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  • JOB OF THE WEEK

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} My name is Pascaline and I am the EMEA Solution Response Manager. I currently have a role open for a Benelux Solution Response Representative to jump-start his/her career in my international team of six people from all across Europe. Key for this exciting role is that you are curious to learn, like networking and constantly want to develop yourself. To help you with that, you will get extensive product trainings and workshops on all Oracle product lines and you will receive sales training. Further, you have the opportunity to get certified on Oracle products through online trainings and workshops. Every month you will also benefit from 1-on-1 sales coaching and regular coaching from me to help you grow and develop your career at Oracle! The role will include the follow-up of marketing events and online marketing activities with current Key Accounts in the Benelux. It is truly a pioneering role at Oracle as it is the first time that an employee will engage in business conversations about all lines of businesses and products ranges with Key Accounts. So are you interested to work in between marketing and sales? Do you want to work for a big IT multinational? Do you want to work abroad after you graduate and do you want to develop yourself? Then please visit this link for more information.

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  • Oracle @Munich Business School

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Last Wednesday, Lisa from the Graduate Recruitment team and her colleague Philipp from Sales visited the Munich Business School to talk about IT challenges, Sales and Career Opportunities at Oracle. Although the talk started at 6:30 pm, the audience of about 100 students was still attentive and curious. First they were provided with some facts about Oracle, then Philipp went into detail and took them through current IT challenges like ‘Social’, ‘Mobile’, ‘Information’ and ‘Cloud’ and how Oracle solutions can help facing these challenges. He also demonstrated what kind of prerequisites and qualifications are required to become a successful Sales person. When talking about his own career, the audience got even more anxious to hear what he would tell them. Finally, students asked questions on career opportunities across Europe or on other topics they were interested in. If you’re interested in talking to us in person, connect with us on Facebook to get the latest information about events we’re attending and schools we’re visiting. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Silverlight Cream for May 08, 2010 -- #858

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Jaime Rodriguez, Senthil Kumar, Mike Snow, DaveDev, Gergely Orosz, Kirupa, Cheryl Simmons, András Velvárt, Dan Wahlin, Michael D. Brown, and Ben Rush. Shoutouts: Erik Mork and crew have their latest up: This Week In Silverlight – Where’s the Tablet? Chris Rouw has a good link post and instructions on WCF RIA services: Deploying and Configuring Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services From SilverlightCream.com: Quick and Easy Sscalable Rounded Bevels Phil Middlemiss duplicates some bevel-edged rectangles in Blend, and they look great. Now you don't have to import all the other PhotoShop bits to get those things looking the way you want! A transparent Windows PHONE FAQ Jaime Rodriguez combined a bunch of information into a WP7 FAQ that he's going to keep up to date, so bookmark the page. He also has links to the Training Kit, on and offline versions. Windows Phone Developer Training Kit April Refresh is now available for Download Thanks to Senthil Kumar, I found out there is an April refresh of the WP7 Training kit at Channel 9 -- go get yours now --- I'll still be here when you get back! Silverlight Tip of the Day #16 – Working with IgnoreImageCache Mike Snow's Tip of the day #16 covers IgnoreImageCache and like many other things in life, until you read Mike's post you may be surprised at how it works. DoodlePad – A fun, free, sketching application for Windows Phone 7 DaveDev has a new WP7 App up that lets you or your kids 'Doodle' on the phone... could be a note, or could be a drawing... good post with all the links you need to get this cranked up on the emulator. Printing in Silverlight: Printing Charts and Auto Scaling Gergely Orosz's latest post is a very useful one on auto-scaling charts to fit a printed page and then getting them to print. Smoothly Scrolling a ListBox Check out the smooth scrolling Kirupa has on the ListBox near the top of his post... all good stuff... you wanna know how to do that! Plus... it's dead simple and all in Blend :) http://www.sparklingclient.com/wheres-the-silverlight-tablet/ Cheryl Simmons has a great tip up at the SilverlightSDK if you haven't burned through to figure it out yet ... changing the watermark on a DatePicker control... looks great! The story of a wicked bug András Velvárt tells a story of a bug that just defied logic or being found. Read how he tracked it down and what it actually was... could save you some time. Story learned: if I have a problem that bad, I'm calling András :) Text Trimming in Silverlight 4 Dan Wahlin gives a quick run-through of what TextBox trimming is, and then by a good real example... check it out and start using it in your projects. Enterprise Patterns with WCF RIA Services Michael D. Brown has an article in MSDN Magazine on RIA Services. Great information and link-packed article, with all the source avialable for download. Building Custom Players with the Silverlight Media Framework Ben Rush has a nice long tutorial on the Silverlight Media Framework up on the MSDN Magazine site ... lots of information in there. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • SQL SERVER – Puzzle #1 – Querying Pattern Ranges and Wild Cards

    - by Pinal Dave
    Note: Read at the end of the blog post how you can get five Joes 2 Pros Book #1 and a surprise gift. I have been blogging for almost 7 years and every other day I receive questions about Querying Pattern Ranges. The most common way to solve the problem is to use Wild Cards. However, not everyone knows how to use wild card properly. SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros Volume 1 – The SQL Queries 2012 Hands-On Tutorial for Beginners Book On Amazon | Book On Flipkart Learn SQL Server get all the five parts combo kit Kit on Amazon | Kit on Flipkart Many people know wildcards are great for finding patterns in character data. There are also some special sequences with wildcards that can give you even more power. This series from SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros® Volume 1 will show you some of these cool tricks. All supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. This example is from the SQL 2012 series Volume 1 in the file SQLQueries2012Vol1Chapter2.2Setup.sql. If you need help setting up then look in the “Free Videos” section on Joes2Pros under “Getting Started” called “How to install your labs” Querying Pattern Ranges The % wildcard character represents any number of characters of any length. Let’s find all first names that end in the letter ‘A’. By using the percentage ‘%’ sign with the letter ‘A’, we achieve this goal using the code sample below: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE '%A' To find all FirstName values beginning with the letters ‘A’ or ‘B’ we can use two predicates in our WHERE clause, by separating them with the OR statement. Finding names beginning with an ‘A’ or ‘B’ is easy and this works fine until we want a larger range of letters as in the example below for ‘A’ thru ‘K’: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE 'A%' OR FirstName LIKE 'B%' OR FirstName LIKE 'C%' OR FirstName LIKE 'D%' OR FirstName LIKE 'E%' OR FirstName LIKE 'F%' OR FirstName LIKE 'G%' OR FirstName LIKE 'H%' OR FirstName LIKE 'I%' OR FirstName LIKE 'J%' OR FirstName LIKE 'K%' The previous query does find FirstName values beginning with the letters ‘A’ thru ‘K’. However, when a query requires a large range of letters, the LIKE operator has an even better option. Since the first letter of the FirstName field can be ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘I’, ‘J’ or ‘K’, simply list all these choices inside a set of square brackets followed by the ‘%’ wildcard, as in the example below: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE '[ABCDEFGHIJK]%' A more elegant example of this technique recognizes that all these letters are in a continuous range, so we really only need to list the first and last letter of the range inside the square brackets, followed by the ‘%’ wildcard allowing for any number of characters after the first letter in the range. Note: A predicate that uses a range will not work with the ‘=’ operator (equals sign). It will neither raise an error, nor produce a result set. --Bad query (will not error or return any records) SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName = '[A-K]%' Question: You want to find all first names that start with the letters A-M in your Customer table and end with the letter Z. Which SQL code would you use? a. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'm%z' b. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'a-m%z' c. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'a-m%z' d. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]%z' e. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]z%' f. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]%z' g. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]z%' Contest Leave a valid answer before June 18, 2013 in the comment section. 5 winners will be selected from all the valid answers and will receive Joes 2 Pros Book #1. 1 Lucky person will get a surprise gift from Joes 2 Pros. The contest is open for all the countries where Amazon ships the book (USA, UK, Canada, India and many others). Special Note: Read all the options before you provide valid answer as there is a small trick hidden in answers. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • VLAN ACLs and when to go Layer 3

    - by wuckachucka
    I want to: a) segment several departments into VLANs with the hopes of restricting access between them completely (Sales never needs to talk to Support's workstations or printers and vice-versa) or b) certain IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports across VLANS -- i.e. permitting the Sales VLAN to access the CRM Web Server in the Server VLAN on port 443 only. Port-wise, I'll need a 48-port switch and another 24-port switch to go with the two existing 24-port Layer 2 switches (Linksys); I'm looking at going with D-Links or HP Procurves as Cisco is out of our price range. Question #1: From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong), if the Servers (VLAN10) and Sales (VLAN20) are all on the same 48-port switch (or two stacked 24-port switches), afaik, the switch "knows" what VLANs and ports each device belongs to and will switch packets between them; I can also apply ACLs to restrict access between VLANs at this point. Is this correct? Question #2: Now lets say that Support (VLAN30) is on a different switch (one of the Linksys) switches. I'm assuming I'll need to trunk (tag) switch #2's VLANs across to switch #1, so switch #1 sees switch #2's VLAN30 (and vice-versa). Once Switch #1 can "see" VLAN30, I'm assuming I can then apply ACLs as stated in Question #1. Is this correct? Question #3: Once Switch #1 can see all the VLANs, can I achieve the seemingly "Layer 3" ACL filtering of restricting access to Server VLAN on only certain TCP/UDP ports and IP addresses (say, only permitting 3389 to the Terminal Server, 192.168.10.4/32). I say "seemingly" because some of the Layer 2 switches mention the ability to restrict ports and IP addresses through the ACLs; I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that in order to have Layer 3 ACLs (packet filtering), I'd need to have at least one Layer 3 switch acting as a core router. If my assumptions are incorrect, at which point do you need a Layer 3 switch for inter-VLAN routing vs. inter-VLAN switching? Is it generally only when you need that higher-level packet filtering ability between your departments?

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  • IIS 7.0 rewrite url problem

    - by Jouni Pekkola
    Hello, How i can set redirect url for virtual directory in iis 7.0.I have installed lates url rewrite module 2. ? I could explain my problem with exsample. I have website on my iis 7.0 server: www.mysite.com I desided to create virtual directory sales under my site which is pointing to website root directory.Now I need create redirect url for the vdir. The vdir is pointing same virtual root directory as my site root is The big idea is that i can write on browser www.mysite/sales and i will automaticly redirect to url www.mysite.com?productid=200. I tried to make redirect with rewite url for vdir(not website), but I always get this error message : cannot add duplicate colletion entry of type 'rule' with unique key key attribute 'name' set to "test".This happens when i am pointing for virtual vdir and try to add rule. I can add rules to website level,but rules doesn work. I mean url www.mysite/sales gives me follwing error. I know that key is unique I checked it from web.config. This kind of feature was really easy use in IIS 6.0, just point vdir with your mouse and set properties--a redirect to url. Please some one explain what is right way to do it in IIS 7.0

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  • Creating dynamic map graphs

    - by Mehper C. Palavuzlar
    I need a software (or softwares) to achieve the following. I'm not sure if it could be done, but I'd like to hear the suggestions from super users. The data I want to use for graphing purposes include sales figures of magazines by provinces. There are 81 provinces of Turkiye, and I want the computer to automatically paint / write on a graph according to the sales magnitude of the provinces. Since there are loads of magazines with loads of issues, the process must be executed automatically just after selecting the related magazine and issue. So there will be graphs showing the sales weight of the whole country with some nice illustrations. Those graphs might be used as part of some decision support mechanism to help field teams. Is it possible? I have all the data and base maps of Turkiye to be filled/painted. I'm sure this is not easy. If there is a way to do that, it might probably include more than one software. Thanks in advance for any valuable comments and answers.

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  • How do I locate the CGRect for a substring of text in a UILabel?

    - by bryanjclark
    For a given NSRange, I'd like to find a CGRect in a UILabel that corresponds to the glyphs of that NSRange. For example, I'd like to find the CGRect that contains the word "dog" in the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The trick is, the UILabel has multiple lines, and the text is really attributedText, so it's a bit tough to find the exact position of the string. The method that I'd like to write on my UILabel subclass would look something like this: - (CGRect)rectForSubstringWithRange:(NSRange)range; Details, for those who are interested: My goal with this is to be able to create a new UILabel with the exact appearance and position of the UILabel, that I can then animate. I've got the rest figured out, but it's this step in particular that's holding me back at the moment. What I've done to try and solve the issue so far: I'd hoped that with iOS 7, there'd be a bit of Text Kit that would solve this problem, but most every example I've seen with Text Kit focuses on UITextView and UITextField, rather than UILabel. I've seen another question on Stack Overflow here that promises to solve the problem, but the accepted answer is over two years old, and the code doesn't perform well with attributed text. I'd bet that the right answer to this involves one of the following: Using a standard Text Kit method to solve this problem in a single line of code. I'd bet it would involve NSLayoutManager and textContainerForGlyphAtIndex:effectiveRange Writing a complex method that breaks the UILabel into lines, and finds the rect of a glyph within a line, likely using Core Text methods. My current best bet is to take apart @mattt's excellent TTTAttributedLabel, which has a method that finds a glyph at a point - if I invert that, and find the point for a glyph, that might work. Update: Here's a github gist with the three things I've tried so far to solve this issue: https://gist.github.com/bryanjclark/7036101

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  • emacs frustration with web development any working dot-files?

    - by Tony Cruise
    I really liked flexibility of emacs but it is really annoying to make it work. I want to use it for web development html, css, javascript, php. I first tried emacs-starter-kit . It didn't included nXhtml. Also C-g key binding does not work (they call it starter kit but basic key command does not work). I think it is mapped for git control. That's a frustration for a beginner. Then I replaced emacs-starter-kit with nXhtml. At least C-g is working. But code completion sucks, M-tab does not work. I tried code completion from nXhtml menu with no success. Also NXhtml mode did'nt colorized my file if css is mixed with html. Isn't it recommended for mixed html, css,php files. So why it doesnt work?. Why Emacs folks do not aware of convention over configuration? Dam! ship it something works! Please help me before I am getting crazy. I use Ubuntu 10.04 and emacs-snaphot-gtk 23.1.50-1. Please guide me step by step with your working dotfile url. Even I accept I am a dummy, it is really annoying and frustrating to use emacs.

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  • emacs frustration with web development

    - by Tony Cruise
    I really liked flexibility of emacs but it is really annoying to make it work. I want to use it for web development html, css, javascript, php. I first tried emacs-starter-kit . It didn't included nXhtml. Also C-g key binding does not work (they call it starter kit but basic key command does not work). I think it is mapped for git control. That's a frustration for a beginner. Then I replaced emacs-starter-kit with nXhtml. At least C-g is working. But code completion sucks, M-tab does not work. I tried code completion from nXhtml menu with no success. Also NXhtml mode did'nt colorized my file if css is mixed with html. Isn't it recommended for mixed html, css,php files. So why it doesnt work?. Why Emacs folks do not aware of convention over configuration? Dam! ship it something works! Please help me before I am getting crazy. I use Ubuntu 10.04 and emacs-snaphot-gtk 23.1.50-1. Please guide step by step with your working dotfile url. Even I accept I am a dummy it really annoying and frustrating to use emacs.

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  • REST from asp.net 2.0

    - by weslleywang
    Hi, I just built a asp.net 2.0 web site. Now I need add REST web service so I can communicate with another web application. I've worked with 2 SOAP web service project before, but have no experise with REST at all. I guess only a coupleweeks would works fine. after googling, I found it's not that easy. This is what I found: There is NO REST out of box of asp.net. WCF REST Starter Kit Codeplex Preview 2 base on .net 3.5 and still in beta Rest ASP.NET Example REST Web Services in ASP.NET 2.0 (C#) Exyus Handling POST and PUT methods with Lullaby ADO.NET Data Service ... Now my question, a) Is a REST solution for .net 2.0? if yes, which one is best solution? b) if I have to, how hard to migrate my asp.net from 2.0 to 3.5? is it as simple as just compile, or I have to change a lot code? c) WCF REST Starter Kit is good enough to use in production? d) Do I have to learn WCF first, then WCF REST Starter Kit? where is the best place to start? I appreciate any help here. Thanks Wes

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  • Magento My Account Layout XML Problem

    - by Remy
    Hi there, I'm having issues getting the customer.xml layout file to work properly for the customer's "my account" pages. The navigation links and the previously ordered items that are usually on the left hand side of the page won't show up on the page, but if I change the reference name to "content" in the xml file, it shows up (except it's obviously then on the right hand side). I've checked the template it's referencing (2columns-left.phtml), and the getChildHtml('left') is there in the correct position. The block that's causing the problem: <customer_account> <!-- Mage_Customer --> <reference name="root"> <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-left.phtml</template></action> </reference> <reference name="left"> <action method="unsetChild"><name>catalog.navigation.all</name></action> <action method="unsetChild"><name>callout.sendcard</name></action> <action method="unsetChild"><name>callout.specialorder</name></action> <block type="customer/account_navigation" name="customer_account_navigation" before="-" template="customer/account/navigation.phtml"> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"><name>account</name><path>customer/account/</path><label>Account Dashboard</label></action> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"><name>account_edit</name><path>customer/account/edit/</path><label>Account Information</label></action> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"><name>address_book</name><path>customer/address/</path><label>Address Book</label></action> </block> <block type="sales/reorder_sidebar" name="sale.reorder.sidebar" as="reorder" template="sales/reorder/sidebar.phtml"/> <remove name="tags_popular"/> </reference> </customer_account> This was basically copied straight over from another one of our sites where this works 100%. I've tried everything I can think of (changing the name of the reference in both the template and the layout xml, for example) to no avail. The templates that the layout is referencing are obviously working because they do show up when put into the "content" area. This installation of magento is version 1.3.1.1. I appreciate any advice you have to give me... *Update: I tried changing the reference to "global_messages", and it doesn't show there either. It only seems to work in the "content" section.* Update 2: These are the results of using the "showLayout=page" query string on the page when used with Alan Storm's very handy debugging module (which you'll find in his answer below). <?xml version="1.0"?> <layout><block type="page/html" name="root" output="toHtml" template="page/3columns.phtml"> <block type="page/html_head" name="head" as="head"> <action method="addJs"> <script>prototype/prototype.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>prototype/validation.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>paypoint/validation.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>scriptaculous/builder.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>scriptaculous/effects.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>scriptaculous/dragdrop.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>scriptaculous/controls.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>scriptaculous/slider.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>varien/js.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>varien/form.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>varien/menu.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>mage/translate.js</script> </action> <action method="addJs"> <script>mage/cookies.js</script> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/reset.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/boxes.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/clears.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/menu.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/calendar-blue.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/styles.css</stylesheet> </action> <action method="addItem"> <type>skin_css</type> <name>css/iestyles.css</name> <params/> <if>IE</if> </action> <action method="addItem"> <type>skin_css</type> <name>css/ie7.css</name> <params/> <if>IE 7</if> </action> <action method="addItem"> <type>skin_css</type> <name>css/ie7minus.css</name> <params/> <if>lt IE 7</if> </action> <action method="addItem"> <type>js</type> <name>lib/ds-sleight.js</name> <params/> <if>lt IE 7</if> </action> <action method="addItem"> <type>js</type> <name>varien/iehover-fix.js</name> <params/> <if>lt IE 7</if> </action> <action method="addCss"> <stylesheet>css/print.css</stylesheet> <params>media="print"</params> </action> </block> <block type="page/html_header" name="header" as="header"> <block type="page/template_links" name="top.links" as="topLinks"/> <block type="page/switch" name="store_language" as="store_language" template="page/switch/languages.phtml"/> <block type="core/template" name="top.nav" template="page/html/top.nav.phtml"/> </block> <block type="core/messages" name="global_messages" as="global_messages"/> <block type="core/messages" name="messages" as="messages"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="content" as="content"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="right" as="right"/> <block type="page/html_footer" name="footer" as="footer" template="page/html/footer.phtml"/> <block type="core/text_list" name="before_body_end" as="before_body_end"/> </block> <block type="core/profiler" output="toHtml"/> <reference name="top.links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="customer"> <label>My Account</label> <url helper="customer/getAccountUrl"/> <title>My Account</title> <prepare/> <urlParams/> <position>10</position> </action> </reference> <reference name="root"> <action method="setTemplate"> <template>page/2columns-left.phtml</template> </action> </reference> <reference name="top.menu"> <block type="catalog/navigation" name="catalog.topnav" template="catalog/navigation/top.phtml"/> </reference> <reference name="footer_links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="catalog" ifconfig="catalog/seo/site_map"> <label>Site Map</label> <url helper="catalog/map/getCategoryUrl"/> <title>Site Map</title> </action> </reference> <reference name="footer_links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="catalogsearch" ifconfig="catalog/seo/search_terms"> <label>Search Terms</label> <url helper="catalogsearch/getSearchTermUrl"/> <title>Search Terms</title> </action> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="catalogsearch"> <label>Advanced Search</label> <url helper="catalogsearch/getAdvancedSearchUrl"/> <title>Advanced Search</title> </action> </reference> <reference name="top.links"> <block type="checkout/links" name="checkout_cart_link"> <action method="addCartLink"/> <action method="addCheckoutLink"/> </block> </reference> <reference name="footer"> <block type="cms/block" name="cms_footer_links" before="footer_links"> <action method="setBlockId"> <block_id>footer_links</block_id> </action> </block> </reference> <reference name="left"> <block type="tag/popular" name="tags_popular" template="tag/popular.phtm" ignore="1"> <action method="setTemplate"> <template>tag/popular.phtml</template> </action> </block> </reference> <reference name="left"> </reference> <reference name="before_body_end"> <block type="googleanalytics/ga" name="google_analytics" as="google_analytics"/> </reference> <reference name="footer_links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="contacts" ifconfig="contacts/contacts/enabled"> <label>Contact Us</label> <url>contact-us</url> <title>Contact Us</title> <prepare>true</prepare> </action> </reference> <reference name="footer_links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="rss" ifconfig="rss/config/active"> <label>RSS</label> <url>rss</url> <title>RSS testing</title> <prepare>true</prepare> <urlParams/> <position/> <li/> <a>class="link-feed"</a> </action> </reference> <reference name="wishlist_sidebar"> <action method="addPriceBlockType"> <type>bundle</type> <block>bundle/catalog_product_price</block> <template>bundle/catalog/product/price.phtml</template> </action> </reference> <reference name="cart_sidebar"> <action method="addItemRender"> <type>bundle</type> <block>bundle/checkout_cart_item_renderer</block> <template>checkout/cart/sidebar/default.phtml</template> </action> </reference> <reference name="root"> <action method="setTemplate"> <template>page/2columns-left.phtml</template> </action> </reference> <reference name="left"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>catalog.navigation.all</name> </action> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>callout.sendcard</name> </action> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>callout.specialorder</name> </action> <block type="customer/account_navigation" name="customer_account_navigation" before="-" template="customer/account/navigation.phtml"> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"> <name>account</name> <path>customer/account/</path> <label>Account Dashboard</label> </action> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"> <name>account_edit</name> <path>customer/account/edit/</path> <label>Account Information</label> </action> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="customer"> <name>address_book</name> <path>customer/address/</path> <label>Address Book</label> </action> </block> <block type="sales/reorder_sidebar" name="sale.reorder.sidebar" as="reorder" template="sales/reorder/sidebar.phtml"/> <remove name="tags_popular"/> </reference> <reference name="customer_account_navigation"> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="sales"> <name>orders</name> <path>sales/order/history/</path> <label>My Orders</label> </action> </reference> <reference name="customer_account_navigation"> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="tag"> <name>tags</name> <path>tag/customer/</path> <label>My Tags</label> </action> </reference> <reference name="customer_account_navigation"> <action method="addLink" translate="label" module="newsletter"> <name>newsletter</name> <path>newsletter/manage/</path> <label>Newsletter Subscriptions</label> </action> </reference> <reference name="cart_sidebar"> <action method="addItemRender"> <type>bundle</type> <block>bundle/checkout_cart_item_renderer</block> <template>checkout/cart/sidebar/default.phtml</template> </action> </reference> <update handle="customer_account"/> <reference name="content"> <block type="customer/account_dashboard" name="customer_account_dashboard" template="customer/account/dashboard.phtml"> <block type="customer/account_dashboard_hello" name="customer_account_dashboard_hello" as="hello" template="customer/account/dashboard/hello.phtml"/> <block type="core/template" name="customer_account_dashboard_top" as="top"/> <block type="customer/account_dashboard_info" name="customer_account_dashboard_info" as="info" template="customer/account/dashboard/info.phtml"/> <block type="customer/account_dashboard_newsletter" name="customer_account_dashboard_newsletter" as="newsletter" template="customer/account/dashboard/newsletter.phtml"/> <block type="customer/account_dashboard_address" name="customer_account_dashboard_address" as="address" template="customer/account/dashboard/address.phtml"/> <block type="core/template" name="customer_account_dashboard_info1" as="info1"/> <block type="core/template" name="customer_account_dashboard_info2" as="info2"/> </block> </reference> <reference name="right"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>catalog_compare_sidebar</name> </action> </reference> <reference name="customer_account_dashboard"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>top</name> </action> <block type="sales/order_recent" name="customer_account_dashboard_top" as="top" template="sales/order/recent.phtml"/> </reference> <reference name="right"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>right.poll</name> </action> </reference> <reference name="customer_account_dashboard"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>customer_account_dashboard_info2</name> </action> <block type="tag/customer_recent" name="customer_account_dashboard_info2" as="info2" template="tag/customer/recent.phtml"/> </reference> <reference name="right"> <action method="unsetChild"> <name>right.newsletter</name> </action> </reference> <reference name="top.links"> <action method="addLink" translate="label title" module="customer"> <label>Log Out</label> <url helper="customer/getLogoutUrl"/> <title>Log Out</title> <prepare/> <urlParams/> <position>100</position> </action> </reference></layout>

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  • Storing a set of criteria in another table

    - by bendataclear
    I have a large table with sales data, useful data below: RowID Date Customer Salesperson Product_Type Manufacturer Quantity Value 1 01-06-2004 James Ian Taps Tap Ltd 200 £850 2 02-06-2004 Apple Fran Hats Hats Inc 30 £350 3 04-06-2004 James Lawrence Pencils ABC Ltd 2000 £980 ... Many rows later... ... 185352 03-09-2012 Apple Ian Washers Tap Ltd 600 £80 I need to calculate a large set of targets from table containing values different types, target table is under my control and so far is like: TargetID Year Month Salesperson Target_Type Quantity 1 2012 7 Ian 1 6000 2 2012 8 James 2 2000 3 2012 9 Ian 2 6500 At present I am working out target types using a view of the first table which has a lot of extra columns: SELECT YEAR(Date) , MONTH(Date) , Salesperson , Quantity , CASE WHEN Manufacturer IN ('Tap Ltd','Hats Inc') AND Product_Type = 'Hats' THEN True ELSE False END AS IsType1 , CASE WHEN Manufacturer = 'Hats Inc' AND Product_Type IN ('Hats','Coats') THEN True ELSE False END AS IsType2 ... ... , CASE WHEN Manufacturer IN ('Tap Ltd','Hats Inc') AND Product_Type = 'Hats' THEN True ELSE False END AS IsType24 , CASE WHEN Manufacturer IN ('Tap Ltd','Hats Inc') AND Product_Type = 'Hats' THEN True ELSE False END AS IsType25 FROM SalesTable WHERE [some stuff here] This is horrible to read/debug and I hate it!! I've tried a few different ways of simplifying this but have been unable to get it to work. The closest I have come is to have a third table holding the definition of the types with the values for each field and the type number, this can be joined to the tables to give me the full values but I can't work out a way to cope with multiple values for each field. Finally the question: Is there a standard way this can be done or an easier/neater method other than one column for each type of target? I know this is a complex problem so if anything is unclear please let me know. Edit - What I need to get: At the very end of the process I need to have targets displayed with actual sales: Type Year Month Salesperson TargetQty ActualQty 2 2012 8 James 2000 2809 2 2012 9 Ian 6500 6251 Each row of the sales table could potentially satisfy 8 of the types. Some more points: I have 5 different columns that need to be defined against the targets (or set to NULL to include any value) I have between 30 and 40 different types that need to be defined, several of the columns could contain as many as 10 different values For point 2, if I am using a row for each permutation of values, 2 columns with 10 values each would give me 100 rows for each sales person for each month which is a lot but if this is the only way to define multiple values I will have to do this. Sorry if this makes no sense!

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  • Date problem in MYSQL Query

    - by davykiash
    Am looking for a query to sum values in a particular time duration say an year or a particular month in an year using MYSQL syntax.Note that my transaction_date column stores daily amount transacted. Am example of a query that returns total sales in an year query would look something like this SELECT SUM(transaction_amount) WHERE transaction_date = (YEAR) Am example of a query that returns total sales in an particular month and year would look something like this SELECT SUM(transaction_amount) WHERE transaction_date = (YEAR)(MONTH) How achievable is this?

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  • Generate lags R

    - by Btibert3
    Hi All, I hope this is basic; just need a nudge in the right direction. I have read in a database table from MS Access into a data frame using RODBC. Here is a basic structure of what I read in: PRODID PROD Year Week QTY SALES INVOICE Here is the structure: str(data) 'data.frame': 8270 obs. of 7 variables: $ PRODID : int 20001 20001 20001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 100001 ... $ PROD : Factor w/ 1239 levels "1% 20qt Box",..: 335 335 335 128 128 128 128 128 128 128 ... $ Year : int 2010 2010 2010 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2010 ... $ Week : int 12 18 19 14 15 16 17 18 19 9 ... $ QTY : num 1 1 0 135 300 270 300 270 315 315 ... $ SALES : num 15.5 0 -13.9 243 540 ... $ INVOICES: num 1 1 2 5 11 11 10 11 11 12 ... Here are the top few rows: head(data, n=10) PRODID PROD Year Week QTY SALES INVOICES 1 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 12 1 15.46 1 2 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 18 1 0.00 1 3 20001 Dolie 12" 2010 19 0 -13.88 2 4 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 14 135 243.00 5 5 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 15 300 540.00 11 6 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 16 270 486.00 11 7 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 17 300 540.00 10 8 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 18 270 486.00 11 9 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2009 19 315 567.00 11 10 100001 Cage Free Eggs 2010 9 315 569.25 12 I simply want to generate lags for QTY, SALES, INVOICE for each product but I am not sure where to start. I know R is great with Time Series, but I am not sure where to start. I have two questions: 1- I have the raw invoice data but have aggregated it for reporting purposes. Would it be easier if I didn't aggregate the data? 2- Regardless of aggregation or not, what functions will I need to loop over each product and generate the lags as I need them? In short, I want to loop over a set of records, calculate lags for a product (if possible), append the lags (as they apply) to the current record for each product, and write the results back to a table in my database for my reporting software to use. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks in advance, Brock

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  • On a local network, are you able to password protect certain folders and how (in windows xp)?

    - by Derek
    I have a local network set up for my small office which consists of me, the manager, my wife, the secretary, and a few sales people/others. I would like to share passwords over the network and other such things privately to my wife, the secretary, but would not like the sales people and others to have access to it, yet I need the others to have access to other folders/documents that I'd like to share. How would I go about doing this if not by password? Thanks in advance

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  • finding missing values, mysql??

    - by praveenmon
    i am using mysql database i have a table called sales its primary key is sales_id ------------------------------------- sales_id | invoice_id | ------------------------------------- 1 | 147 2 | 148 3 | 150 for sales-id 3 the invoice is supposed to be 149. i want to know which numbers are missing from invoice_id (i start invoice_id is 147 and end invoice_id is 4497). The invoice_id had no relation with sales_id is it possible to know which numbers are missing from invoice_id, using some queries??

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  • Excel function advanced filter

    - by Adam
    I have a list of sales people and a list of their sale revenues in two separate columns. How do I use an advanced filter or other sorting means to find the max of the sale revenue column and then have the formula output be the corresponding sales person?

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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • Stored Procedures with SSRS? Hmm… not so much

    - by Rob Farley
    Little Bobby Tables’ mother says you should always sanitise your data input. Except that I think she’s wrong. The SQL Injection aspect is for another post, where I’ll show you why I think SQL Injection is the same kind of attack as many other attacks, such as the old buffer overflow, but here I want to have a bit of a whinge about the way that some people sanitise data input, and even have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let me say that again, in case you missed it the first time: I want to have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let’s look at the data input sanitisation aspect – except that I’m going to call it ‘parameter validation’. I’m talking about code that looks like this: create procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     /* First check that @eomdate is a valid date */     if isdate(@eomdate) != 1     begin         select 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end     /* Then check that time has passed since @eomdate */     if datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     begin         select 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end         /* If those checks have succeeded, return the data */     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)         and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Notice that the code checks that a date has been entered. Seriously??!! This must only be to check for NULL values being passed in, because anything else would have to be a valid datetime to avoid an error. The other check is maybe fair enough, but I still don’t like it. The two problems I have with this stored procedure are the result sets and the small fact that the stored procedure even exists in the first place. But let’s consider the first one of these problems for starters. I’ll get to the second one in a moment. If you read Jes Borland (@grrl_geek)’s recent post about returning multiple result sets in Reporting Services, you’ll be aware that Reporting Services doesn’t support multiple results sets from a single query. And when it says ‘single query’, it includes ‘stored procedure call’. It’ll only handle the first result set that comes back. But that’s okay – we have RETURN statements, so our stored procedure will only ever return a single result set.  Sometimes that result set might contain a single field called ErrorMessage, but it’s still only one result set. Except that it’s not okay, because Reporting Services needs to know what fields to expect. Your report needs to hook into your fields, so SSRS needs to have a way to get that information. For stored procs, it uses an option called FMTONLY. When Reporting Services tries to figure out what fields are going to be returned by a query (or stored procedure call), it doesn’t want to have to run the whole thing. That could take ages. (Maybe it’s seen some of the stored procedures I’ve had to deal with over the years!) So it turns on FMTONLY before it makes the call (and turns it off again afterwards). FMTONLY is designed to be able to figure out the shape of the output, without actually running the contents. It’s very useful, you might think. set fmtonly on exec dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson '20030401'; set fmtonly off Without the FMTONLY lines, this stored procedure returns a result set that has three columns and fourteen rows. But with FMTONLY turned on, those rows don’t come back. But what I do get back hurts Reporting Services. It doesn’t run the stored procedure at all. It just looks for anything that could be returned and pushes out a result set in that shape. Despite the fact that I’ve made sure that the logic will only ever return a single result set, the FMTONLY option kills me by returning three of them. It would have been much better to push these checks down into the query itself. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Now if we run it with FMTONLY turned on, we get the single result set back. But let’s consider the execution plan when we pass in an invalid date. First let’s look at one that returns data. I’ve got a semi-useful index in place on OrderDate, which includes the SalesPersonID and TotalDue fields. It does the job, despite a hefty Sort operation. …compared to one that uses a future date: You might notice that the estimated costs are similar – the Index Seek is still 28%, the Sort is still 71%. But the size of that arrow coming out of the Index Seek is a whole bunch smaller. The coolest thing here is what’s going on with that Index Seek. Let’s look at some of the properties of it. Glance down it with me… Estimated CPU cost of 0.0005728, 387 estimated rows, estimated subtree cost of 0.0044385, ForceSeek false, Number of Executions 0. That’s right – it doesn’t run. So much for reading plans right-to-left... The key is the Filter on the left of it. It has a Startup Expression Predicate in it, which means that it doesn’t call anything further down the plan (to the right) if the predicate evaluates to false. Using this method, we can make sure that our stored procedure contains a single query, and therefore avoid any problems with multiple result sets. If we wanted, we could always use UNION ALL to make sure that we can return an appropriate error message. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, /*Placeholder: */ '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     /* Now include the error messages */     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     order by SalesPersonID; end But still I don’t like it, because it’s now a stored procedure with a single query. And I don’t like stored procedures that should be functions. That’s right – I think this should be a function, and SSRS should call the function. And I apologise to those of you who are now planning a bonfire for me. Guy Fawkes’ night has already passed this year, so I think you miss out. (And I’m not going to remind you about when the PASS Summit is in 2012.) create function dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) returns table as return (     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5 ); We’ve had to lose the ORDER BY – but that’s fine, as that’s a client thing anyway. We can have our reports leverage this stored query still, but we’re recognising that it’s a query, not a procedure. A procedure is designed to DO stuff, not just return data. We even get entries in sys.columns that confirm what the shape of the result set actually is, which makes sense, because a table-valued function is the right mechanism to return data. And we get so much more flexibility with this. If you haven’t seen the simplification stuff that I’ve preached on before, jump over to http://bit.ly/SimpleRob and watch the video of when I broke a microphone and nearly fell off the stage in Wales. You’ll see the impact of being able to have a simplifiable query. You can also read the procedural functions post I wrote recently, if you didn’t follow the link from a few paragraphs ago. So if we want the list of SalesPeople that made any kind of sales in a given month, we can do something like: select SalesPersonID from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) order by SalesPersonID; This doesn’t need to look up the TotalDue field, which makes a simpler plan. select * from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) where SalesPersonID is not null order by SalesPersonID; This one can avoid having to do the work on the rows that don’t have a SalesPersonID value, pushing the predicate into the Index Seek rather than filtering the results that come back to the report. If we had joins involved, we might see some of those being simplified out. We also get the ability to include query hints in individual reports. We shift from having a single-use stored procedure to having a reusable stored query – and isn’t that one of the main points of modularisation? Stored procedures in Reporting Services are just a bit limited for my liking. They’re useful in plenty of ways, but if you insist on using stored procedures all the time rather that queries that use functions – that’s rubbish. @rob_farley

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  • Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

    - by raul.goycoolea
    Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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