business value. You don’t have to be an SSRS expert to know its value or to start using it. For example you don’t have to be an airline pilot to know the usefulness of modern transportation. Even the people who don’t know how to run SSRS but need the reports can tell you why that is needed. This blog post will go into why SSRS is an important invention by showing how it improves the usage of information in your company. Before SSRS there has always been a need for a company to benefit from the use of its own information. Excel spreadsheets have been a popular way to do this for a long time. With SSRS you can still use this solution and gain many other options too. A friend of mine told me a story about doing database work in the 90s for a major company and how he wished SSRS was available back then. The Vice President of the marketing channel would often come to him just before an important meeting with the board of directors. He often needed to show how certain product sales were performing over time. All this information was in the database so it was my friend’s job to get the information out and organized into a medium the VP could use. This medium was usually Excel. The VP often had meetings all over the world where he showcased this Excel report. The solution to get the VP to him anywhere he was in the world was an Excel file attached to an e-mail. This worked pretty well but with some drawbacks. One time my friend sent the wrong file in the e-mail. A few minutes later my friend realized his mistake and sent another frantic e-mail to VP. This one was saying to ignore the last e-mail and use this newer one. Would the VP see the correct e-mail in time? If SSRS had been available, my friend could have created a solution that let the VP run the report any time he wished. The report could have been published to the company intranet where the VP could run it from any of the offices he happened to be traveling to that month. There is a fair amount of work up front to develop and publish the report, but once that work is completed, the report can be reused as many times as needed. My friend could even be on vacation for the first day of the monthly and the VP can get his real-time report. Not only could the report show the most recent data, the VP could choose to view reports of previous months with just a few clicks. The deployed SSRS is user friendly, and can also be configured to protect reports from being run by the wrong people. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to know if you already have SSRS installed. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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• &lsquo;Publish&hellip;&rsquo; Resulting in Directory With No Files

  - by ToStringTheory

  I was pulling my hair out with this one…  Which isn’t good considering I have so little of it left!  I had just upgraded to the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK the day before with no problems, and used the upgraded ‘Publish…’ dialog to successfully publish a website to my hard disk for hosting on an internal development server.  However, when trying to deploy another project to my file system, it said it was successful, but there were no files in the directory.  The only difference, the first project was an Azure project, the second was a standard ASP.Net Web Application.  If you installed the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK, you may want to read this. The Problem At first it appears that there is no problem: However you may remember that when publishing a web application, the output window will generally iterate through each of the directories as it copies the files from that directory over.  Sure enough, when looking at the output directory – there are no files, no bin directory, no nothing… Troubleshooting Since one site published and the other did not, I believed that the failure may have been to a failed SQL Server 2012 installation that happened between publish.  I rolled back the installation, however that did not work either.  I also checked the Configuration Manager dialog, and ensured that the projects were selected to actually build (just checking, even though the output said it built them..)  I checked the properties of the solution and the projects, and a selection of files in the project to make sure that they were selected for content…  Nothing seemed to work. I then decided to uninstall the Azure 1.7 SDK to see if that was the culprit.  When I opened the Windows 7 ‘Uninstall a Program’ dialog, I noticed that the Azure SDK came with 2 extra packages that just so happen to be in a Release Candidate state from Microsoft – ‘Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0’ and ‘Microsoft Web Publish – Visual Studio 2010’.  It dawned on me that the publish dialog must not be just for Azure, since it appeared when I tried to deploy the regular web application as well.  Therefore, it must have been an upgrade to the publish mechanism in Visual Studio.  I uninstalled both of the programs and received my old publish dialog once again, and was able to successfully publish the solution above as I had done before. After celebrating solving the problem, I tried reinstalling the Azure package, to see if it would repair the publishing process. Even though it brought back the updated dialogs, it did not publish any files. Instead of uninstalling and retreating, I now KNEW what the cause was, and these were packages not just for Azure. I now knew a product name to search for. The Solution Sure enough, with the correct search term in Google – ‘microsoft web publish no files’, and setting the timeline to 1 week, I found what I needed - Microsoft Connect - Publish Web Application FAILS! (by Andrew Rits). I am surprised that I missed something that ended up being so simple…  In the Configuration Manager, I had the following settings: This is how I had been building and debugging the solution always…  However, apparently when installing the new Web Publishing package, it does things a little differently in its configuration for publishing: You see the difference?  The configuration here is set to ‘x86’ instead of ‘Any CPU’.  Sure enough, as soon as I switched the configuration to ‘Release – Any CPU’, the deployment built and published all of my files as I expected. Conclusion It was a small change, but apparently the new ‘Publish web application’ defaults to the x86 configuration, thereby not copying any of the project/bin files to the publish target directory.  I spent forever trying things, but this small drop down eluded me until I was able to target that the dialog was actually working apparently, I just didn’t have the correct configuration. I hope that this saves you the hours of frustration and hastened hair loss that it caused me…  I also hope that before Microsoft brings this publishing package out of RC status, that they change the behavior of that menu to default to the settings of the old publish menu for the first time. Happy Coding!

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• Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by Side

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you’re still running XP, currently have Office 2003 installed on your machine, and skipped Office 2007, you might want to upgrade to Office 2010. In this guide we will show you the upgrade process or how to run them side by side. In this example we are upgrading from Office 2003 Standard to Office Professional Plus 2010 RTM (Final) on XP Professional. System Requirements To run Office 2010 on your XP machine you have to make sure you have Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Silverlight installed (links below). Or you can just install them through Windows Update. Recommended Hardware 1GHZ CPU or higher 512 MB of RAM or higher 1024×768 Resolution or higher DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card with 64 MB of memory or higher Installing Office 2010 Simply kick off the Office Professional Plus 2010 installation. Enter in your product key… Agree to the EULA…   Select the Customize button… Setup will detect Office 2003 and allow you to remove all applications, keep them, or select only the ones you want to keep. In this example we’re going to remove Excel and PowerPoint, and keep Outlook and Word 2003. Next, click the Installation Options tab and select Office programs you want to install. Since we’re keeping Outlook 2003 and don’t want to use Outlook 2010, we’re making sure not to install Outlook 2010. However, we want to run Word 2003 and 2010 on the same machine. After you’ve made your selections click the Upgrade button. The installation begins and you’re shown the progress. The amount of time it takes to install will vary between systems. Installation is complete and you can close out of the installer. Now when you go into the Start menu under Microsoft Office, you’ll see both versions of the Office apps available. Here is a shot of Word 2003 and 2010 running together on our XP machine.   Conclusion If you’re moving from Office 2003 to 2010, this allows you to install both versions side by side. It gives you a chance to learn 2010 features, and still work in the familiar 2003 environment when you need to get things done quickly. If you’re having problems installing Office 2010 make sure to check out our article on how to fix problems upgrading Office 2010 beta to RTM (Final) release. Also, if you were using Office 2007 and are currently using the 2010 beta, we have a guide on how to switch back to Office 2007 after the 2010 beta ends. Links XP Service Pack 3 Microsoft Silverlight Details on Office 2010 System Requirements Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Word/Excel 97-2003 Documents Back to the "New" Context Menu After Installing Office 2007Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatRemove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins Cool Looking Skins for Windows Media Player 12 Move the Mouse Pointer With Your Face Movement Using eViacam

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• SharePoint OCR image files indexing

  Introduction This article describes how to setup indexing of the image files (including TIFF, PDF, JPEG, BMP...) using OCR technology. The indexing described below utilizes Microsoft IFilter technology and as such is not specific to SharePoint, but can be used with any product that uses Microsoft indexing: Microsoft Search, Desktop search, SQL Server search, and through the plug-ins with Google desktop search. I however use it with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003. For those other products, the registration may need to be slightly different. Background  One of the projects I was working on required a storage of old documents scanned into PDF files. Then there was a separate team of people responsible for providing a tags for a search engine so those image documents could be found. The whole process was clumsy, labor intensive, and error prone. That was what started me on my exploration path. OCR The first search I fired was for the Open Source OCR products. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to TESSERACT (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). Tesseract is an orphaned brain child of HP that worked on it from 1985 to 1995. Then it was moved to the Open Source, and now if I understand it correctly, Google is working on it. With credentials like that, it's no wonder that Tesseract scores one of the highest marks on OCR recognition and accuracy. After downloading and struggling just a bit, I got Tesseract to work. The struggling part was that the home page claims that its base input format is a TIFF file. May be my TIFFs were bad, but I was able to get it to work only for BMP files. Image files conversion So now that I have an OCR that can convert BMP files into text, how do I get text out of the image PDF files? One more search, and I settled down on ImageMagic (http://www.imagemagick.org/). This is another wonderful Open Source utility that can convert any file into image. It did work out of the box, converting any TIFF files into bitmaps, but to get PDF files converted, it requires a GhostScript (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe). Dealing with text PDFs With that utility installed, I was cooking - I can convert any file (in particular PDF and TIFF) into bitmap, and then I can extract the text out of the bitmap. The only consideration was to somehow treat PDF files containing text differently - after all, OCR is very computation intensive and somewhat error prone even with perfect image quality and resolution. So another quick search, and I have a PDFTOTEXT (ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip) - thank God for Open Source! With these guys, I can pull text out of PDF in an eye blink. However, I would get nothing for pure image PDFs, but I already have a solution for that! Batch process It took another 15 minutes to setup a batch script to automate the process: Check the file extension If file is a PDF file try to extract text out of it if there is more than certain amount of text in the file - done! if there is no text, convert first page into bitmap run OCR on the bitmap For any other file type, convert file into bitmap Run OCR on the bitmap Once you unzip the attached project, check out the bin\OCR.BAT file. It will create a temporary file in the directory where your source file is with the same name + the '.txt' extension.Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• How do you install a USB CD Rom drive?

  - by Matt Allen

  Hello, I recently purchased a USB CD ROM drive, but I don't know how to get it to work with my computer which runs Ubuntu 10.04. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00303H908/ref=oss_product When I issue the lsusb command, it shows up as: Bus 002 Device 016: ID 05e3:0701 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB 2.0 IDE Adapter The computer doesn't recognize it automatically. How can I get this drive to show up as an actual drive on my computer? If this particular drive can't handle Linux, can you recommended one which can and provide a link to it so I can purchase it? Thanks! Update: I was asked by Scaine to run a command and report back with the output: joe@joe-laptop:~$ tail -f /var/log/kern.log Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.551437] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.551446] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.551463] end_request: I/O error, dev sr1, sector 0 Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877542] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877551] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877559] Info fld=0x0, ILI Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877562] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877572] sr 7:0:0:0: [sr1] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 Dec 29 12:51:35 joe-laptop kernel: [103190.877588] end_request: I/O error, dev sr1, sector 0 Dec 29 13:08:46 joe-laptop kernel: [104221.558911] usb 2-2.2: USB disconnect, address 16 Then when I plugged the drive back into the computer, I got: Dec 29 13:10:29 joe-laptop kernel: [104324.668320] usb 2-2.2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 17 Dec 29 13:10:29 joe-laptop kernel: [104324.761702] usb 2-2.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Dec 29 13:10:29 joe-laptop kernel: [104324.762700] scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Dec 29 13:10:29 joe-laptop kernel: [104324.762935] usb-storage: device found at 17 Dec 29 13:10:29 joe-laptop kernel: [104324.762938] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104329.760521] usb-storage: device scan complete Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104329.761344] scsi 8:0:0:0: CD-ROM TEAC CD-224E 1.7A PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104329.767425] sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104329.767612] sr 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1 Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104329.767720] sr 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5 Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141060] sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141069] sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141077] Info fld=0x0, ILI Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141081] sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141090] sr 8:0:0:0: [sr1] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141106] end_request: I/O error, dev sr1, sector 0 Dec 29 13:10:34 joe-laptop kernel: [104330.141113] __ratelimit: 18 callbacks suppressed There was more output than this (the number of lines started growing after the drive was plugged back in, and kept growing), but this is the first few lines.

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• SQL Server – SafePeak “Logon Trigger” Feature for Managing Data Access

  - by pinaldave

  Lately I received an interesting question about the abilities of SafePeak for SQL Server acceleration software: Q: “I would like to use SafePeak to make my CRM application faster. It is an application we bought from some vendor, after a while it became slow and we can’t reprogram it. SafePeak automated caching sounds like an easy and good solution for us. But, in my application there are many servers and different other applications services that address its main database, and some even change data, and I feel that there is a chance that some servers that during the connection process we may miss some. Is there a way to ensure that SafePeak will be aware of all connections to the SQL Server, so its cache will remain intact?” Interesting question, as I remember that SafePeak (http://www.safepeak.com/Product/SafePeak-Overview) likes that all traffic to the database will go thru it. I decided to check out the features of SafePeak latest version (2.1) and seek for an answer there. A: Indeed I found SafePeak has a feature they call “Logon Trigger” and is designed for that purpose. It is located in the user interface, under: Settings -> SQL instances management  ->  [your instance]  ->  [Logon Trigger] tab. From here you activate / deactivate it and control a white-list of enabled server IPs and Login names that SafePeak will ignore them. Click to Enlarge After activation of the “logon trigger” Safepeak server is notified by the SQL Server itself on each new opened connection. Safepeak monitors those connections and decides if there is something to do with them or not. On a typical installation SafePeak likes all application and users connections to go via SafePeak – this way it knows about data and schema updates immediately (real time). With activation of the safepeak “logon trigger”  a special CLR trigger is deployed on the SQL server and notifies Safepeak on any connection that has not arrived via SafePeak. In such cases Safepeak can act to clear and lock the cache or to ignore it. This feature enables to make sure SafePeak will be aware of all connections so SafePeak cache will maintain exactly correct all times. So even if a user, like a DBA will connect to the SQL Server not via SafePeak, SafePeak will know about it and take actions. The notification does not impact the work of that connection, the user or application still continue to do whatever they planned to do. Note: I found that activation of logon trigger in SafePeak requires that SafePeak SQL login will have the next permissions: 1) CONTROL SERVER; 2) VIEW SERVER STATE; 3) And the SQL Server instance is CLR enabled; Seeing SafePeak in action, I can say SafePeak brings fantastic resource for those who seek to get performance for SQL Server critical apps. SafePeak promises to accelerate SQL Server applications in just several hours of installation, automatic learning and some optimization configuration (no code changes!!!). If better application and database performance means better business to you – I suggest you to download and try SafePeak. The solution of SafePeak is indeed unique, and the questions I receive are very interesting. Have any more questions on SafePeak? Please leave your question as a comment and I will try to get an answer for you. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• A Letter for Your CEO About Social Marketing’s Future

  - by Mike Stiles

  We’ll leave it to you to decide if or how to sneak this in front of them. Dear Chief: This social marketing thing looks serious. It’s gone beyond having a Facebook page and putting our info and a few promotions on it. It’s seriously disrupting how we’ve always done marketing. And its implications reach well beyond marketing. My concern is that we stay positioned ahead of these changes and are prepared to embrace, adapt and capitalize on these new capabilities as opposed to spending valuable time and money trying to shoehorn social into “the way we’ve always done things.” I’m also concerned about what happens if our competition executes on this before we do. The days of being able to impose our ad messaging on the masses to great effect are numbered. The public now has the tech tools and ability to filter out things that are irrelevant to them. And frankly, spending ad dollars to reach unlikely prospects isn’t the most efficient path for us either. Today, our customers have to genuinely love what we do. That starts with a renewed, customer-centric focus on the quality and usability of our product. If their experience with it is bad, they now have very connected, loud voices that will testify against us. We can’t afford that. Next, their customer service experience, before and after the sale, has to be a pleasant surprise. That requires truly knowing our customers and listening to them. Lip service won’t cut it. We have to get and use as much data on the customer as possible, interact with them wherever they want to interact with us, and commit to impressing them. If we do, they’ll get out there and advertise for us. Since peer-to-peer recommendation is the most effective marketing, that’s money in the bank. Social marketing is about forming relationships, same as how individuals use social. We want them to know us, trust us, and get real value from knowing us. That requires honesty and transparency that before now might have been uncomfortable. I propose that if we clearly make everything we do about our customers’ wants and needs, we’ll have nothing to hide. It will solidify customer loyalty, retention, and thus, revenue. These things can’t happen without certain tools and structural changes in the organization. There are social cloud platforms that integrate social management into all of the necessary areas: CRM, customer service, sales, marketing automation, content marketing, ecommerce, etc. This is will give us a real-time, complete view of the customer so their every interaction with us is attentive, personalized, accurate, relevant, and satisfying. Without it, we’re just a collage of disjointed systems, each gathering data that informs only its own departmental silo. The customer is voluntarily giving us everything we need to know about them to win them over, but we have to start listening and putting the pieces together. There’s still time. Brands are coming to terms with this transition to the socially enabled enterprise, but so far they aren’t moving very fast. Like us, they’re dealing with long-entrenched technologies and processes. CMO’s and CIO’s have to form new partnerships. Content operations have to be initiated and properly staffed and funded. Various departments must be able to utilize interconnected big data. What will separate the winners from the losers? Well chief, that’s why I’m writing you. It’s in your hands. These initiatives won’t get the kind of priority and seriousness that inspire actual deadlines & action unless they come from your desk. You have to be the champion of customer centricity. You have to be our change agent. You have to be our innovator. Otherwise, it’s going to be business as usual, and that puts us in a very vulnerable place. Sincerely, Your Team @mikestilesPhoto: Gary Scott, stock.xchng

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• Major Analyst Report Chooses Oracle As An ECM Leader

  - by brian.dirking(at)oracle.com

  Oracle announced that Gartner, Inc. has named Oracle as a Leader in its latest "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management" in a press release issued this morning. Gartner's Magic Quadrant reports position vendors within a particular quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, "Leaders have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clearly articulated vision. In the context of ECM, they have strong channel partners, presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technology or vertical market. Leaders deliver a suite that addresses market demand for direct delivery of the majority of core components, though these are not necessarily owned by them, tightly integrated, unique or best-of-breed in each area. We place more emphasis this year on demonstrated enterprise deployments; integration with other business applications and content repositories; incorporation of Web 2.0 and XML capabilities; and vertical-process and horizontal-solution focus. Leaders should drive market transformation." "To extend content governance and best practices across the enterprise, organizations need an enterprise content management solution that delivers a broad set of functionality and is tightly integrated with business processes," said Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle. "We believe that Oracle's position as a Leader in this report is recognition of the industry-leading performance, integration and scalability delivered in Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g." With Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g, Oracle offers a comprehensive, integrated and high-performance content management solution that helps organizations increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve content security. In the report, Oracle is grouped among the top three vendors for execution, and is the furthest to the right, placing Oracle as the most visionary vendor. This vision stems from Oracle's integration of content management right into key business processes, delivering content in context as people need it. Using a PeopleSoft Accounts Payable user as an example, as an employee processes an invoice, Oracle ECM Suite brings that invoice up on the screen so the processor can verify the content right in the process, improving speed and accuracy. Oracle integrates content into business processes such as Human Resources, Travel and Expense, and others, in the major enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and E-Business Suite. As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents strategy, you can see an example of these integrations in this webinar: Managing Customer Documents and Marketing Assets in Siebel. You can also get a white paper of the ROI Embry Riddle achieved using Oracle Content Management integrated with enterprise applications. Embry Riddle moved from a point solution for content management on accounts payable to an infrastructure investment - they are now using Oracle Content Management for accounts payable with Oracle E-Business Suite, and for student on-boarding with PeopleSoft e-Campus. They continue to expand their use of Oracle Content Management to address further use cases from a core infrastructure. Oracle also shows its vision in the ability to deliver content optimized for online channels. Marketers can use Oracle ECM Suite to deliver digital assets and offers as part of an integrated campaign that understands website visitors and ensures that they are given the most pertinent information and offers. Oracle also provides full lifecycle management through its built-in records management. Companies are able to manage the lifecycle of content (both records and non-records) through built-in retention management. And with the integration of Oracle ECM Suite and Sun Storage Archive Manager, content can be routed to the appropriate storage media based upon content type, usage data or other business rules. This ensures that the most accessed content is instantly available, and archived content is stored on a more appropriate medium like tape. You can learn more in this webinar - Oracle Content Management and Sun Tiered Storage. If you are interested in reading more about why Oracle was chosen as a Leader, view the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management.

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• OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

  - by David Allan

  Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

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• CRMIT’s HIGH VALUE CRM++ PLUGINS FOR CRM On DEMAND

  - by Soumo Das

  Customer satisfaction and experience being the two most considerable factors, these days businesses are on the lookout for automation tools that are world class, agile and keep quality at its core. CRMIT has developed such tools using cutting edge technologies and abstracting industry best practices and R&D.  Self Service Portal  With customers being so meticulous about regular updates and reliable access to their data, administrators just cannot think of walking a thin line. Surviving without a resource that provides a track of customer requirements for services available 24 x 7 can severely affect the productivity. In such a scenario, CRMIT’s Self Service Portal (SSP) is the best solution. This not only tracks the required customer data, but also allows companies to stay in tune with their employees, vendors and stakeholders.   One can directly sign up to become a CRMOD contact and SSP user. One need not use the database, as operations and interactions are d at run time. This is a fully configurable solution that tracks results periodically, thus making it easy for end users. It also offers better security and data visibility that enables users to progress smoothly. Quote and Order Management   When dealing with quotes, contracts and orders becomes complicated, only Quote & Order Management can work as a one-stop solution. CRMIT offers this great tool for managing all this information and for taking care of customer orders and service requirements.  This CRM On Demand plug-in allows one to create a new quote or copy the existing one. Products can be directly added from the product list of CRMOD and the pricing is calculated automatically. Quote can be generated and mailed to the external users in PDF, HTML and XLS formats. This not only allows management of quotes in an enhanced manner, but also supports various billing and tax calculation features that make work effortless.    Report Scheduler  When it comes to analyzing and providing statistics of various business processes currently running in an organization, one cannot depend on manual updates, which sometimes may be inaccurate or even delayed. CRMIT provides a SaaS based powerful solution - Report Scheduler - that allows CRM users to schedule reports as per the frequencies and then receive them as email attachments at the scheduled time.   With this powerful tool, administrators can control the report scheduler for assigning specific reports to specific users. After that, users can login and schedule any assigned report for viewing at particular intervals on monthly, weekly or daily basis. Additionally, users can also copy the mail to external users and can choose the preferred format. The best part is that sharing business data with third party become easy with this and for viewing reports, users need not log into their CRMOD account.  CRM On Demand Offline Solution CRM On-Demand Offline is another great CRM++ extension that allows one to work in both online and offline modes. Synchronizing both the modes is absolutely easy and offers ease while working. CRM OD offline works as an automation tool that not only improves efficiency, but also works as a backup in most cases. It is readily available as a windows application installer and requires users to be online only while validating and synchronizing. The best part is that working in the offline mode also works as a backup. 

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• What’s the use of code reuse?

  - by Tony Davis

  All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), moving logic into specific “helper” modules that they can then reuse, agonizing about the minutiae of the class structure, inheritance and interface design that will promote easy reuse. Unfortunately, writing code specifically for reuse often leads to complicated object hierarchies and inheritance models that are anything but reusable. If, instead, one strives to write simple code units that are highly maintainable and perform a single function, in a concise, isolated fashion then the potential for reuse simply “drops out” as a natural by-product. Programmers, of course, care about these principles, about encapsulation and clean interfaces that don’t expose inner workings and allow easy pluggability. This is great when it helps with the maintenance and development of code but how often, in practice, do we actually reuse our code? Most DBAs and database developers are familiar with the practical reasons for the limited opportunities to reuse database code and its potential downsides. However, surely elsewhere in our code base, reuse happens often. After all, we can all name examples, such as date/time handling modules, which if we write with enough care we can plug in to many places. I spoke to a developer just yesterday who looked me in the eye and told me that in 30+ years as a developer (a successful one, I’d add), he’d never once reused his own code. As I sat blinking in disbelief, he explained that, of course, he always thought he would reuse it. He’d often agonized over its design, certain that he was creating code of great significance that he and other generations would reuse, with grateful tears misting their eyes. In fact, it never happened. He had in his head, most of the algorithms he needed and would simply write the code from scratch each time, refining the algorithms and tailoring the code to meet the specific requirements. It was, he said, simply quicker to do that than dig out the old code, check it, correct the mistakes, and adapt it. Is this a common experience, or just a strange anomaly? Viewed in a certain light, building code with a focus on reusability seems to hark to a past age where people built cars and music systems with the idea that someone else could and would replace and reuse the parts. Technology advances so rapidly that the next time you need the “same” code, it’s likely a new technique, or a whole new language, has emerged in the meantime, better equipped to tackle the task. Maybe we should be less fearful of the idea that we could write code well suited to the system requirements, but with little regard for reuse potential, and then rewrite a better version from scratch the next time.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

  - by pinaldave

  Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Don&rsquo;t Kill the Password

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  A week ago Mr. Honan from Wired.com penned an article on security he titled “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore.” He asserts that the password is not effective and a new solution is needed. Unfortunately, Mr. Honan was a victim of hacking. As a result he has a victim’s vendetta. His conclusion is ill conceived even though there are smatterings of truth and good advice. The password is a security barrier much like a lock on your door. In of itself it’s not guaranteeing protection. You can have a good password akin to a steel reinforced door with the best lock money can buy, or you can have a poor password like “password” which is like a sliding lock like on a bathroom stall. But, just like in the real world a lock isn’t always enough. You can have a lock, security system, video cameras, guard dogs, and even armed security guards; but none of that guarantees your protection. Even top secret government agencies can be breached by someone who is just that good (as dramatized in movies like Mission Impossible). And that’s the crux of it. There are real hackers out there that are that good. Killer coding ninja monkeys do exist! We still have locks on our doors, because they still serve their role. Passwords are no different. Security doesn’t end with the password. Most people would agree that stuffing your mattress with your life savings isn’t a good idea even if you have the best locks and security system. Most people agree its safest to have the money in a bank. Essentially this is compartmentalization. Compartmentalization extends to the online world as well. You’re at risk if your online banking accounts are linked to the same account as your social networks. This is especially true if you’re lackadaisical about linking those social networks to outside sources including apps. The object here is to minimize the damage that can be done. An attacker should not be able to get into your bank account, because they breached your Twitter account. It’s time to prioritize once you’ve compartmentalized. This simply means deciding how much security you want for the different compartments which I’ll call security zones. Social networking applications like Facebook provide a lot of security features. However, security features are almost always a compromise with privacy and convenience. It’s similar to an engineering adage, but in this case it’s security, convenience, and privacy – pick two. For example, you might use a safe instead of bank to store your money, because the convenience of having your money closer or the privacy of not having the bank records is more important than the added security. The following are lists of security do’s and don’ts (these aren’t meant to be exhaustive and each could be an article in of themselves): Security Do’s: Use strong passwords based on a phrase Use encryption whenever you can (e.g. HTTPS in Facebook) Use a firewall (and learn to use it properly) Configure security on your router (including port blocking) Keep your operating system patched Make routine backups of important files Realize that if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product Security Don’ts Link accounts if at all possible Reuse passwords across your security zones Use real answers for security questions (e.g. mother’s maiden name) Trust anything you download Ignore message boxes shown by your system or browser Forget to test your backups Share your primary email indiscriminately Only you can decide your comfort level between convenience, privacy, and security. Attackers are going to find exploits in software. Software is complex and depends on other software. The exploits are the responsibility of the software company. But your security is always your responsibility. Complete security is an illusion. But, there is plenty you can do to minimize the risk online just like you do in the physical world. Be safe and enjoy what the Internet has to offer. I expect passwords to be necessary just as long as locks.

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• Install Problem (Ubuntu Server 10.04) with USB as it reboots when I hit 'enter' for 'Install Ubuntu Server' option! Help

  - by Alastair

  We cannot seem to install Ubuntu Server with USB as it reboots when I hit 'enter' for 'Install Ubuntu Server' option. My friend wants to try setting up a server so; we downloaded Ubuntu Server 10.04.4 we created a boot CD and installed ubuntu server no problem at all. But then the problem arose the hardrive we wanted to use is a 1tb sata drive and the computer orginally has 40gb IDE. So I bought a Sata to IDE and IDE to Sata converter from: http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/52926/IDE-to-SATA-converter---Converts-IDE-HDD-to-SATA-inc-sata-data-and-power-cables Unfortunately this converter means I cannot plug in the IDE cable meaning I only have one IDE connection i.e CD drive has to be disconnected for the 1tb sata Hardrive to be connected. So now the 1tb drive is connected, powered it on opened the bios to make sure the hdd appeared it did as ST3ASDAPFKG (somthing like that). Fortunately the computer supports USB booting, so I read ubuntu server usb install instructions I tried: Startup Disk Creator & Unebootin Startup Disk Creator made the usb bootable with the 'ubuntu-10.04.4-server-i386.iso' All looked fine stuck the usb drive in, booted the machine up and I am quickly presented with ubuntu language choice. I hit enter to select English then I am presented with: Install Ubuntu Server, Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Check Disk for defects, test memory, Boot from first hard disk, Rescue a broken system I can move up and down the menu fine everything seems ok, I select 'Install Ubuntu Server', computer just hangs and screen either goes blank or locks. So I rebooted the computer loads the same menus fine, I select 'Install Ubuntu Server' hit 'enter' and the computer just restarts then brings me back to the same menu. hmmm Then I tried choosing the rest of the options separately: Install Ubuntu Server, Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Check Disk for defects, test memory, Boot from first hard disk, Rescue a broken system computer just restarts and back to the same ubuntu menu every-time. Grrrr At this point I wish I actually new how to command line install or something but I don't have a clue how to do that. So I tried hitting 'f6' for 'other options' and I tried them all in various combinations and individually. No Luck: (Expert mode, acpi=off, noapic, nolapic, edd=on, nodmraid, nomodeset, Free Software only) At this point I am wondering if it is a bios setting causing problems, I tried turning every option in there on off that I don't understand. No Luck. I then discovered by accident if you hit esc in the ubuntu install menu it says "you are leaving the graphical boot menu and starting the text mode interface" I hit 'Ok'. Next a prompt pops up saying 'boot:' One time it responded when I typed somthing with 'Cannot find kernal image (something like that but since then it just restarts when I hit enter in that prompt). I had a browse on the net and found someone suggesting removing quiet from install command for 'Install Ubuntu Server'. Made no difference at all just reboots... Orginal boot options noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server.seed initrd=/install/initrd.gz quiet -- Modified boot options noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server.seed initrd=/install/initrd.gz -- Still I cannot install Ubuntu Server by USB as it, reboots when I hit 'enter' for 'Install Ubuntu Server' option. This is a real pain as we cannot take the 1tb Sata Hardrive and swap it for IDE to be able to use the cd drive. Why is is it so hard to install ubuntu server with usb? I have wasted a full day and half on this really frustrated any help would be amazing! I know the answers out there just seems a bit illusive at the moment! Computer Spec- Asus Motherboard, 1gb RAM 2X512MB, Powersupply 200watt, 2.8ghz Processor Intel, On-board 64mb graphics, 100mb Ethernet, 54mb Wireless,

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• SQL SERVER – How to Compare the Schema of Two Databases with Schema Compare

  - by Pinal Dave

  Earlier I wrote about An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases and it was very much well received. Since the blog post I have received quite a many question that just like data how we can also compare schema and synchronize it. If you think about comparing the schema manually, it is almost impossible to do so. Table Schema has been just one of the concept but if you really want the all the schema of the database (triggers, views, stored procedure and everything else) it is just impossible task. If you are developer or database administrator who works in the production environment than you know that there are so many different occasions when we have to compare schema of the database. Before deploying any changes to the production server, I personally like to make note of the every single schema change and document it so in case of any issue , I can always go back and refer my documentation. As discussed earlier it is absolutely impossible to do this task without the help of third party tools. I personally use Devart Schema Compare for this task. This is an extremely easy tool. Let us see how it works. First I have two different databases – a) AdventureWorks2012 and b) AdventureWorks2012-V1. There are total three changes between these databases. Here is the list of the same. One of the table has additional column One of the table have new index One of the stored procedure is changed Now let see how dbForge Schema Compare works in this scenario. First open dbForge Schema Compare studio. Click on New Schema Comparison. It will bring you to following screen where we have to configure the database needed to configure. I have selected AdventureWorks2012 and AdventureWorks-V1 databases. In the next screen we can verify various options but for this demonstration we will keep it as it is. We will not change anything in schema mapping screen as in our case it is not required but generically if you are comparing across schema you may need this. This is the most important screen as on this screen we select which kind of object we want to compare. You can see the options which are available to select. The screen lets you select the objects from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2012. Once you click on compare in previous screen it will bring you to this screen, which will essentially display the comparative difference between two of the databases which we had selected in earlier screen. As mentioned above there are three different changes in the database and the same has been listed over here. Two of the changes belongs to the tables and one changes belong to the procedure. Let us click each of them one by one to see what is the difference between them. In very first option we can see that there is an additional column in another database which did not exist earlier. In this example we can see that AdventureWorks2012 database have an additional index. Following example is very interesting as in this case, we have changed the definition of the stored procedure and the result pan contains the same. dbForget Schema Compare very effectively identify the changes in schema and lists them neatly to developers. Here is one more screen. This software not only compares the schema but also provides the options to update or drop them as per the choice. I think this is brilliant option. Well, I have been using schema compare for quite a while and have found it very useful. Here are few of the things which dbForge Schema Compare can do for developers and DBAs. Compare and synchronize SQL Server database schemas Compare schemas of live database and SQL Server backup Generate comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Eliminate mistakes in schema changes propagation across environments Track production database changes and customizations Automate migration of schema changes using command line interface I suggest that you try out dbForge Schema Compare and let me know what you think of this product. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL

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• Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

  - by steve.diamond

  Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

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• How to install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

  - by ybbest

  The Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview is announced yesterday and as a SharePoint Developer, I am really excited to learn all the new features and capabilities. Today I will show you how to install the preview. 1. Create a service account called SP2013Install and give this account Dbcreator and SecurityAdmin in SQL Server 2012 2. You need to run the following script to set the ‘maxdegree of parellism’ setting to the required value of 1 in SQL Server 2012(using sysadmin privilege) before configure the SharePoint Farm. Otherwise , you might get the error ‘This SQL Server Instance does not have the required maxdegree of parellism setting of 1’ sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO 3. Download the SharePoint preview from here and I am going to install it on Windows Server 2008R2 with SQL2012. 4. Click the Install software prerequisites, this works fine with the internet connection. (However, if you do not have internet connection, it is a bit tricky to install window azure AppFabric as it has to be installed using the prerequisite installer. Your computer might reboot a few times in the process.) 5.After the prerequisites are installed `completely, you can then install the Preview. Click the Install SharePoint Server and Enter the Product key you get from the Preview download page. 6. Accept the License terms and Click Next. 7. Leave the default path for the file location. 8. You can now start the installation process 9. After binary files are installed, you then can configure your farm using the farm configuration wizard. 10.Specify the Database server and the install account 11. Specify SharePoint farm passphrase. 12 Specify the port number , you should choose your own favorite port number. 13. Choose Create a New Server Farm and click next. 14. Double-check with the settings and click Next to Configure the farm install. 15. Finally, your farm is configured successfully and you now are able to go to your Central Admin site http://sp2010:6666/ 16. You should configure the services manually or automate using PowerShell (If you like to understand why,you can read the blog post here) ,however I will use the wizard to configure automatically here  as  this is a test machine. After the configuration is complete, you now be able to see your SharePoint Site. 17.To start the evaluate the Preview , you need to install Visual Studio 2012 RC , Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012,SharePoint 2013 Designer Preview , Office 2013 Preview. References: Download SharePoint2013 Server 2013 Download Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 Preview Install SharePoint 2013 Preview Hardware and software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview SharePoint 2013 IT Pro and Developer training materials released Plan for SharePoint 2013 Preview Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint 2013 Preview Office365 for the SharePoint 2013 preview SharePoint Designer 2013 Download: Microsoft Office 2013 Preview Language Pack Try Office

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• AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

  - by Daniel Moth

  Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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