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  • Driving Growth through Smarter Selling

    - by Samantha.Y. Ma
    With the proliferation of social media and mobile technologies, the world of selling and buying has drastically changed, as buyers now have access to more information than they did in the past. In fact, studies have shown that buyers complete 60 percent of the buying process before they even engage with a salesperson. The old models of selling no longer work effectively; and the new way of selling is driven by customer insights. To succeed, sales need to be proactive, not reactive. They need to engage with the customer early, sometimes even before the customer’s needs are fully understood. In fact, the best sales reps prescribe a solution that the customer doesn't even know they need, often by leveraging social media to listen, engage and collaborate with peers. And they fully tap into the power of analytics and data to drive results.  Let’s look at some stats regarding challenges facing sales today. According to recent studies, sales reps spend 78 percent of their time doing administrative things -- such as planning, searching for information, data entry -- and only 22 percent of the time actually selling. Furthermore, 40 percent of B2B sales reps miss their quota, and only 3 percent of companies can say with confidence that their forecasts are “always accurate.” How do you drive growth in this modern day and age? It's not just getting your sales teams to work harder; it's helping them work smarter and providing them with a solution they want to use, on the device(s) they already know, giving them critical insights and tools to be more productive, increase win rates, and close deals faster. Oracle Sales Cloud was designed to do exactly that. It enables smarter selling that allows reps to sell more, managers to know more, and companies to grow more.  Let’s face it—if all CRM solutions worked well, sales executives wouldn’t be having the same headaches as they had in the past. Join Oracle’s Thomas Kurian and Doug Clemmans on Tuesday, October 22 as they explain: • How today’s sales processes have rendered many CRM systems obsolete • The secrets to smarter selling, leveraging mobile, social, and big data • How Oracle Sales Cloud enables smarter selling—as proven by Oracle and its customers Take the first step down the path toward smarter selling. With Oracle Sales Cloud, reps sell more, managers know more, and companies grow more.

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  • Join the Customer Experience Revolution

    - by Divya Malik
    By Suzy Meriwhether Customers want simple, consistent, and relevant experiences across all touchpoints and devices. Creating a great customer experience means delivering these qualities consistently over time across the entire customer lifecycle and enable businesses to attract more, retain more and sell more. Exceptional customer experiences create the loyalty, advocacy, and repeat business that drives success. Most successful companies would say that they try to create a good customer experience and have already invested in the systems, people, and training to develop it. So what’s missing? Why is it so much more difficult to meet customer expectations every day, in every way? How can you learn more? Join Oracle for a Live Event: Customer Experience Online Forum Participate in the Customer Experience Online Forum to hear from Bruce Temkin, a leading expert in customer experience, Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM, Marriott International, Nikon and other thought leaders to learn about the ROI of customer experience, what strategies leading brands use to win over customers, and how Oracle solutions can help you succeed in the Experience Revolution. I encourage you to register now for the half-day live event.

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  • Four Easy Ways to Save a Rocky CRM Relationship

    - by Divya Malik
     Today, I am pleased to introduce our guest blogger Luke Christianson. Luke is  an Application Sales rep based out of Minneapolis, MN.  You can find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter. In any relationship, sooner or later, the excitement fades away.  The honeymoon period gives way to the old routines you had, before you committed to each other and you eventually begin doing things apart from one another.  I’m not talking about a marriage…  Well, I guess I am.Commitment to a CRM tool and building a deep and lasting relationship is not much different than the basics of a traditional love story.  After your controlled CRM pilot program, and maybe the National Sales Meeting where you couldn’t escape those three wonderful letters, CRM, you will soon find that if you haven’t designed an environment where it’s going to enable your reps to make more money, the relationship is doomed.   . If you’re currently in a dysfunctional CRM relationship, here are 4 simple tips to re-engaging users and getting that spark back. Shadow a Sales Rep:   Chances are you can find out exactly what is preventing your sales reps from using the application by simply watching how they go about their day.  Sales reps are driven by money, not by additional administrative duties.  Your system needs to be setup so that they can get the information they need quickly, facilitate making key updates and run their business out of one easy-to-use application.  Increase your sales team’s productivity by 5% automatically:    Cancel the weekly forecast calls with your reps and require them update their opportunities in CRM.  Something else that I’ve seen work extremely well, is when you do Monthly or Quarterly reviews, do not let your sales reps bring anything into the room with them; no spreadsheets, notebooks, or computers.  Everything they need to tell you should be able to be put into CRM and fully accessible by the Sales Manager at any time.  Tool time:      Make sure the tools that you have selected meet both your short-term goals and your long term goals.   You need tools that can adapt like your business does.  You probably can’t wait two months for an update to a picklist value or for the addition of a simple workflow rule.  Do you feel the tools that are in place can create the experience you want for your users? and finally, if all else fails... Keep It Simple, Stupid:     Do you really need to require 15 fields to create an Opportunity?  Do you need to clutter the interface with different reports that don’t add daily value?  Most CRM systems on the market today are flexible enough today that your admin could clean up most of the unnecessary interface ‘noise’ in a few hours.  If they're not, see #3. Every strong relationship can be tedious at times, you’ll fight and eventually make amends, you may even threaten to upgrade to a newer model…  But be patient and think about what you want to achieve and you’ll find a partner for life.

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  • Create a Loyalty Program That Sticks - Thursday 30 Minute Webcast

    - by Charles Knapp
    Loyalty programs don't necessarily translate into loyal or profitable customers. What are market leaders doing to retain customers? Webcast Alert: Live complimentary webcast, Creating a Holistic Loyalty Program That Sticks, on Thursday, 11/15 at 1:00-1:30 pm EST. Southwest Airlines joins 1to1 Media to share insights on developing loyalty programs that are focused on customer needs and preferences. Hope to see you there! 

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  • Avoiding the Black Hole of Leads

    - by Charles Knapp
    Sales says, "Marketing doesn’t deliver enough qualified leads. So, we generate 90% of our own leads." Meanwhile, Marketing says, "We generate most of the leads. But, Sales doesn’t contact them quickly enough, while the lead is still interested." According to Sirius Decisions: Up to 90% of leads never make it to closure Sales works on only 11% of the leads supplied by Marketing Only 18% of the leads Sales accepts convert to opportunities Yet, 45% of prospects typically buy a product from someone within 12 months The root cause of these commonplace complaints is a disconnect between the funnels of marketing and sales. Unfortunately, we often see companies with an assortment of poorly integrated marketing tools. It takes too long and too many people to move the data around, scrub it, upload it from one system to another, and get it routed to the right sales teams. As a result, leads fall through the cracks, contextual information is lost, and by the time sales actually contacts a customer it may be too late. Sales automation alone is not enough. Marketing automation (including social) is not enough. Sales and Marketing must work together. It’s time to connect the silos of marketing and sales pipelines and analytics. It’s time for integrated Sales and Marketing automation. Integrated pipelines improve lead quality and timeliness. Marketing systems can track a rich set of contextual information about a prospect–self-disclosed information about interests, content viewed, and so on. This insight can equip the sales rep with rich information to make a face-to-face conversation more relevant and more likely to convert to the next stage in the sales process. Integrated lead to revenue (LTR) management provides end-to-end visibility, enabling the company to measure what is working. Marketing can measure its impact on revenue and other business outcomes, and sales can harness and redirect marketing investments to areas where they most help achieve sales objectives. It’s a win-win play. Marketing delivers more leads that are qualified, cuts cost per lead, and demonstrates a strong Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). Sales spends more time with warm leads and less time on cold calls, achieves higher close rates, and delivers more revenue. Learn more by attending our Integrated Sales and Marketing session at the upcoming CloudWorld conferences. Or, visit our Sales and Marketing Cloud Service site for videos and other learning resources.

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  • Mapping Your Customer Experience Journey

    - by Michael Hylton
    For those who attended today’s Oracle Customer Experience Summit keynote you heard from Brian Curran talk about the strategies and best practices to implement customer experience (CX) in your organization.  He spoke about how this evolving journey begins by understanding six steps to transform your business and put your customers front and center.  Here are those key six steps: What are the strategic business objectives in your company? What are your operational objectives and KPIs necessary to measure a CX project? Build an income statement and create “what if” scenarios and see how changes impact your business’ bottom line.  Explore what keeps you from getting to your own goals for your business. Define the business objectives and opportunities you want to meet? Understand the trends and accelerators in the market?  What factors are going on in the market affect that impact your business?  Social?  Mobile?  Cloud?  Just to name a few.  Many of these trends may signal a change in the way people think about your business. What approach will you take to solve these issues?  Understand who your customer is.  How do you need to adapt your business to build relevant, personalized customer experiences. What technologies can you implement to address CX?  Does technology help you solve your problem? A great way to begin your customer experience journey is a concept called journey mapping, one of the most powerful and deceptively simple tools for unlocking CX innovation at your organization. Here is where you can learn more about how you can bring this concept into your business to drive great customer experiences.

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  • Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Solutions Make Retailers Merry

    - by Tuula Fai
    Tis the season to be jolly. If you’re a retailer, your level of jolliness depends on sales. So you watch trends like U.S. store traffic increasing 3.5% to 308 million on Black Friday but sales actually falling 1.8% to $11.2 billion. Fortunately, by the end of November, retail sales were up 3.7% over the previous year, thanks to life recovering after Hurricane Sandy. And online sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever! Who are the companies improving their sales online? They are big names like Walgreen’s Drugstore.com, Nordstrom’s HauteLook, and Intuit. More importantly, how are they doing it? They use cutting-edge business practices enabled by Oracle’s CX Cloud Service & Support solutions to: Increase conversions rates and order sizes (Customer Acquisition) Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty (Customer Retention) Reduce contact center costs and improve agent productivity (Operational Efficiency). Acquisition + Retention + Operational Efficiency = Sustainable Growth and Profits. That’s the magic formula for retail customer service success. Don’t take our word for it. Look at the results of these Oracle customers: Walgreen’s Drugstore—30% sales conversion rate on chat sessions with 20% increase in shopping cart size Nordstrom’s HauteLook—40,000+ interactions per month—20% growth over last year— efficiently managed by 40 agents, with no increase in IT costs Intuit—50% increase in customer satisfaction and 70% decrease in cost per interaction Using Oracle’s CX Cloud & Service solutions, these retailers deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including social, mobile, and web. Their ability to connect with customers anytime, anywhere—providing the right answer at the right time—helps them create a defensible advantage in the marketplace. Want to learn more? Please visit http://www.oracle.com/goto/cloudlaunchpad for free resources on delivering exceptional customer service in the Cloud. Also, watch our YouTube channel to learn more about seamless multichannel retail and Winston Furnishings’ exceptional customer experience.

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  • Attend This Webcast To Learn How CG Manufacturers Are Stepping Up Their Efforts to Sell to Consumers

    - by Michael Hylton
    Going Direct to Consumer is top of mind with executives in the Consumer Goods (CG) industry today. But are companies ready to engage? Recently, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted research sponsored by Oracle to better understand how Consumer Goods companies are engaging directly with consumers today and in the future. The survey involved CG executives across the globe as well as in-depth interviews with corporate leaders in the industry to explore their direct-to-consumer initiatives. Some key findings include: Pushing traditional media through new media channels is not enough to reach today's more plugged in, product-savvy consumer  CG companies are experimenting with new ways to establish and enhance direct, two-way relationships with their target consumers across multiple channels to enhance brand loyalty and drive product sales Survey respondents and other CG executives see their nascent e-commerce efforts as complimentary to, not competing with, existing retail channels. This webinar will review the results of the research and panelists will discuss what CG companies worldwide are thinking as they deploy their direct-to-consumer strategies in an effort to engage directly with today's empowered consumer.

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  • What Is the Experience Revolution – and Why Does it Matter?

    - by Charles Knapp
    Customer experience is how your customer perceives the sum of their interactions with your organization throughout their buying, service delivery, and ownership experiences. In our highly connected online, phone, social, and mobile interactions, it’s easy to lose a dissatisfied customer – who can readily dissuade future customers. Nevertheless, great brand experiences still deliver top margins and low-cost repeat business. The Experience Revolution seamlessly connects customer-facing interactions with employee-facing CRM transactions. While your organization has invested in some of these capabilities, how well do the pieces work for your customers? Is it time for your organization to join the Experience Revolution? We invite you to join Oracle President Mark Hurd for an incredible, educational evening on June 25, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. in New York City.  Attend to see and learn: What leading brands do to win over customers How to unlock the value of customer experiences The bottom-line effect of great experiences Why doing nothing is not an option

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  • Webcast: Oracle's Vision For The Socially-Enabled Enterprise

    - by Michael Hylton
    Smart companies are developing social media strategies to engage customers, gain brand insights, and transform employee collaboration and recruitment. Oracle is powering this transformation with the most comprehensive enterprise social platform that lets you:     Monitor and engage in social conversations     Collect and analyze social data     Build and grow brands through social media     Integrate enterprise-wide social functionality into a single system     Create rich social applications Join Oracle President Mark Hurd and senior Oracle executives to learn more about Oracle’s vision for the social-enabled enterprise.  Click here to register.

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  • High Tech Product Companies: Benchmark Your Sales & Marketing Data Management

    - by user709269
    Aberdeen’s Q4 2010 Quarterly Business Review found that 74% of the Sales and Marketing organizations in High Tech product manufacturing have strategic CRM initiatives in 2011. Aberdeen Group is conducting a survey that will help high tech product companies such as yours determine the Best-in-Class procedures for capturing, managing, and disseminating business data. If your product company is planning on implementing a CRM solution or is simply evaluating the potential benefits, we would appreciate your feedback in this brief, 10-minute survey. You will be able to compare your experiences in leveraging customer information for sales and marketing compare with your peers, benchmark your performance, and see how you can achieve Best-in-Class results. Individual responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate. In appreciation for sharing your time and thoughts with us, we will provide complimentary access for you to the full benchmark report as soon as it is published (a $399 value). Take the survey.

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  • P-Commerce – What The Heck Is That?

    - by Michael Hylton
    We’ve heard of e-commerce, m-commerce (Mobile Commerce), and f-commerce (Facebook Commerce) but what is p-commerce?  It’s not truly a customer touchpoint or channel but the emphasis on personalization of the buying experience. Ask yourself how well do you know your customer?  Are you able to take what you know about them and apply it to their commerce activity with you and personalize the shopping experience? Much of this is dictated by have a complete 360 degree view of your customer, collecting data from your website, sales interactions, historical commerce purchases, call center activity, how they got to your website, etc. and applying it to their current commerce interaction.  Customers expect to have a similar interaction on your website as they would in your brick-and-mortar store, displaying the products and services that they might be interested in purchasing.

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  • New Features, Fresh Competitive Edge: Help Your Customers Get the Most from Oracle RightNow Cloud Service by Sandi Main

    - by Tuula Fai
    Are your customers taking full advantage of their customer service solution? If they’re not up-to-speed with the new features of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, this is their chance to catch up—and gain competitive advantage. Invite customers to join our live Webcast on Thursday, July 16, for a rapid overview of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service's most powerful new capabilities and what they mean for their organization. They’ll learn how they can: Take full advantage of RightNow's evolution under Oracle Stay ahead of the competition with key innovations and enhancements Upgrade with confidence based on other user experiences Don't miss the chance to help your customers deliver an even smarter customer experience.  Click here for the Evite to send to your customers.

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  • 11/28 Thought Leaders Webinar: Marketing Strategies for Great Customer Experiences

    - by Charles Knapp
    With the growing use of mobile and social, it's tempting to bolt on these new channels to existing processes. However, that piecemeal approach may not lead to satisfying customer experiences or solid returns on investments. Furthermore, the volume of information businesses have access to is growing exponentially. Is this leading to better business insight and customer experiences? Join the Internet Marketing Association, The University of California at Irvine, and Oracle as we discuss marketing strategies that will help your customers have better experiences with your brand. You'll learn effective strategies for harnessing the power of "big data" to know more and understand your customers better, empowering customers and employees to make every interaction easy and rewarding, and adapting the customer experience to connect and engage effectively with each customer. Our speakers are Melissa Boxer, Vice President of Product Strategy, Oracle Cloud and CX Applications, who is a conference keynote speaker on integrated social marketing and loyalty analytics, and Dean Abbott, CEO of Abbott Analytics, who is a thought leader in commercial predictive analytics. This learning opportunity takes place on Wednesday, November 28, 11 am to 12 pm Pacific. Register today to learn from these thought leaders.

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  • Is There a Cloud Over OpenWorld?

    - by Tony Berk
    If you have been to OpenWorld in the past, you know it can be overwhelming or at least a bit "large." If this is your first time at OpenWorld, get ready! You are in for a big (or I should say HUGE) treat. The first thing you'll notice when you get to San Francisco is there are a lot of people, buses with "Oracle" posters, large exhibit halls filled with demos, games and tchotchkes from vendors with hot new solutions, and then there are the sessions. Yes, in fact there are over 2000 sessions. How can you possibly sort through 2000 sessions to find the best 20 or so for you? Which are the 1% for you? We will try to help with some insight over the next few weeks.  I'm going start at the highest level. Up in the Clouds! Since I know many people are looking for an update on The Oracle Cloud. We will drill down into the cloud and other topics for CRM and Customer Experience sessions in the next set of posts. Below is a list of some of the Oracle executive keynotes during OpenWorld highlighting The Oracle Cloud and applications related topics (the full list is here). In these sessions you will get details on Oracle's strategy and how Oracle is changing the industry to help our customers be more efficient, effective and innovative. Sunday, September 30 6:00pm - 7:00pm Larry Ellison: Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together: Why it's a Different Approach Tuesday, October 2 8:45am - 9:45am Thomas Kurian: The Oracle Cloud: Oracle's Cloud Platform and Application's Strategy Tuesday, October 2 3:30pm - 4:30pm Larry Ellison: The Oracle Cloud: Where Social is Built in Thursday, October 4 9:45am - 10:45am Mark Hurd: See More, Act Faster: Oracle Business Analytics We encourage you to also join the keynotes on the Oracle Database and Cloud Infrastructure and the fascinating partner keynotes, as well. Check the full list on the OpenWorld site. Oh, if you haven't registered yet, what are you waiting for? OpenWorld Registration Details.

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  • Calling Knowledge Workers: Make a Difference in the User Experience

    - by Charles Knapp
    Do you consider yourself a knowledge worker? Do you have ideas of how to make CRM software work smarter so you don't have to work harder? The Oracle Middleware User Experience team will be conducting customer feedback focus groups at Oracle OpenWorld, October 1-3. All it takes is a couple of hours or less for us to learn from you. Customer participation helps Oracle develop outstanding products and solutions. Knowledge workers of all types are invited to participate: Finance, Sales, Human Resources, Marketing, Recruiters, Budget Managers, Project & Product Managers and more. To participate in these sessions you do not have to be registered for Oracle OpenWorld. If you or someone you know is interested in participating, please email muxtesting_us at oracle.com with your name, company, job title, work and mobile phone numbers with country code, and email address.

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  • Stores Still Matter In The World Of E-Commerce

    - by Michael Hylton
    You may think that more and more consumers are moving their purchasing to the Web or mobile device.  However, according The NPD Group, Inc., a leading market research company, 15-20 percent of consumers in 2011 checked out products in stores before buying online, or called “showrooming”, for product categories like stand mixers, electric knives, sewing machines, and some floor cleaners. Other categories like power tools, hairsetters, and robotic vacuums are now beginning to show signs of the “showrooming” trend as well. It is doubly important to present a consistent, personalized, and relevant shopping experience for your customers, no matter whether they interact with you in-person in your store, with your sales agents or call center agents, over the Web, or using a mobile device.  Your goal is to make that experience across touchpoints as seamless as possible.

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  • The Path to Best-In-Class Service Business Performance

    - by Charles Knapp
    What would it matter to offer your customers best-in-class service and support experiences? According to a new study, best-in-class companies enjoy margins that are nearly double the average, retain almost all of their customers each year, deliver annual revenue growth that is six greater than average, and realize cost decreases rather than increases! What does it take to become best in class? Some of the keys are: Engage customers effectively and consistently across all channels Focus on mobility to improve reactive service performance Continue to transition from primarily reactive to proactive and predictive service performance Build the support structure for new services and service contracts Construct an engaged service delivery team Join the Aberdeen Group, Oracle, Infosys, and Hyundai Capital as we highlight the key stages in the service transformation journey and reveal how Best-in-Class organizations are equipping themselves to thrive in this new era of service. Please join us for "Service Excellence and the Path to Business Transformation" -- this Thursday, October 25, 8:00 AM PDT | 11:00 AM EDT | 3:00 PM GMT | 4:00 PM BST.

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  • Why Deliver Customer Service in the Cloud?

    - by Charles Knapp
    In volatile, competitive markets, delivering exceptional service across channels is essential. But delivering world-class service on tight budgets, and deliving improvements quickly, is a tough challenge. That's why so many of the world's most successful organizations choose to deliver customer service in the cloud. Example: Michele Watson, VP of Global Customer Care at Match.com, says Oracle's service in the cloud "helps our customer receive the support they need in real time, our contact center agents be more productive and helpful, and our executive and product development teams receive detailed feedback to continue our improve our customers' experience." Learn more here about why you should consider delivering customer service in the cloud. 

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  • ASP.NET WebForms vs MVC [after VS2010/.NET 4.0 announcement]

    - by fjxx
    Two of the biggest advantages of MVC over webforms were non-existent viewstate and URL routing. VS2010 and .NET 4.0 incorporates built-in URL routing for Webforms as well as better control for viewstate. I advocate use of MVC for extranet sites due to the MVC design pattern and its general lightweight nature but in light of this new announcement has Webforms closed the gap? Why would you still pick MVC over Webforms? Thanks

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  • WPF C# Client/Server announcement system

    - by manemawanna
    I'm currently in the process of creating an announcement system at my place of work. The role of this system will be to replace all users email due to people misusing it and generally abusing the facility. The system will consist of: Web Portal: Will allow staff to enter any important announcements (this will be restricted via AD). SQL Server 2k5 DB: Will hold the announcements along with records of staff members and if they've read the announcements etc. Front End: Created in WPF & C# which is nearly complete, it will display the announcements to the users. Web Page: Client will contact every so often, which will return an xml file for the client to read. However my boss has now shifted the goal posts and would like the announcements to appear to the user once they are written to the database, rather than waiting on the client to contact the webpage. So now I'm a bit unsure as to how to go about this. I have one idea where I would create a small server application to monitor for new announcements then contact the clients to inform them to approach the website for the information they need. But I'm just looking to see if theres a better or more efficient way to do this or if someone else has a more appropriate idea or suggestion.

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  • Web Apps: Closeable Announcements/Info/Tooltip boxes (how to implement)

    - by Daxon
    I want to understand how to implement an announcement/info box system that displays a box for the user with information. The user can do nothing or close the box, but then it will never be seen again. E.g. Facebook home page. Box asking for Translators. if you leave it then its always there. But if you close it, it never appears again. Does this mean that a Boolean value needs to be used and checked for announcement/info boxes? I'm looking for a pseudo way with database tables to do this?

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  • Ruby on Rails - f.error_messages not showing up

    - by Brian Roisentul
    Hi, I've read many posts about this issue but I never got this to work. My model looks like this: class Announcement < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :title, :description end My controller's create method(only its relevant part) looks like this: def create respond_to do |format| if @announcement.save flash[:notice] = 'Announcement was successfully created.' format.html { redirect_to(@announcement) } format.xml { render :xml => @announcement, :status => :created, :location => @announcement } else @announcement = Announcement.new @provinces = Province.all @types = AnnouncementType.all @categories = Tag.find_by_sql 'select * from tags where parent_id=0 order by name asc' @subcategories= '' format.html { render :action => "new" } #new_announcement_path format.xml { render :xml => @announcement.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity } end end end My form looks like this: <% form_for(@announcement) do |f| %> <%= error_messages_for 'announcement' %> <!--I've also treid f.error_messages--> ... What am I doing wrong?

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  • Content Query Web Part and the Yes/No Field

    - by Bil Simser
    The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a pretty powerful beast. It allows you to do multiple site queries and aggregate the results. This is great for rolling up content and doing some summary type reporting. Here’s a trick to remember about Yes/No fields and using the CQWP. If you’re building a news style site and want to aggregate say all the announcements that people tag a certain way, up onto the home page this might be a solution. First we need to allow a way for users of all our sites to mark an announcement for inclusion on our Intranet Home Page. We’ll do this by just modifying the Announcement Content type and adding a Yes/No field to it. There are alternate ways of doing this like building a new Announcement type or stapling a feature to all sites to add our column but this is pretty low impact and only affects our current site collection so let’s go with it for now, okay? You can berate me in the comments about the proper way I should have done this part. Go to the Site Settings for the Site Collection and click on Site Content Types under the Galleries. This takes you to the gallery for this site and all subsites. Scroll down until you see the List Content Types and click on Announcements. Now we’re modifying the Announcement content type which affects all those announcement lists that are created by default if you’re building sites using the Team Site template (or creating a new Announcements list on any site for that matter). Click on Add from new site column under the Column list. This will allow us to create a new Yes/No field that users will see in Announcement items. This field will allow the user to flag the announcement for inclusion on the home page. Feel free to modify the fields as you see fit for your environment, this is just an example. Now that we’ve added the column to our Announcements Content type we can go into any site that has an announcement list, modify that announcement and flag it to be included on our home page. See the new Featured column? That was the result of modifying our Announcements Content Type on this site collection. Now we can move onto the dirty part, displaying it in a CQWP on the home page. And here is where the fun begins (and the head scratching should end). On our home page we want to drop a Content Query Web Part and aggregate any Announcement that’s been flagged as Featured by the users (we could also add the filter to handle Expires so we don’t show old content so go ahead and do that if you want). First add a CQWP to the page then modify the settings for the web part. In the first section, Query, we want the List Type to be set to Announcements and the Content type to be Announcement so set your options like this: Click Apply and you’ll see the results display all Announcements from any site in the site collection. I have five team sites created each with a unique announcement added to them. Now comes the filtering. We don’t want to include every announcement, only ones users flag using that Featured column we added. At first blush you might scroll down to the Additional Filters part of the Query options and set the Featured column to be equal to Yes: This seems correct doesn’t it? After all, the column is a Yes/No column and looking at an announcement in the site, it displays the field as Yes or No: However after applying the filter you get this result: (I have the announcements from Team Site 1 and Team Site 4 flagged as Featured) Huh? It’s BACKWARDS! Let’s confirm that. Go back in and change the Additional Filters section from Yes to No and hit Apply and you get this: Wait a minute? Shouldn’t I see Team Site 1 and 4 if the logic is backwards? Why am I seeing the same thing as before. What gives… For whatever reason, unknown to me, a Yes/No field (even though it displays as such) really uses 1 and 0 behind the scenes. Yeah, someone was stuck on using integer values for booleans when they wrote SharePoint (probably after a long night of white boarding ways to mess with developers heads) and came up with this. The solution is pretty simple but not very discoverable. Set the filter to include your flagged items like so: And it will filter the items marked as Featured correctly giving you this result: This kind of solution could also be extended and enhanced. Here are a few suggestions and ideas: Modify the ItemStyle.xsl file to add a new style for this aggregation which would include the first few paragraphs of the body (or perhaps add another field to the Content type called Excerpt or Summary and display that instead) Add an Image column to the Announcement Content type to include a Picture field and display it in the summary Add a Category choice field (Employee News, Current Events, Headlines, etc.) and add multiple CQWPs to the home page filtering each one on a different category I know some may find this topic old and dusty but I didn’t see a lot out there specifically on filtering the Yes/No fields and the whole 1/0 trick was a little wonky, so I figured a few pictures would help walk through overcoming yet another SharePoint weirdness. With a little work and some creative juices you can easily us the power of aggregation and the CQWP to build a news site from content on your team sites.

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