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An Actionable Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture

- by TedMcLaughlan

The recent “Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture” (US Executive Office of the President, May 2 2012) is extremely timely and well-organized guidance for the Federal IT investment and deployment community, as useful for Federal Departments and Agencies as it is for their stakeholders and integration partners. The guidance not only helps IT Program Planners and Managers, but also informs and prepares constituents who may be the beneficiaries or otherwise impacted by the investment. The FEA Common Approach extends from and builds on the rapidly-maturing Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) and its associated artifacts and standards, already included to a large degree in the annual Federal Portfolio and Investment Management processes – for example the OMB’s Exhibit 300 (i.e. Business Case justification for IT investments).A very interesting element of this Approach includes the very necessary guidance for actually using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) and/or its collateral – good guidance for any organization charged with maintaining a broad portfolio of IT investments. The associated FEA Reference Models (i.e. the BRM, DRM, TRM, etc.) are very helpful frameworks for organizing, understanding, communicating and standardizing across agencies with respect to vocabularies, architecture patterns and technology standards. Determining when, how and to what level of detail to include these reference models in the typically long-running Federal IT acquisition cycles wasn’t always clear, however, particularly during the first interactions of a Program’s technical and functional leadership with the Mission owners and investment planners. This typically occurs as an agency begins the process of describing its strategy and business case for allocation of new Federal funding, reacting to things like new legislation or policy, real or anticipated mission challenges, or straightforward ROI opportunities (for example the introduction of new technologies that deliver significant cost-savings).The early artifacts (i.e. Resource Allocation Plans, Acquisition Plans, Exhibit 300’s or other Business Case materials, etc.) of the intersection between Mission owners, IT and Program Managers are far easier to understand and discuss, when the overlay of an evolved, actionable Enterprise Architecture (such as the FEA) is applied. “Actionable” is the key word – too many Public Service entity EA’s (including the FEA) have for too long been used simply as a very highly-abstracted standards reference, duly maintained and nominally-enforced by an Enterprise or System Architect’s office. Refreshing elements of this recent FEA Common Approach include one of the first Federally-documented acknowledgements of the “Solution Architect” (the “Problem-Solving” role). This role collaborates with the Enterprise, System and Business Architecture communities primarily on completing actual “EA Roadmap” documents. These are roadmaps grounded in real cost, technical and functional details that are fully aligned with both contextual expectations (for example the new “Digital Government Strategy” and its required roadmap deliverables - and the rapidly increasing complexities of today’s more portable and transparent IT solutions. We also expect some very critical synergies to develop in early IT investment cycles between this new breed of “Federal Enterprise Solution Architect” and the first waves of the newly-formal “Federal IT Program Manager” roles operating under more standardized “critical competency” expectations (including EA), likely already to be seriously influencing the quality annual CPIC (Capital Planning and Investment Control) processes. Our Oracle Enterprise Strategy Team (EST) and associated Oracle Enterprise Architecture (OEA) practices are already engaged in promoting and leveraging the visibility of Enterprise Architecture as a key contributor to early IT investment validation, and we look forward in particular to seeing the real, citizen-centric benefits of this FEA Common Approach in particular surface across the entire Public Service CPIC domain - Federal, State, Local, Tribal and otherwise. Read more Enterprise Architecture blog posts for additional EA insight!

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BizTalk–Mapping repeating EDI segments using a Table Looping functoid

- by Bill Osuch

BizTalk’s HIPAA X12 schemas have several repeating date/time segments in them, where the XML winds up looking something like this: <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>232</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120301</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>233</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120302</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> The corresponding EDI segments would look like this: DTM*232*20120301~ DTM*233*20120302~ The DateTimeQualifier element indicates whether it’s the start date or end date – 232 for start, 233 for end. So in this example (an X12 835) we’re saying the statement starts on 3/1/2012 and ends on 3/2/2012. When you’re mapping from some other data format, many times your start and end dates will be within the same node, like this: <StatementDates> <Begin>20120301</Begin> <End>20120302</End> </StatementDates> So how do you map from that and create two repeating segments in your destination map? You could connect both the <Begin> and <End> nodes to a looping functoid, and connect its output to <DTM_StatementDate>, then connect both <Begin> and <End> to <DTM_StatementDate> … this would give you two repeating segments, each with the correct date, but how to add the correct qualifier? The answer is the Table Looping Functoid! To test this, let’s create a simplified schema that just contains the date fields we’re mapping. First, create your input schema: And your output schema: Now create a map that uses these two schemas, and drag a Table Looping functoid onto it. The first input parameter configures the scope (or how many times the records will loop), so drag a link from the StatementDates node over to the functoid. Yes, StatementDates only appears once, so this would make it seem like it would only loop once, but you’ll see in just a minute. The second parameter in the functoid is the number of columns in the output table. We want to fill two fields, so just set this to 2. Now drag the Begin and End nodes over to the functoid. Finally, we want to add the constant values for DateTimeQualifier, so add a value of 232 and another of 233. When all your inputs are configured, it should look like this: Now we’ll configure the output table. Click on the Table Looping Grid, and configure it to look like this: Microsoft’s description of this functoid says “The Table Looping functoid repeats with the looping record it is connected to. Within each iteration, it loops once per row in the table looping grid, producing multiple output loops.” So here we will loop (# of <StatementDates> nodes) * (Rows in the table), or 2 times. Drag two Table Extractor functoids onto the map; these are what are going to pull the data we want out of the table. The first input to each of these will be the output of the TableLooping functoid, and the second input will be the row number to pull from. So the functoid connected to <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> will look like this: Connect these two functoids to the two nodes we want to populate, and connect another output from the Table Looping functoid to the <DTM_StatementDate> record. You should have a map that looks something like this: Create some sample xml, use it as the TestMap Input Instance, and you should get a result like the XML at the top of this post. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, EDI, Mapping

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BizTalk 2009 - The Community ODBC Adapter: Schema Generation

- by Stuart Brierley

Having previously detailed the installation of the Community ODBC Adapter for BizTalk 2009, the next thing I will be looking at is the generation of schemas using this ODBC adapter. Within your BizTalk 2009 project, right click the project and select Add Generated Items. In the resultant window choose Add Adapter Metadata and click Add to open the Add Adapter Wizard. Check that the BizTalk Server and Database names are correct, select the ODBC adapter and click next. You must now set the connection string. To start with choose set, then new DSN (data source name). You now need to define the Data Source you will be connecting to. On the User DSN tab select Add add then driver you want to use. In this case I am going to use the MySQL ODBC Driver. A User DSN will only be visible on the current machine with you as a user. * Although I initially set up a User DSN and this was fine for creating schemas with, I later realised that you actually need a system DSN as the BizTalk host service needs this to be able connect to the database on a receive or send port. You will then be asked to Set up the MySQL ODBC Data Source. In my case this is a local database making use of named pipes, so I had to make sure that I ticked the "Force use of named pipes" check box and removed the "# The Pipe the MySQL Server will use socket=mysql" line from the mysql.ini; with this is place the connection would fail as there is no apparent way to specify the pipe name in the ODBC driver configuration. This will then update the User DSN tab with the new Data Source. Make sure that you select it and press OK. Select it again in the Choose Data Source window and press OK. On the ODBC transport window select next. You will now be presented with the Schema Information window, where you must supply the namespace, type and root element names for your schema. Next choose the type of statement that you will be using to create your schema - in this case I am using a stored procedure. *I later discovered that this option is fine for MySQL stored procedures without input parameters, but failed for MySQL stored procedures with input parameters. (I will be posting on the way to handle input parameters soon) Next you will need to specify the name of the stored procedure. In this case I have a simple stored procedure to return all the data held by my TestTable in MySQL. Select * from TestTable; The table itself has three columns: Name, Sex and Married. Selecting finish should now hopefully create your schemas based on the input and output from your stored procedure. In my case I have: An empty schema for the request; after all I have no parameters for the stored procedure. A response schema comprised of a Table Record with Name, Sex and Married children. Next I will be looking at the use of the ODBC adpater with: Receive ports Send ports

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How change LOD in geometry?

- by ChaosDev

Im looking for simple algorithm of LOD, for change geometry vertexes and decrease frame time. Im created octree, but now I want model or terrain vertex modify algorithm,not for increase(looking on tessellation later) but for decrease. I want something like this Questions: Is same algorithm can apply either to model and terrain correctly? Indexes need to be modified ? I must use octree or simple check distance between camera and object for desired effect ? New value of indexcount for DrawIndexed function needed ? Code: //m_LOD == 10 in the beginning //m_RawVerts - array of 3d Vector filled with values from vertex buffer. void DecreaseLOD() { m_LOD--; if(m_LOD<1)m_LOD=1; RebuildGeometry(); } void IncreaseLOD() { m_LOD++; if(m_LOD>10)m_LOD=10; RebuildGeometry(); } void RebuildGeometry() { void* vertexRawData = new byte[m_VertexBufferSize]; void* indexRawData = new DWORD[m_IndexCount]; auto context = mp_D3D->mp_Context; D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE data; ZeroMemory(&data,sizeof(D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE)); context->Map(mp_VertexBuffer->mp_buffer,0,D3D11_MAP_READ,0,&data); memcpy(vertexRawData,data.pData,m_VertexBufferSize); context->Unmap(mp_VertexBuffer->mp_buffer,0); context->Map(mp_IndexBuffer->mp_buffer,0,D3D11_MAP_READ,0,&data); memcpy(indexRawData,data.pData,m_IndexBufferSize); context->Unmap(mp_IndexBuffer->mp_buffer,0); DWORD* dwI = (DWORD*)indexRawData; int sz = (m_VertexStride/sizeof(float));//size of vertex element //algorithm must be here. std::vector<Vector3d> vertices; int i = 0; for(int j = 0; j < m_VertexCount; j++) { float x1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[0+i]); float y1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[1+i]); float z1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[2+i]); Vector3d lv = Vector3d(x1,y1,z1); //my useless attempts if(j+m_LOD+1<m_RawVerts.size()) { float v1 = VECTORHELPER::Distance(m_RawVerts[dwI[j]],m_RawVerts[dwI[j+m_LOD]]); float v2 = VECTORHELPER::Distance(m_RawVerts[dwI[j]],m_RawVerts[dwI[j+m_LOD+1]]); if(v1>v2) lv = m_RawVerts[dwI[j+1]]; else if(v2<v1) lv = m_RawVerts[dwI[j+2]]; } (((float*)vertexRawData)[0+i]) = lv.x; (((float*)vertexRawData)[1+i]) = lv.y; (((float*)vertexRawData)[2+i]) = lv.z; i+=sz;//pass others vertex format values without change } for(int j = 0; j < m_IndexCount; j++) { //indices ? } //set vertexes to device UpdateVertexes(vertexRawData,mp_VertexBuffer->getSize()); delete[] vertexRawData; delete[] indexRawData; }

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WIF-less claim extraction from ACS: JWT

- by Elton Stoneman

ACS support for JWT still shows as "beta", but it meets the spec and it works nicely, so it's becoming the preferred option as SWT is losing favour. (Note that currently ACS doesn’t support JWT encryption, if you want encrypted tokens you need to go SAML). In my last post I covered pulling claims from an ACS token without WIF, using the SWT format. The JWT format is a little more complex, but you can still inspect claims just with string manipulation. The incoming token from ACS is still presented in the BinarySecurityToken element of the XML payload, with a TokenType of urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt: <t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse xmlns:t="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust"> <t:Lifetime> <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T07:39:55.337Z</wsu:Created> <wsu:Expires xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T09:19:55.337Z</wsu:Expires> </t:Lifetime> <wsp:AppliesTo xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy"> <EndpointReference xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing"> <Address>http://localhost/x.y.z</Address> </EndpointReference> </wsp:AppliesTo> <t:RequestedSecurityToken> <wsse:BinarySecurityToken wsu:Id="_1eeb5cf4-b40b-40f2-89e0-a3343f6bd985-6A15D1EED0CDB0D8FA48C7D566232154" ValueType="urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd">[ base64string ] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken> </t:RequestedSecurityToken> <t:TokenType>urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt</t:TokenType> <t:RequestType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/Issue</t:RequestType> <t:KeyType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/NoProofKey</t:KeyType> </t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse> The token as a whole needs to be base-64 decoded. The decoded value contains a header, payload and signature, dot-separated; the parts are also base-64, but they need to be decoded using a no-padding algorithm (implementation and more details in this MSDN article on validating an Exchange 2013 identity token). The values are then in JSON; the header contains the token type and the hashing algorithm: "{"typ":"JWT","alg":"HS256"}" The payload contains the same data as in the SWT, but JSON rather than querystring format: {"aud":"http://localhost/x.y.z" "iss":"https://adfstest-bhw.accesscontrol.windows.net/" "nbf":1346398795 "exp":1346404795 "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant":"2012-08-31T07:39:53.652Z" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod":"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname":"xyz" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress":"[email protected]" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/upn":"[email protected]" "identityprovider":"http://fs.svc.x.y.z.com/adfs/services/trust"} The signature is in the third part of the token. Unlike SWT which is fixed to HMAC-SHA-256, JWT can support other protocols (the one in use is specified as the "alg" value in the header). How to: Validate an Exchange 2013 identity token contains an implementation of a JWT parser and validator; apart from the custom base-64 decoding part, it’s very similar to SWT extraction. I've wrapped the basic SWT and JWT in a ClaimInspector.aspx page on gitHub here: SWT and JWT claim inspector. You can drop it into any ASP.Net site and set the URL to be your redirect page in ACS. Swap ACS to issue SWT or JWT, and using the same page you can inspect the claims that come out.

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Server-Sent Events using GlassFish (TOTD #179)

- by arungupta

Bhakti blogged about Server-Sent Events on GlassFish and I've been planning to try it out for past some days. Finally, I took some time out today to learn about it and build a simplistic example showcasing the touch points. Server-Sent Events is developed as part of HTML5 specification and provides push notifications from a server to a browser client in the form of DOM events. It is defined as a cross-browser JavaScript API called EventSource. The client creates an EventSource by requesting a particular URL and registers an onmessage event listener to receive the event notifications. This can be done as shown var url = 'http://' + document.location.host + '/glassfish-sse/simple';eventSource = new EventSource(url);eventSource.onmessage = function (event) { var theParagraph = document.createElement('p'); theParagraph.innerHTML = event.data.toString(); document.body.appendChild(theParagraph);} This code subscribes to a URL, receives the data in the event listener, adds it to a HTML paragraph element, and displays it in the document. This is where you'll parse JSON and other processing to display if some other data format is received from the URL. The URL to which the EventSource is subscribed to is updated on the server side and there are multipe ways to do that. GlassFish 4.0 provide support for Server-Sent Events and it can be achieved registering a handler as shown below: @ServerSentEvent("/simple")public class MySimpleHandler extends ServerSentEventHandler { public void sendMessage(String data) { try { connection.sendMessage(data); } catch (IOException ex) { . . . } }} And then events can be sent to this handler using a singleton session bean as shown: @Startup@Statelesspublic class SimpleEvent { @Inject @ServerSentEventContext("/simple") ServerSentEventHandlerContext<MySimpleHandler> simpleHandlers; @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendDate() { for(MySimpleHandler handler : simpleHandlers.getHandlers()) { handler.sendMessage(new Date().toString()); } }} This stateless session bean injects ServerSentEventHandlers listening on "/simple" path. Note, there may be multiple handlers listening on this path. The sendDate method triggers every 10 seconds and send the current timestamp to all the handlers. The client side browser simply displays the string. The HTTP request headers look like: Accept: text/event-streamAccept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdchAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8Cache-Control: no-cacheConnection: keep-aliveCookie: JSESSIONID=97ff28773ea6a085e11131acf47bHost: localhost:8080Referer: http://localhost:8080/glassfish-sse/faces/index2.xhtmlUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.54 Safari/536.5 And the response headers as: Content-Type: text/event-streamDate: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 21:16:10 GMTServer: GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0Transfer-Encoding: chunkedX-Powered-By: Servlet/3.0 JSP/2.2 (GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.0 Java/Apple Inc./1.6) Notice, the MIME type of the messages from server to the client is text/event-stream and that is defined by the specification. The code in Bhakti's blog can be further simplified by using the recently-introduced Twitter API for Java as shown below: @Schedule(hour="*", minute="*", second="*/10") public void sendTweets() { for(MyTwitterHandler handler : twitterHandler.getHandlers()) { String result = twitter.search("glassfish", String.class); handler.sendMessage(result); }} The complete source explained in this blog can be downloaded here and tried on GlassFish 4.0 build 34. The latest promoted build can be downloaded from here and the complete source code for the API and implementation is here. I tried this sample on Chrome Version 19.0.1084.54 on Mac OS X 10.7.3.

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The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Request Phase

- by Kellsey Ruppel

Originally posted by John Brunswick. For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material. This lowers the quality of end user experiences. The good news is that by using a simple process in this request phase - we will not have to revisit this phase unless something drastic changes in the project. For each of the elements mentioned above in this stage, the why, how (technically focused) and impact are outlined with the intent of providing the most value to a small team. 1. Ownership Why - Without ownership information it will not be possible to track and manage any of the content and take advantage of many features of enterprise content management technology. To hedge against this, we need to ensure that both a individual and their group or department within the organization are associated with the content. How - Apply metadata that indicates the owner and department or group that has responsibility for the content. Impact - It is possible to keep the content system optimized by running native reports against the meta-data and acting on them based on what has been outlined for success criteria. This will maximize end user experience, as content will be faster to locate and more relevant to the user by virtue of working through a smaller collection. 2. Business Purpose Why - This simple step will weed out requests that have tepid justification, as users will most likely not spend the effort to request resources if they do not have a real need. How - Use a simple online form to collect and workflow the request to management native to the content system. Impact - Minimizes the amount user generated content that is of low value to the organization. 3. Prerequisite Education Resources Needed Why - If a project cannot be properly staffed the probability of its success is going to be low. By outlining the resources needed - in both skill set and duration - it will cause the requesting party to think critically about the commitment needed to complete their project and what gap must be closed with regard to education of those resources. How - In the simple request form outlined above, resources and a commitment to fulfilling any needed education should be included with a brief acceptance clause that outlines the requesting party's commitment. Impact - This stage acts as a formal commitment to ensuring that resources are able to execute on the vision for the project. 4. Success Criteria Why - Similar to the business purpose, this is a key element in helping to determine if the project and its respective content should continue to exist if it does not meet its intended goal. How - Set a review point for the project content that will check the progress against the originally outlined success criteria and then determine the fate of the content. This can even include logic that will tell the content system to remove items that have not been opened by any users in X amount of time. Impact - This ensures that projects and their contents do not live past their useful lifespans. Just as with orphaned content, non-relevant information will slow user's access to relevant materials for the jobs. Request Phase Summary With a simple form that outlines the ownership of a project and its content, business purpose, education and resources, along with success criteria, we can ensure that an enterprise content management system will stay clean and relevant to end users - allowing it to deliver the most value possible. The key here is to make it straightforward to make the request and let the content management technology manage as much as possible through metadata, retention policies and workflow. Doing these basic steps will allow project content to get off to a great start in the enterprise! Stay tuned for the next installment - the "Create Phase" - covering security access and workflow involved in content creation, enabling a practical layer of governance over our enterprise content repository.

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Cloud – the forecast is improving

- by Rob Farley

There is a lot of discussion about “the cloud”, and how that affects people’s data stories. Today the discussion enters the realm of T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jorge Segarra. Over the years, companies have invested a lot in making sure that their data is good, and I mean every aspect of it – the quality of it, the security of it, the performance of it, and more. Experts such as those of us at LobsterPot Solutions have helped these companies with this, and continue to work with clients to make sure that data is a strong part of their business, not an oversight. Whether business intelligence systems are being utilised or not, every business needs to be able to rely on its data, and have the confidence in it. Data should be a foundation upon which a business is built. In the past, data had been stored in paper-based systems. Filing cabinets stored vital information. Today, people have server rooms with storage of various kinds, recognising that filing cabinets don’t necessarily scale particularly well. It’s easy to ‘lose’ data in a filing cabinet, when you have people who need to make sure that the sheets of paper are in the right spot, and that you know how things are stored. Databases help solve that problem, but still the idea of a large filing cabinet continues, it just doesn’t involve paper. If something happens to the physical ‘filing cabinet’, then the problems are larger still. Then the data itself is under threat. Many clients have generators in case the power goes out, redundant cables in case the connectivity dies, and spare servers in other buildings just in case they’re required. But still they’re maintaining filing cabinets. You see, people like filing cabinets. There’s something to be said for having your data ‘close’. Even if the data is not in readable form, living as bits on a disk somewhere, the idea that its home is ‘in the building’ is comforting to many people. They simply don’t want to move their data anywhere else. The cloud offers an alternative to this, and the human element is an obstacle. By leveraging the cloud, companies can have someone else look after their filing cabinet. A lot of people really don’t like the idea of this, partly because the administrators of the data, those people who could potentially log in with escalated rights and see more than they should be allowed to, who need to be trusted to respond if there’s a problem, are now a faceless entity in the cloud. But this doesn’t mean that the cloud is bad – this is simply a concern that some people may have. In new functionality that’s on its way, we see other hybrid mechanisms that mean that people can leverage parts of the cloud with less fear. Companies can use cloud storage to hold their backup data, for example, backups that have been encrypted and are therefore not able to be read by anyone (including administrators) who don’t have the right password. Companies can have a database instance that runs locally, but which has its data files in the cloud, complete with Transparent Data Encryption if needed. There can be a higher level of control, making the change easier to accept. Hybrid options allow people who have had fears (potentially very justifiable) to take a new look at the cloud, and to start embracing some of the benefits of the cloud (such as letting someone else take care of storage, high availability, and more) without losing the feeling of the data being close. @rob_farley

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PCI Encryption Key Management

- by Unicorn Bob

(Full disclosure: I'm already an active participant here and at StackOverflow, but for reasons that should hopefully be obvious, I'm choosing to ask this particular question anonymously). I currently work for a small software shop that produces software that's sold commercially to manage small- to mid-size business in a couple of fairly specialized industries. Because these industries are customer-facing, a large portion of the software is related to storing and managing customer information. In particular, the storage (and securing) of customer credit card information. With that, of course, comes PCI compliance. To make a long story short, I'm left with a couple of questions about why certain things were done the way they were, and I'm unfortunately without much of a resource at the moment. This is a very small shop (I report directly to the owner, as does the only other full-time employee), and the owner doesn't have an answer to these questions, and the previous developer is...err...unavailable. Issue 1: Periodic Re-encryption As of now, the software prompts the user to do a wholesale re-encryption of all of the sensitive information in the database (basically credit card numbers and user passwords) if either of these conditions is true: There are any NON-encrypted pieces of sensitive information in the database (added through a manual database statement instead of through the business object, for example). This should not happen during the ordinary use of the software. The current key has been in use for more than a particular period of time. I believe it's 12 months, but I'm not certain of that. The point here is that the key "expires". This is my first foray into commercial solution development that deals with PCI, so I am unfortunately uneducated on the practices involved. Is there some aspect of PCI compliance that mandates (or even just strongly recommends) periodic key updating? This isn't a huge issue for me other than I don't currently have a good explanation to give to end users if they ask why they are being prompted to run it. Question 1: Is the concept of key expiration standard, and, if so, is that simply industry-standard or an element of PCI? Issue 2: Key Storage Here's my real issue...the encryption key is stored in the database, just obfuscated. The key is padded on the left and right with a few garbage bytes and some bits are twiddled, but fundamentally there's nothing stopping an enterprising person from examining our (dotfuscated) code, determining the pattern used to turn the stored key into the real key, then using that key to run amok. This seems like a horrible practice to me, but I want to make sure that this isn't just one of those "grin and bear it" practices that people in this industry have taken to. I have developed an alternative approach that would prevent such an attack, but I'm just looking for a sanity check here. Question 2: Is this method of key storage--namely storing the key in the database using an obfuscation method that exists in client code--normal or crazy? Believe me, I know that free advice is worth every penny that I've paid for it, nobody here is an attorney (or at least isn't offering legal advice), caveat emptor, etc. etc., but I'm looking for any input that you all can provide. Thank you in advance!

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Login via XDMCP not possible to 12.04 from Squeeze box

- by Joysn

Can anybody tell me whats wrong with my 12.04/lightdm/XDMCP setup? i activated X11 remote via tcp and XDMCP on lightdm and restarted lightdm: [SeatDefaults] user-session=ubuntu greeter-session=unity-greeter xserver-allow-tcp=true [XDMCPServer] enabled=true whenever i try to login to the remove lightdm via Xephyr Xephyr -query <remote ip> :10 i get the following trace: SELinux: Disabled on system, not enabling in X server [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic, removing from list! Ignoring device from udev. Ignoring device from udev. Ignoring device from udev. Ignoring device from udev. Ignoring device from udev. Ignoring device from udev. *** glibc detected *** Xephyr: free(): corrupted unsorted chunks: 0x08659088 *** ======= Backtrace: ========= /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(+0x6af71)[0xb72b6f71] /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(+0x6c7c8)[0xb72b87c8] /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(cfree+0x6d)[0xb72bb8ad] Xephyr(Xfree+0x21)[0x81ddcd1] Xephyr(SrvXkbResizeKeyType+0x59e)[0x81ca01e] Xephyr[0x81ab8eb] Xephyr[0x81ac8c2] Xephyr[0x8088807] Xephyr[0x807c16a] /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6)[0xb7262ca6] Xephyr[0x8061081] ======= Memory map: ======== 08048000-08204000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 1148994 /usr/bin/Xephyr 08204000-08210000 rw-p 001bc000 fd:00 1148994 /usr/bin/Xephyr 08210000-08239000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 08496000-087ac000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [heap] b5600000-b5621000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b5621000-b5700000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0 b5762000-b588f000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b588f000-b58b3000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 50040 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2 b58b3000-b58b5000 rw-p 00024000 fd:00 50040 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2 b58d0000-b5ae4000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 1212530 /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so b5ae4000-b5ae9000 rw-p 00214000 fd:00 1212530 /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so b5ae9000-b5af8000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b5af8000-b5c24000 rw-s 00000000 00:04 1420132375 /SYSV00000000 (deleted) b5c24000-b5c28000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 770089 /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3.1.0 b5c28000-b5c29000 rw-p 00003000 fd:00 770089 /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3.1.0 b5c29000-b5c31000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 772923 /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1.3.0 b5c31000-b5c32000 rw-p 00007000 fd:00 772923 /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1.3.0 b5c32000-b5c3a000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 49913 /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1.0.2 b5c3a000-b5c3b000 rw-p 00007000 fd:00 49913 /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1.0.2 b5c3b000-b5c58000 r-xp 00000000 09:02 466930 /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 b5c58000-b5c59000 rw-p 0001c000 09:02 466930 /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 b5c59000-b5c5b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b5c5b000-b7121000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 49164 /usr/lib/libnvidia-glcore.so.256.53 b7121000-b7178000 rwxp 014c6000 fd:00 49164 /usr/lib/libnvidia-glcore.so.256.53 b7178000-b7188000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0 b7188000-b7189000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 49193 /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.256.53 b7189000-b718a000 rw-p 00000000 fd:00 49193 /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.256.53 b718a000-b718b000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b718b000-b7190000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 50172 /usr/lib/libfontenc.so.1.0.0 b7190000-b7191000 rw-p 00005000 fd:00 50172 /usr/lib/libfontenc.so.1.0.0 b7191000-b71a1000 r-xp 00000000 09:02 466849 /lib/libbz2.so.1.0.4 b71a1000-b71a2000 rw-p 00010000 09:02 466849 /lib/libbz2.so.1.0.4 b71a2000-b71b5000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 52002 /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3.4 b71b5000-b71b6000 rw-p 00013000 fd:00 52002 /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3.4 b71b6000-b722a000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 51162 /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.6.0 b722a000-b722e000 rw-p 00073000 fd:00 51162 /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.6.0 b722e000-b7246000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 49652 /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1.1.0 b7246000-b7247000 rw-p 00017000 fd:00 49652 /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1.1.0 b7247000-b7248000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 b7248000-b724b000 r-xp 00000000 fd:00 54148 /usr/lib/libgpg-error.so.0.4.0 b724b000-b724c000 rw-p 00002000 fd:00 54148 /usr/lib/libgpg-error.so.0.4.0 b724c000-b738c000 r-xp 00000000 09:02 467095 /lib/i686/cmov/libc-2.11.3.so

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Where are my date ranges in Analytics coming from?

- by Jeffrey McDaniel

In the P6 Reporting Database there are two main tables to consider when viewing time - W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS. W_DAY_D is populated internally during the ETL process and will provide a row for every day in the given time range. Each row will contain aspects of that day such as calendar year, month, week, quarter, etc. to allow it to be used in the time element when creating requests in Analytics to group data into these time granularities. W_Calendar_FS is used for calculations such as spreads, but is also based on the same set date range. The min and max day_dt (W_DAY_D) and daydate (W_Calendar_FS) will be related to the date range defined, which is a start date and a rolling interval plus a certain range. Generally start date plus 3 years. In P6 Reporting Database 2.0 this date range was defined in the Configuration utility. As of P6 Reporting Database 3.0, with the introduction of the Extended Schema this date range is set in the P6 web application. The Extended Schema uses this date range to calculate the data for near real time reporting in P6. This same date range is validated and used for the P6 Reporting Database. The rolling date range means if today is April 1, 2010 and the rolling interval is set to three years, the min date will be 1/1/2010 and the max date will be 4/1/2013. 1/1/2010 will be the min date because we always back fill to the beginning of the year. On April 2nd, the Extended schema services are run and the date range is adjusted there to move the max date forward to 4/2/2013. When the ETL process is run the Reporting Database will pick up this change and also adjust the max date on the W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS. There are scenarios where date ranges affecting areas like resource limit may not be adjusted until a change occurs to cause a recalculation, but based on general system usage these dates in these tables will progress forward with the rolling intervals. Choosing a large date range can have an effect on the ETL process for the P6 Reporting Database. The extract portion of the process will pull spread data over into the STAR. The date range defines how long activity and resource assignment spread data is spread out in these tables. If an activity lasts 5 days it will have 5 days of spread data. If a project lasts 5 years, and the date range is 3 years the spread data after that 3 year date range will be bucketed into the last day in the date range. For the overall project and even the activity level you will still see the correct total values. You just would not be able to see the daily spread 5 years from now. This is an important question when choosing your date range, do you really need to see spread data down to the day 5 years in the future? Generally this amount of granularity years in the future is not needed. Remember all those values 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future are still available to report on they would be in more of a summary format on the activity or project. The data is always there, the level of granularity is the decision.

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Using Private Extension Galleries in Visual Studio 2012

- by Jakob Ehn

Note: The installer and the complete source code is available over at CodePlex at the following location: http://inmetavsgallery.codeplex.com Extensions and addins are everywhere in the Visual Studio ALM ecosystem! Microsoft releases new cool features in the form of extensions and the list of 3rd party extensions that plug into Visual Studio just keeps growing. One of the nice things about the VSIX extensions is how they are deployed. Microsoft hosts a public Visual Studio Gallery where you can upload extensions and make them available to the rest of the community. Visual Studio checks for updates to the installed extensions when you start Visual Studio, and installing/updating the extensions is fast since it is only a matter of extracting the files within the VSIX package to the local extension folder. But for custom, enterprise-specific extensions, you don’t want to publish them online to the whole world, but you still want an easy way to distribute them to your developers and partners. This is where Private Extension Galleries come into play. In Visual Studio 2012, it is now possible to add custom extensions galleries that can point to any URL, as long as that URL returns the expected content of course (see below).Registering a new gallery in Visual Studio is easy, but there is very little documentation on how to actually host the gallery. Visual Studio galleries uses Atom Feed XML as the protocol for delivering new and updated versions of the extensions. This MSDN page describes how to create a static XML file that returns the information about your extensions. This approach works, but require manual updates of that file every time you want to deploy an update of the extension. Wouldn’t it be nice with a web service that takes care of this for you, that just lets you drop a new version of your VSIX file and have it automatically detect the new version and produce the correct Atom Feed XML? Well search no more, this is exactly what the Inmeta Visual Studio Gallery Service does for you :-) Here you can see that in addition to the standard Online galleries there is an Inmeta Gallery that contains two extensions (our WIX templates and our custom TFS Checkin Policies). These can be installed/updated i the same way as extensions from the public Visual Studio Gallery. Installing the Service Download the installler (Inmeta.VSGalleryService.Install.msi) for the service and run it. The installation is straight forward, just select web site, application pool and (optional) a virtual directory where you want to install the service. Note: If you want to run it in the web site root, just leave the application name blank Press Next and finish the installer. Open web.config in a text editor and locate the the <applicationSettings> element Edit the following setting values: FeedTitle This is the name that is shown if you browse to the service using a browser. Not used by Visual Studio BaseURI When Visual Studio downloads the extension, it will be given this URI + the name of the extension that you selected. This value should be on the following format: http://SERVER/[VDIR]/gallery/extension/ VSIXAbsolutePath This is the path where you will deploy your extensions. This can be a local folder or a remote share. You just need to make sure that the application pool identity account has read permissions in this folder Save web.config to finish the installation Open a browser and enter the URL to the service. It should show an empty Feed page: Adding the Private Gallery in Visual Studio 2012 Now you need to add the gallery in Visual Studio. This is very easy and is done as follows: Go to Tools –> Options and select Environment –> Extensions and Updates Press Add to add a new gallery Enter a descriptive name, and add the URL that points to the web site/virtual directory where you installed the service in the previous step Press OK to save the settings. Deploying an Extension This one is easy: Just drop the file in the designated folder! :-) If it is a new version of an existing extension, the developers will be notified in the same way as for extensions from the public Visual Studio gallery: I hope that you will find this sever useful, please contact me if you have questions or suggestions for improvements!

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Multichannel Digital Engagement: Find Out How Your Organization Measures Up

- by Michael Snow

This article was originally published in the September 2013 Edition of the Oracle Information InDepth Newsletter ORACLE WEBCENTER EDITION Thanks to mobile and social technologies, interactive online experiences are now commonplace. Not only that, they give consumers more choices, influence, and control than ever before. So how can you make your organization stand out? The key building blocks for delivering exceptional cross-channel digital experiences are outlined below. Also, a new assessment tool is available to help you measure your organization's ability to deliver such experiences. A clearly defined digital strategy. The customer journey is growing increasingly complex, encompassing multiple touchpoints and channels. It used to be easy to map marketing efforts to specific offline channels; for example, a direct mail piece with an offer to visit a store for a discounted purchase. Now it is more difficult to cultivate and track such clear cause-and-effect relationships. To deliver an integrated digital experience in this more complex world, organizations need a clearly defined and comprehensive digital marketing strategy that is backed up by an integrated set of software, middleware, and hardware solutions. Strong support for business agility and speed-to-market. As both IT and marketing executives know, speed-to-market and business agility are key to competitive advantage. That means marketers need solutions to support the rapid implementation of online marketing initiatives—plus the flexibility to adapt quickly to a changing marketplace. And IT needs tools with the performance, scalability, and ease of integration to support marketing efforts. Both teams benefit when business users are empowered to implement marketing initiatives on their own, with minimal IT intervention. The ability to deliver relevant, personalized content. Delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable. Customers expect you to know who they are, including their preferences and past relationship with your brand. That means delivering the most relevant content from the moment a visitor enters your site. To make that happen, you need a powerful rules engine so that marketers and business users can easily define site visitor segments and deliver content accordingly. That includes both implicit targeting that is based on the user’s behavior, and explicit targeting that takes a user’s profile information into account. Ideally, the rules engine can also intelligently weight recommendations when multiple segments apply to a specific customer. Support for social interactivity. With the advent of Facebook and LinkedIn, visitors expect to participate in and contribute to your web presence—and share their experience on their own social networks. That requires easy incorporation of user-generated content such as comments, ratings, reviews, polls, and blogs; seamless integration with third-party social networking sites; and support for social login, which helps to remove barriers to social participation. The ability to deliver connected, multichannel experiences that include powerful, flexible mobile capabilities. By 2015, mobile usage is projected to surpass that of PCs and other wired devices. In other words, mobile is an essential element in delivering exceptional online customer experiences. This requires the creation and management of mobile experiences that are optimized for delivery to the thousands of different devices that are in use today. Just as important, organizations must be able to easily extend their traditional web presence to the mobile channel and deliver highly personalized and relevant multichannel marketing initiatives while also managing to minimize the time and effort required to manage mobile sites. Are you curious to know how your organization measures up when it comes to delivering an engaging, multichannel digital experience? If so, take this brief, 15-question online assessment and see how your organization scores in the areas of digital strategy, digital agility, relevance and personalization, social interactivity, and multichannel experience.

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Don’t string together XML

- by KyleBurns

XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade. It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies. Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML. This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended to take a Contact object and return an XML string): return string.Format("<Contact><BusinessName>{0}</BusinessName></Contact>", contact.BusinessName); In the code example, I created (or at least believe I created) an XML document representing a simple contact object in one line of code with very little overhead. Work’s done, right? No it’s not. You see, what I didn’t realize was that this code would be used in the real world instead of my fantasy world where I own all the data and can prevent any of it containing problematic values. If I use this code to create a contact record for the business “Sanford & Son”, any XML parser will be incapable of processing the data because the ampersand is special in XML and should have been encoded as &. Following the pattern that I have seen many times over, my next step as a developer is going to be to do what any developer in his right mind would do – instruct the user that ampersands are “bad” and they cannot be used without breaking computers. This may work in many cases and is often accompanied by logic at the UI layer of applications to block these “bad” characters, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out that other applications allow for them and will want the same. This often leads to the creation of “cleaner” functions that perform a replace on the strings for every special character that the person writing the function can think of. The cleaner function will usually grow over time as support requests reveal characters that were missed in the initial cut. Sooner or later you end up writing your own somewhat functional XML engine. I have never been told by anyone paying me to write code that they would like to buy a somewhat functional XML engine. My employer/customer’s needs have always been for something that may use XML, but ultimately is functionality that drives business value. I’m not going to build an XML engine. So how can I generate XML that is always well-formed without writing my own engine? Easy – use one of the ones provided to you for free! If you’re in a shop that still supports VB6 applications, you can use the DomDocument or MXXMLWriter object (of the two I prefer MXXMLWriter, but I’m not going to fully describe either here). For .Net Framework applications prior to the 3.5 framework, the code is a little more verbose than I would like, but easy once you understand what pieces are required: using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw)) { writer.WriteStartDocument(); writer.WriteStartElement("Contact"); writer.WriteElementString("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName); writer.WriteEndElement(); // end Contact element writer.WriteEndDocument(); writer.Flush(); return sw.ToString(); } } Looking at that code, it’s easy to understand why people are drawn to the initial one-liner. Lucky for us, the 3.5 .Net Framework added the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object. This object takes away a lot of the complexity present in the XmlTextWriter approach and allows us to generate the document as follows: return new XElement("Contact", new XElement("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName)).ToString(); While it is very common for people to use string manipulation to create XML, I’ve discussed here reasons not to use this method and introduced powerful APIs that are built into the .Net Framework as an alternative. I’ve given a very simplistic example here to highlight the most basic XML generation task. For more information on the XmlTextWriter and XElement APIs, check out the MSDN library.

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Making user input/math on data fast, unlike excel type programs

- by proGrammar

I'm creating a research platform solely for myself to do some research on data. Programs like excel are terribly slow for me so I'm trying to come up with another solution. Originally I used excel. A1 was the cell that contained the data and all other cells in use calculated something on A1, or on other cells, that all could be in the end traced to A1. A1 was like an element of an array, I then I incremented it to go through all my data. This was way too slow. So the only other option I found originally was to hand code in c# the calculations inside a loop. Then I simply recompiled each time I changed my math. This was terribly slow to do and I had to order everything correctly so things would update correctly (dependencies). I could have also used events, but hand coding events for each cell like calculation would also be very slow. Next I created an application to read Excel and to perfectly imitate it. Which is what I now use. Basically I write formulas onto a fraction of my data to get live results inside excel. Then my program reads excel, writes another c# program, compiles it, and runs that program which runs my excel created formulas through a lot more data a whole lot faster. The advantage being my application dependency sorts everything (or I could use events) so I don't have to (like excel does) And of course the speed. But now its not a single application anymore. Instead its 2 applications, one which only reads my formulas and writes another program. The other one being the result which only lives for a short while before I do other runs through my data with different formulas / settings. So I can't see multiple results at one time without introducing even more programs like a database or at least having the 2 applications talking to each other. My idea was to have a dll that would be written, compiled, loaded, and unloaded again and again. So a self-updating program, sort of. But apparently that's not possible without another appdomain which means data has to be marshaled to be moved between the appdomains. Which would slow things down, not for summaries, but for other stuff I need to do with all my data. I'm also forgetting to mention a huge problem with restarting an application again and again which is having to reload ALL my data into memory again and again. But its still a whole lot faster than excel. I'm really super puzzled as to what people do when they want to research data fast. I'm completely unable to have a program accept user input and having it fast. My understanding is that it would have to do things like excel which is to evaluate strings again and again. So my only option is to repeatedly compile applications. Do I have a correct understanding on computer science? I've only just began programming, and didn't think I would have to learn much to do some simple math on data. My understanding is its either compiling my user defined stuff to a program or evaluating them from a string or something stupid again and again. And my only option is to probably switch operating systems or something to be able to have a program compile and run itself without stopping (writing/compiling dll, loading dll to program, unloading, and repeating). Can someone give me some idea on how computers work? Is anything better possible? Like a running program, that can accept user input and compile it and then unload it later? I mean heck operating systems dont need to be RESTARTED with every change to user input. What is this the cave man days? Sorry, it's just so super frustrating not knowing what one can do, and can't do. If only I could understand and learn this stuff fast enough.

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Taking a look at the Mindscape Phone Elements for WP7.

- by mbcrump

I recently heard that Mindscape HQ had released the Windows Phone 7 Controls and had to take a look at them. 100 FREE LICENSE GIVEAWAY! Before we get to the screenshots, you will be pleased to learn that my usergroup called “Allaboutxaml” has partnered with Mindscape HQ and are giving away 100 license. You can check out the site here to get your free controls. But please hurry as after the 100 are gone then I will not have any more to give away! A few links to read first: The official blog post from Mindscape HQ detailing the release. They also have the links to download the trial and get started. The phone elements official forum! So, let’s get started. After you download the controls go ahead and double click the .exe to get started installing them. After everything is installed then you will have the following program group. I’d recommend clicking on the Phone Elements Directory to get started: Let’s go over each element: Bin – Just the .DLL that’s required to use Mindscape HQ WP7 Controls in your project. Documentation – a .CHM File that will show you how to get your project up and running quickly. Resources – Just a few image files Samples – This is a full WP7 project that details every controls. The thing that I was most interested in was how the controls look and is it easy to use. I always believed if your paying for controls then you should hold my hand through using them. You will be pleased to know that Mindscape made it very easy to use. First, the WP7 project in the “Samples” folder just works. Double click on the solution file and you are in an emulator looking at the controls. Since you have the source code for every control, it’s a matter of copying/pasting the code in your project to get it to work. What I did, was play with the controls in the emulator until I found one I could use. Then I looked at the Visual Studio solution and found the Page that contained the control. Mindscape makes this very easy to do with their layout: So, the one that I was interested in was the Looping List Box. Here is a demo of it: I wanted to see how they were populating the numbers 1-100 so I found the code behind and noticed it was just this one line. LoopingListBox1.DataSource = new NumericDataSource() { MinValue = 1, MaxValue = 100 }; In case you are wondering, the NumericDataSource was created by MindScape and you can view the Declaration to find out more about it: So, the controls are pretty much that easy to use. Play with the emulator and find the control you want to use. Find the XAML file in the Sample Solution and copy/paste the code. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the controls available: They also have a great variety of Charting controls: Overall it’s a nice set of WP7 controls. Feel free to leave a comment below on anything you would like to see and I will make sure that Mindscape HQ get the message. Don’t forget if you are the first 100 people reading this article then you will get a free license. Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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i want to access mysql database table on given conditions in drop down menu [on hold]

- by user3909877

as the code below is accesing the database table directly but i want it to display the table content on giving conditions in drop down menu like when i select islamabad in one drop down menu and lahore in other as given in code and press search buttonn then it display the table flights.but it is displaying it directly <p class="h2">Quick Search</p> <div class="sb2_opts"> <p> </p> <form method="post" action=""> <p>Enter your source and destination.</p> <p> From:</p> <select name="from"> <option value="Islamabad">Islamabad</option> <option value="Lahore">Lahore</option> <option value="murree">Murree</option> <option value="Muzaffarabad">Muzaffarabad</option> </select> <p> To:</p> <select name="To"> <option value="Islamabad">Islamabad</option> <option value="Lahore">Lahore</option> <option value="murree">Murree</option> <option value="Muzaffarabad">Muzaffarabad</option> </select> <input type="submit" value="search" /> </form> </form> </table> <?php $from = isset($_POST['from'])?$_POST['from']:''; $to = isset($_POST['to'])?$_POST['to']:''; if( $from =='Islamabad'){ if($to == 'Lahore'){ $db_host = 'localhost'; $db_user = 'root'; $database = 'homedb'; $table = 'flights'; if (!mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user)) die("Can't connect to database"); if (!mysql_select_db($database)) die("Can't select database"); $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM {$table}"); if (!$result) { die("Query to show fields from table failed"); } $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM {$table}"); if (!$result) { die("Query to show fields from table failed"); } $fields_num = mysql_num_fields($result); echo "<h1>Table: {$table}</h1>"; echo "<table border='1'><tr>"; while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) { echo "<tr>"; // $row is array... foreach( .. ) puts every element // of $row to $cell variable foreach($row as $cell) echo "<td>$cell</td>"; echo "</tr>\n"; } } } mysqli_close($con); ?>

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How can I make this script output each categories item per category [closed]

- by Duice352

Ok so here is the deal currently this script outputs all the products in a parent category as well as the products in the child categories. What i would like to do is seperate the output based on child categories. All the child categories are in the array $children and the string $childs. The parent category is the first array element of $children with the following ones being the actual children. The category names are stored in the database $result as " $cat_name ". I want to first Display the cat_name then the products that fall in that category and then display the next child cat_name and items, ect. Any suggestions of how to manipulate the while loop that cylcles through the rows? <?php $productsPerRow = 3; $productsPerPage = 15; //$productList = getProductList($catId); $children = array_merge(array($catId), getChildCategories(NULL, $catId)); $childs = ' (' . implode(', ', $children) . ')'; $sql = "SELECT pd_id, pd_name, pd_price, pd_thumbnail, pd_qty, c.cat_id, c.cat_name FROM tbl_product pd, tbl_category c WHERE pd.cat_id = c.cat_id AND pd.cat_id IN $childs ORDER BY pd_name"; $result = dbQuery(getPagingQuery($sql, $productsPerPage)); $pagingLink = getPagingLink($sql, $productsPerPage, "c=$catId"); $numProduct = dbNumRows($result); // the product images are arranged in a table. to make sure // each image gets equal space set the cell width here $columnWidth = (int)(100 / $productsPerRow); ?> <p><?php if(isset($_GET['m'])){echo "You must select a model first! After you select your model you can customize your dragster parts.";} ?> </p> <p align="center"><?php echo $pagingLink; ?></p> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="20"> <?php if ($numProduct > 0 ) { $i = 0; while ($row = dbFetchAssoc($result)) { extract($row); if ($pd_thumbnail) { $pd_thumbnail = WEB_ROOT . 'images/product/' .$pd_thumbnail; } else { $pd_thumbnail = 'images/no-image-small.png'; } if ($i % $productsPerRow == 0) { echo '<tr>'; } // format how we display the price $pd_price = displayAmount($pd_price); echo "<td width=\"$columnWidth%\" align=\"center\"><a href=\"" . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . "?c=$catId&p=$pd_id" . "\"><img src=\"$pd_thumbnail\" border=\"0\"><br>$pd_name</a><br>Price : $pd_price <br> $cat_id - $cat_name"; // if the product is no longer in stock, tell the customer if ($pd_qty <= 0) { echo "<br>Out Of Stock"; } echo "</td>\r\n"; if ($i % $productsPerRow == $productsPerRow - 1) { echo '</tr>'; } $i += 1; } if ($i % $productsPerRow > 0) { echo '<td colspan="' . ($productsPerRow - ($i % $productsPerRow)) . '"> </td>'; }

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IIS can't load Oracle.Web assembly (for ASP.NET membership provider)

- by Konamiman

I am trying to configure an IIS web site to use an Oracle database for ASP.NET membership, but I can't get it to work. IIS doesn't seem to be able to load the assembly containing the Oracle membership provider. That's what I have so far: An Oracle 10g database online and with all the tables for ASP.NET membership created. Windows 2008 R2 Standard with the web server role installed, including support for ASP.NET. Oracle 11g Release 2 ODAC 11.2.0.1.2 installed. The installed components are: Oracle data provider for .NET, Oracle providers for ASP.NET, Oracle instant client. The default web site on IIS (I am using that for testing) has the following web.config file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.web> <membership defaultProvider="OracleMembershipProvider"> <providers> <remove name="SqlMembershipProvider" /> <add name="OracleMembershipProvider" type="Oracle.Web.Security.OracleMembershipProvider, Oracle.Web, Version=2.112.1.2, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342" connectionStringName="OracleServer" /> </providers> </membership> </system.web> </configuration> (Additional attributes on the "add" element omitted for brevity. Also, the connection string is defined for the whole server.) The Oracle.Web.dll file is on the GAC. That's the relevant part of the C:\Windows\Assembly folder: The web site application pool is configured for .NET 2.0, and has 32-bit applications enabled. I have allowed untrusted providers in the IIS' administration.config file (just for the sake of testing, I'll explicitly add the assembly to the trusted providers list later). With all of this setup in place, when I click on the ".NET Users" icon on the IIS manager, I get a warning about the provider having too much privileges, and when I accept I get the following message: There was an error while performing this operation. Details: Could not load file or assembly 'Oracle.Web, Version=2.112.1.2, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89b483f429c47342' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. So, what am I missing? How can I get the Oracle membership provider to work? Thank you! UPDATE: It seems that the problem is not with IIS itself, but with the IIS administrator only. When using the web site configuration tool provided by Visual Studio, everything works fine.

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JNDI Datasource definition in Tomcat 6.0

- by romaintaz

I want to define a DataSource to an Oracle database on my Tomcat 6.0. So, in conf/server.xml (yes, I know that this DataSource will be available for all the webapps in Tomcat, but it's not a problem here), I've set this Resource: <GlobalNamingResources> <Resource name="hibernate/HibernateDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@myserver:1542:foo" username="foo" password="bar" driverClassName="oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver" maxActive="50" maxIdle="10" validationQuery="select 1 from dual"/> Then, in the web.xml of my application, I set a resource-ref element: <resource-ref> <description>Hibernate Datasource</description> <res-ref-name>hibernate/HibernateDS</res-ref-name> <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type> <res-auth>Container</res-auth> </resource-ref> Finally, as Hibernate is used to manage the database connection, I have a webapps/mywebapp/WEB-INF/classes/hibernate.cfg.xml that creates a session-factory using the JNDI DataSource: <hibernate-configuration> <session-factory> <property name="connection.datasource">java:comp/env/hibernate/HibernateDS</property> ... However, when I start my Tomcat server, I get an error that says it could not create the INFO [net.sf.hibernate.util.NamingHelper] JNDI InitialContext properties:{} INFO [net.sf.hibernate.connection.DatasourceConnectionProvider] Using datasource: java:comp/env/hibernate/HibernateDS INFO [net.sf.hibernate.transaction.TransactionFactoryFactory] Transaction strategy: net.sf.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory INFO [net.sf.hibernate.transaction.TransactionManagerLookupFactory] No TransactionManagerLookup configured (in JTA environment, use of process level read-write cache is not recommended) WARN [net.sf.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory] Could not obtain connection metadata org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot create JDBC driver of class '' for connect URL 'null' at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:1150) at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.getConnection(BasicDataSource.java:880) at net.sf.hibernate.connection.DatasourceConnectionProvider.getConnection(DatasourceConnectionProvider.java:59) at net.sf.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory.buildSettings(SettingsFactory.java:84) at net.sf.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSettings(Configuration.java:1172) ... Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.getProtocol(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:507) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.knownURL(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:476) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.acceptsURL(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:307) at java.sql.DriverManager.getDriver(DriverManager.java:253) at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:1143) ... 11 more Do you have any idea why Hibernate is not able to construct the session-factory? What is wrong in my configuration?

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JNDI Datasource definition in Tomcat 6.0

- by romaintaz

Hi all, I want to define a DataSource to an Oracle database on my Tomcat 6.0. So, in conf/server.xml (yes, I know that this DataSource will be available for all the webapps in Tomcat, but it's not a problem here), I've set this Resource: <GlobalNamingResources> <Resource name="hibernate/HibernateDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@myserver:1542:foo" username="foo" password="bar" driverClassName="oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver" maxActive="50" maxIdle="10" validationQuery="select 1 from dual"/> Then, in the web.xml of my application, I set a resource-ref element: <resource-ref> <description>Hibernate Datasource</description> <res-ref-name>hibernate/HibernateDS</res-ref-name> <res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type> <res-auth>Container</res-auth> </resource-ref> Finally, as Hibernate is used to manage the database connection, I have a webapps/mywebapp/WEB-INF/classes/hibernate.cfg.xml that creates a session-factory using the JNDI DataSource: <hibernate-configuration> <session-factory> <property name="connection.datasource">java:comp/env/hibernate/HibernateDS</property> ... However, when I start my Tomcat server, I get an error that says it could not create the INFO [net.sf.hibernate.util.NamingHelper] JNDI InitialContext properties:{} INFO [net.sf.hibernate.connection.DatasourceConnectionProvider] Using datasource: java:comp/env/hibernate/HibernateDS INFO [net.sf.hibernate.transaction.TransactionFactoryFactory] Transaction strategy: net.sf.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory INFO [net.sf.hibernate.transaction.TransactionManagerLookupFactory] No TransactionManagerLookup configured (in JTA environment, use of process level read-write cache is not recommended) WARN [net.sf.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory] Could not obtain connection metadata org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot create JDBC driver of class '' for connect URL 'null' at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:1150) at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.getConnection(BasicDataSource.java:880) at net.sf.hibernate.connection.DatasourceConnectionProvider.getConnection(DatasourceConnectionProvider.java:59) at net.sf.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory.buildSettings(SettingsFactory.java:84) at net.sf.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSettings(Configuration.java:1172) ... Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.getProtocol(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:507) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.knownURL(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:476) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.acceptsURL(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:307) at java.sql.DriverManager.getDriver(DriverManager.java:253) at org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:1143) ... 11 more Do you have any idea why Hibernate is not able to construct the session-factory? What is wrong in my configuration?

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Why is domU faster than dom0 on IO?

- by Paco

I have installed debian 7 on a physical machine. This is the configuration of the machine: 3 hard drives using RAID 5 Strip element size: 1M Read policy: Adaptive read ahead Write policy: Write Through /boot 200 MB ext2 / 15 GB ext3 SWAP 10GB LVM rest (~500GB) emphasized text I installed postgresql, created a big database (over 1GB). I have an SQL request that takes a lot of time to run (a SELECT statement, so it only reads data from the database). This request takes approximately 5.5 seconds to run. Then, I installed XEN, created a domU, with another debian distro. On this OS, I also installed postgresql, with the same database. The same SQL request takes only 2.5 seconds to run. I checked the kernel on both dom0 and domU. uname-a returns "Linux debian 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.41-2+deb7u2 x86_64 GNU/Linux" on both systems. I checked the kernel parameters, which are approximately the same. For those that are relevant, I changed their values to make them match on both systems using sysctl. I saw no changes (the requests still take the same amount of time). After this, I checked the file systems. I used ext3 on domU. Still no changes. I installed hdparm, and ran hdparm -Tt on both systems, on all my partitions on both systems, and I get similar results. Now, I am stuck, I don't know what is different, and what could be the cause of such a big difference. Additional Info: Debian runs on a Dell server PowerEdge 2950 postgresql: 9.1.9 (both dom0 and domU) xen-linux-system: 3.2.0 xen-hypervisor: 4.1 Thanks EDIT: As Krzysztof Ksiezyk suggested, it might be due to some file caching system. I ran the dd command to test both the read and write speed. Here is domU: root@test1:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/dd count=5MB bs=1MB ^C2020+0 records in 2020+0 records out 2020000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 18.8289 s, 107 MB/s root@test1:~# dd if=/root/dd of=/dev/null count=5MB bs=1MB 2020+0 records in 2020+0 records out 2020000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 15.0549 s, 134 MB/s And here is dom0: root@debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/dd count=5MB bs=1MB ^C1693+0 records in 1693+0 records out 1693000000 bytes (1.7 GB) copied, 8.87281 s, 191 MB/s root@debian:~# dd if=/root/dd of=/dev/null count=5MB bs=1MB 1693+0 records in 1693+0 records out 1693000000 bytes (1.7 GB) copied, 0.501509 s, 3.4 GB/s What can be the cause of this caching system? And how can we "fix" it? Can we apply it to dom0? EDIT 2: I switched my virtual disk type. To do so I followed this article. I did a dd if=/dev/vg0/test1-disk of=/mnt/test1-disk.img bs=16M Then in /etc/xen/test1.cfg, I changed the disk parameter to use file: instead of phy: it should have removed the file caching, but I still get the same numbers (domU being much faster for Postgres)

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SharePoint 2010 – Central Admin tooling to create host header site collections

- by eJugnoo

Just like SharePoint 2007, you can create host-header based site collections in SharePoint 2010 as well. It means, that you do not necessarily need to create a site-collection under a managed path like /sites/, you can create multiple root-level site collections on same web-application/port by using host-header site collections. All you need to do is point your domain or sub-domain to your web-application and create a matching site-collection that you want. But, just like in 2007, it is something that you do by using STSADM, and is not available on Central Admin UI in 2010 as well. Yeah, though you can now also use PowerShell to create one: C:\PS>$w = Get-SPWebApplication http://sitename C:\PS>New-SPSite http://www.contoso.com -OwnerAlias "DOMAIN\jdoe" -HostHeaderWebApplication $w -Title "Contoso" -Template "STS#0" This example creates a host header site collection. Because the template is provided, the root Web of this site collection will be created. .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I’ve been playing with WCM in SharePoint 2010 more and more, and for that I preferred creating hosts file entries for desired domains and create site-collections by those headers – in my dev environment. I used PowerShell initially, but then got interested to build my own UI on Central Admin instead. Developed with Visual Studio 2010 So I used new Visual Studio 2010 tooling to create an empty SharePoint 2010 project. Added an application page (there is no option to add _Admin page item in VS 2010 RC), that got created in Layouts “mapped” folder. Created a new Admin mapped folder for 14-“hive”, and moved my new page there instead. Yes, I didn’t change the base class for page, its just that it runs under _admin, but it is indeed a LayoutsPageBase inherited page. To introduce a action-link in Central Admin console, I created following element: 1: <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> 2: <CustomAction 3: Id="CreateSiteByHeader" 4: Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Applications" 5: Title="Create site collections by host header" 6: GroupId="SiteCollections" 7: Sequence="15" 8: RequiredAdmin="Delegated" 9: Description="Create a new top-level web site, by host header" > 10: <UrlAction Url="/_admin/OfficeToolbox/CreateSiteByHeader.aspx" /> 11: </CustomAction> 12: </Elements> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Used Reflector to understand any special code behind createpage.aspx, and created a new for our purpose – CreateSiteByHeader.aspx. From there I quickly created a similar code behind, without all the fancy of Farm Config Wizard handling and dealt with alternate implementations of sealed classes! Goal was to create a professional looking and OOB-type experience. I also added Regex validation to ensure user types a valid domain name as header value. Below is the result… Release @ Codeplex I’ve released to WSP on OfficeToolbox @ Codeplex, and you can download from here. Hope you find it useful… -- Sharad

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Getting TF215097 error after modifying a build process template in TFS Team Build 2010

- by Jakob Ehn

When embracing Team Build 2010, you typically want to define several different build process templates for different scenarios. Common examples here are CI builds, QA builds and release builds. For example, in a contiuous build you often have no interest in publishing to the symbol store, you might or might not want to associate changesets and work items etc. The build server is often heavily occupied as it is, so you don’t want to have it doing more that necessary. Try to define a set of build process templates that are used across your company. In previous versions of TFS Team Build, there was no easy way to do this. But in TFS 2010 it is very easy so there is no excuse to not do it! :-) I ran into a scenario today where I had an existing build definition that was based on our release build process template. In this template, we have defined several different build process parameters that control the release build. These are placed into its own sectionin the Build Process Parameters editor. This is done using the ProcessParameterMetadataCollection element, I will explain how this works in a future post. I won’t go into details on these parametes, the issue for this blog post is what happens when you modify a build process template so that it is no longer compatible with the build definition, i.e. a breaking change. In this case, I removed a parameter that was no longer necessary. After merging the new build process template to one of the projects and queued a new release build, I got this error: TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition <Build Definition Name>: The values provided for the root activity's arguments did not satisfy the root activity's requirements: 'DynamicActivity': The following keys from the input dictionary do not map to arguments and must be removed: <Parameter Name>. Please note that argument names are case sensitive. Parameter name: rootArgumentValues <Parameter Name> was the parameter that I removed so it was pretty easy to understand why the error had occurred. However, it is not entirely obvious how to fix the problem. When open the build definition everything looks OK, the removed build process parameter is not there, and I can open the build process template without any validation warnings. The problem here is that all settings specific to a particular build definition is stored in the TFS database. In TFS 2005, everything that was related to a build was stored in TFS source control in files (TFSBuild.proj, WorkspaceMapping.xml..). In TFS 2008, many of these settings were moved into the database. Still, lots of things were stored in TFSBuild.proj, such as the solution and configuration to build, wether to execute tests or not. In TFS 2010, all settings for a build definition is stored in the database. If we look inside the database we can see what this looks like. The table tbl_BuildDefinition contains all information for a build definition. One of the columns is called ProcessParameters and contains a serialized representation of a Dictionary that is the underlying object where these settings are stoded. Here is an example: <Dictionary x:TypeArguments="x:String, x:Object" xmlns="clr-namespace:System.Collections.Generic;assembly=mscorlib" xmlns:mtbwa="clr-namespace:Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities;assembly=Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <mtbwa:BuildSettings x:Key="BuildSettings" ProjectsToBuild="$/PathToProject.sln"> <mtbwa:BuildSettings.PlatformConfigurations> <mtbwa:PlatformConfigurationList Capacity="4"> <mtbwa:PlatformConfiguration Configuration="Release" Platform="Any CPU" /> </mtbwa:PlatformConfigurationList> </mtbwa:BuildSettings.PlatformConfigurations> </mtbwa:BuildSettings> <mtbwa:AgentSettings x:Key="AgentSettings" Tags="Agent1" /> <x:Boolean x:Key="DisableTests">True</x:Boolean> <x:String x:Key="ReleaseRepositorySolution">ERP</x:String> <x:Int32 x:Key="Major">2</x:Int32> <x:Int32 x:Key="Minor">3</x:Int32> </Dictionary> Here we can see that it is really only the non-default values that are persisted into the databasen. So, the problem in my case was that I removed one of the parameteres from the build process template, but the parameter and its value still existed in the build definition database. The solution to the problem is to refresh the build definition and save it. In the process tab, there is a Refresh button that will reload the build definition and the process template and synchronize them: After refreshing the build definition and saving it, the build was running successfully again.

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Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

- by raul.goycoolea

@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA. Introduction A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders. Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc. Purpose of Reference Architecture In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness. Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level: · Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise · Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. · Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles · Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc · A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information · Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security · Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. · Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets · Has a shorter implementation time and cost Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO). Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider: · In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. · Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. · Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. · Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. · Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. · Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. · Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape. Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges. “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum. The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture: · Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements · Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. · Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) · Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services · Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem · (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks · Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products · Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products Drivers of Reference Architecture The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure. Telecom reference architectures are today expected to: · Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems · Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services · Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure · Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. · Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g. Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. · Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations · Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) · Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management · Lower operating costs to drive profitability Enterprise Reference Architecture The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA. • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture Telecom Reference Architecture Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements: · The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. · The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. · The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. · The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes. NGOSS Architecture Standards are: · Centralized data · Loosely coupled distributed systems · Application components/re-use · A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations · Interoperability to service provider data/processes · Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios · Workflow automation The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers, · Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. · Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. · Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. · Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility. Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows: 1. Customer Relationship Management CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty. CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise. The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are · Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. · Create and manage customer profiles. · Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. · Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. · Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. · Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). · Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions. CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing. 2. Billing and Revenue Management Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. · To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. · To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. · Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. · Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. · Support prepaid and post-paid rating. · Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. · Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. · Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. · Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. · Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc. Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements. 3. Mediation Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution. · Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. · Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. · Validate Usage Data Records from each source. · Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. · Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. · Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. · Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. · Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. · Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window. 4. Fulfillment This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; · Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; · Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; · Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; · Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; · Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; · Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and · Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer. These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders. 5. Enterprise Management This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that · Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.; · Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business; · Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc. (i) Enterprise Risk Management: Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are: · Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o Interconnect bill verification. o Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized. · Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator. The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows: o Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems (ii) Knowledge Management This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions. Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to · Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. · Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse · Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. · Run report generator. · Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc. (iii) Document Management It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system. (iv) Data Management It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management. Key responsibilities of Data Management are · Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. · Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) · Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. · Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use. (v) Business Intelligence It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level: · It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. · It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. · It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. · It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. · It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. · It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions. It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer · It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence. (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations. (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment. The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below: · It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. · It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. · It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. · It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. · It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges. 6. External Interfaces/Touch Points The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including: · Exchange of emails or faxes · Call Centers · Web Portals · Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points. Typical characteristics of these touch points are · Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine · Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment · Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses. 7. Middleware The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution. · As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces · Provide a web service framework with service registry. · Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. · Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. · Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. · Use standard XML for data exchange. · Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. · Provide a tracking until the response completion. · Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. · Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. · Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. · Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component. 8. Network Elements The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service. Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc. Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment. 9. 3rd Party Applications 3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government. Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done. 10. Service Delivery Platform A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction. SOA Reference Architecture SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques. In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables: · The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services · Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface · A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs · Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services · Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change · Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services · A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits. Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers. COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives. The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers. The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1. Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation. ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc. CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc. Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components: · Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges · Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured. MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data. 2. Enterprise Component Layer: This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing. Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are: · Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc. · Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query. · Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design. Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc. 3. Integration Layer: This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime. • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework. 4. Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains. 5. Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services. 6. Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications. 7. Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications. 8. Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance. 9. EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices: EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology). Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey. Conclusions Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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