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• Help with this optimization

  - by Milo

  Here is what I do: I have bitmaps which I draw into another bitmap. The coordinates are from the center of the bitmap, thus on a 256 by 256 bitmap, an object at 0.0,0.0 would be drawn at 128,128 on the bitmap. I also found the furthest extent and made the bitmap size 2 times the extent. So if the furthest extent is 200,200 pixels, then the bitmap's size is 400,400. Unfortunately this is a bit inefficient. If a bitmap needs to be drawn at 500,500 and the other one at 300,300, then the target bitmap only needs to be 200,200 in size. I cannot seem to find a correct way to draw in the components correctly with a reduced size. I figure out the target bitmap size like this: float AvatarComposite::getFloatWidth(float& remainder) const { float widest = 0.0f; float widestNeg = 0.0f; for(size_t i = 0; i < m_components.size(); ++i) { if(m_components[i].getSprite() == NULL) { continue; } float w = m_components[i].getX() + ( ((m_components[i].getSprite()->getWidth() / 2.0f) * m_components[i].getScale()) / getWidthToFloat()); float wn = m_components[i].getX() - ( ((m_components[i].getSprite()->getWidth() / 2.0f) * m_components[i].getScale()) / getWidthToFloat()); if(w > widest) { widest = w; } if(wn > widest) { widest = wn; } if(w < widestNeg) { widestNeg = w; } if(wn < widestNeg) { widestNeg = wn; } } remainder = (2 * widest) - (widest - widestNeg); return widest - widestNeg; } And here is how I position and draw the bitmaps: int dw = m_components[i].getSprite()->getWidth() * m_components[i].getScale(); int dh = m_components[i].getSprite()->getHeight() * m_components[i].getScale(); int cx = (getWidth() + (m_remainderX * getWidthToFloat())) / 2; int cy = (getHeight() + (m_remainderY * getHeightToFloat())) / 2; cx -= m_remainderX * getWidthToFloat(); cy -= m_remainderY * getHeightToFloat(); int dx = cx + (m_components[i].getX() * getWidthToFloat()) - (dw / 2); int dy = cy + (m_components[i].getY() * getHeightToFloat()) - (dh / 2); g->drawScaledSprite(m_components[i].getSprite(),0.0f,0.0f, m_components[i].getSprite()->getWidth(),m_components[i].getSprite()->getHeight(),dx,dy, dw,dh,0); I basically store the difference between the original 2 * longest extent bitmap and the new optimized one, then I translate by that much which I would think would cause me to draw correctly but then some of the components look cut off. Any insight would help. Thanks

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• Skyrim Creation Kit with Xbox 360

  - by funseiki

  I posted this on stackoverflow but was advised to post here (here is a link to the stackoverflow question). I'm hoping for constructive feedback on its plausibility. Update on progress: It looks like there are ways to stuff files back onto the console (horizon, modio, xplorer360, etc) and they do require some form of signing. As of now, though, I've had no luck. I was hoping I could get away with just placing the ".esp" into the directory containing marketplace downloads for Skyrim, along with the signed ".bsa" file (basically a zipped up file containing any extra content the .esp will need to refer that doesn't exist in the basic game). This doesn't work, at least not in the ways I've tried, so next I'm going to try install the entire game to my flash drive (if possible) and attempt to traverse through the game's directory (this is probably unlikely). If anyone else has suggestions or luck or wants more detail on my failures comment/answer away. Here is the question: I'm thinking about buying the PC version of Skyrim to get the Creation Kit (I already own a copy for the Xbox). I have read the faq and scoured plenty of forums to see if there was some way to mod Skyrim for a console (Xbox 360, in particular), but they are generally coming up negative. I realize the CreationKit is on the PC, but I was wondering if there was a way to set up the '.esp' (hopefully I'm interpreting this correctly) files to be placed on the Xbox 360 file system in a similar manner to how game add-ons are downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace. I believe it is possible to transfer saves between the console and the PC (e.g. google: 'skyrim mod xbox360'), but these are referencing items that already exist in the game (e.g. a console command for maximum carry weight does not require reference to new animations or models). It would probably be easier if one could navigate through the xbox's file system to see where the games' files are placed, but with the current setup, the file system is abstracted away. Any help or insight on the matter would be much appreciated. I would love to work on a project that would make it possible to let console gamers experience and enjoy all the great mods available to the PC community.

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• Detect, Analyze, Act – Fast!

  - by Ajay Khanna

  In fast changing business environment, it becomes crucial to identify business opportunities and business issues as soon as possible. If identified at the right time, business managers can address issues before they escalate to serious problems and can take advantage of the new opportunities before the competition does. Moreover, they have to be efficient to do this at the right cost. Success depends on how responsive organization is to emerging events and changing environment. These events can be customer issues, competition moves, changes in regulations, or changes in company policies. In order to be responsive in such situations, organizations need to first identify and track these situations. They can do that via business activity monitoring (BAM) and complex event processing (CEP). A unified monitoring dashboard helps put together a comprehensive picture of the situation in hand and provides deep insight to take proper actions. With CEP, businesses can connect all the relevant events, detect event patterns and take immediate actions using Business Process Management system.   So to be responsive we need: Real-Time Visibility with Business Activity Monitoring You can use BAM technology to monitor progress, track performance, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), manage exceptions, and issue alerts to an employee or application when a process is not functioning properly—all in real time. A unified monitoring dashboard helps you maintain a complete picture of each situation so you can take action effectively. BAM works hand in hand with BPM software to discover the significant activities that drive business success.   Real-Time Sense and Respond An event-driven BPM solution enables each step in a business process to be informed not only by the previous step, but also by any other step, data, and pattern of behavior deemed relevant to that step. This gives the company the ability to “sense and respond.” You can describe interesting event patterns and event correlations and monitor the business in real-time. Whenever a pre-defined pattern emerges you can take actions like raising alerts, notifications, or kicking off another business process. This synergy possible by integrating activity monitoring, event processing, and BPM makes it possible for managers to keep a finger on the pulse of their business. Business managers can now respond to customers faster, respond to competition faster, reduce fraud and do more cross-selling. Read more about being responsive in the whitepaper “The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating BPM and Complex Event Processing” in BPM Resource Kit.

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

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• iTorque for a simple arcade game

  - by Herfus

  I have a basic understanding of programming, but I am no programmer. I've had a couple of a semesters with java programming, so we're talking pretty basic here. I have some scripting experience with game editors where I've created a few (simple) encounters, boss AI, abilities, events and so on. I've mostly done level design with UDK, Source and several other toolsets for a few years now, but I'd like to divert some of the focus to iphone-development. I've participated in a few development projects (source, udk, daot) where I've had a variety of roles (yet never beyond simple scripting). I have just finished prototyping an Iphone game (using game maker) and begun a bit more precise planning on what I'll have to do for the real version. The game is fairly simple, perhaps the best comparison in scope and complexity would be Doodlejump for iPhone. The reason I created the prototype was not just to answer a few questions about the gameplay, but to get some insight into what kind of problems I might face when trying to develop the real thing. I've been looking for engines that I can use for this. iTorque looks, so far, like the best option with a scripting language and WYSIWYG-editor. However the price is fairly steep and I'd like to prepare myself as much as possible before jumping into this, which is why I'm going to ask a few questions here. What kind of difficulties do you think I might run into, considering what you've read so far? Not just with torque, but development in general. I'm making this question mostly to have someone to reality check me. I usually achieve to do what I'm trying to do with scripting, but something tells me there's a very big difference between scripting an AI or an event and creating game logic. Will it be too much of a leap? Just how simple is it to use the Torque scripting language? Obviously I don't expect to be prepared, I expect it to be a learning process. However, I'd still like to be at least a bit confident on the time I'll have to dedicate to this first.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-07

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Boston, MA - 9/12/2012 Sure, you could ask a voodoo priestess for help in improving your solution architecture skills. But there's the whole snake thing, and the zombie thing, and other complications. So why not keep it simple and register for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA. There's no magic, just a full day of technical sessions covering Cloud, SOA, Engineered Systems, and more. Registration is free. Wednesday September 12, 2012 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Boston Marriott Burlington, One Burlington Mall Road, Burlington, MA 01803 Attend OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 The OTN Architect Day roadshow stops in Boston next week, then it's on to Los Angeles for another all architecture, all day event on Thursday October 25, 2012 at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Like all Architect Day events, this one is absolutley free, so register now. Webcast: Oracle WebCenter in Action: Hitachi Data Systems Catch this live webcast on Thursday, September 13, 2012 (10am PT / 1pm ET) to learn from speakers from Hitachi Data Systems, LingoTek, and Oracle about how Hitachi used Oracle WebCenter to improve the web experience for its international customers. Article Index: Architect Community Column in Oracle Magazine Did you know that Oracle Magazine features a regular column devoted specifically to the architect community? Every column includes insight and expertise from architects who regularly deal with the issues architects face. Click here to see a complete list of articles. ADF EMG Sunday at OOW 2012 (30. Sep 2012) - A day full of content | Frank Nimphius Frank Nimphius's shares details on Chris Muir's ADF EMG series of sessions during User Group Sunday at OOW, Sept 30, in Moscone West room 305. The Role of Oracle VM Server for SPARC in a Virtualization Strategy New OTN article from Matthias Pfützner. Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle WebCenter Blog A helpful list of OOW sessions focused on Oracle WebCenter. Oracle Exalogic X2-2 walkthrough | Jan van Zoggel "For those of us not lucky enough to have one at home," Jan van Zoggel recommends this "very cool" video featuring "a detailed walkthrough explaining each component of a Oracle Exalogic X2-2 machine," presented by Oracle Exalogic VP Development Brad Cameron. September OTN Member Offers | OTN Blog Save big on books from top tech publishers with these discounts for OTN members. Thought for the Day "Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday." — Unknown Source: Quote Garden

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• SOA Community Newsletter September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA partner community member Are you ready for Oracle Open World 2012? If you are planning to attend, make sure that you prepare your trip to San Francisco. If you could not make it, watch the keynotes live on-demand. You can also plan and decide to visit the SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium 2012 and meet Tim Hall and Demed Lher from our product management team in London. As an Oracle partner you will get 50% discount on the conference pass, please use the code DJMXZ370 and avail your discount. The BPM Solution Catalogue is now live, make sure you use the process examples and contribute your processes. SOA Proactive support is the best resource to support your SOA implementations. To administrate your SOA systems Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is the best tool, you can now attend thefree on-demand training. EM12c, Real User Experience Insight 12R1 gives you all the details, checkout our new demo. The BPM11g demo for Oracle E-Business Suite has become available. A wonderful SOA demo case is the Fusion Order Demo, Antony Reynolds posted an article how to update it on SOA Suite PS5. If you do use Coherence e.g. for SOA Suite, checkout the extension from our partner CloudTran. In this edition to this you will also find articles from: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB By Jian Liang & Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository by Nicolás Fonnegra Martinez and Markus Lohn & Exploring MDS Explorer by Mark Nelson & Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL by Rajesh Raheja & Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence by Jan van Zoggel & Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux Lonneke Dikmans & Generating an EJB SDO Service Interface for Oracle SOA Suite by Edwin Biemond. Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsSeptember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Release – Focus on your driving by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  The next time you’re twiddling dials on your car’s dashboard to get the air to blow in the right direction, and the right song to play on the stereo, while pulling on the wires to charge your phone and punching in passwords to re-sync your hands-free headset to take a call, consider this… Does having a better dashboard UI in your car improve your driving performance? The Tesla car has one of the most modern and intuitive dashboards in any commercial car today. It is actually based on the design of a smart phone, which can download apps and updates directly from the cloud.  The 17” touchscreen, Lynx-based dashboard totally integrates all channels and devices, allowing the driver to focus on the smooth driving and power of this luxury (toy) car.  What the folks at Tesla didn't do was avoid the complexity of our needs. Instead, they streamlined them. And, while we might not all be able to afford a Tesla, their approach demonstrates that a modern UI approach can ultimately make a positive difference in our lives and businesses.  This is why the productivity and effectiveness of a Modern Contact Center is many times greater than that of a traditional contact center. Agents in a Modern Contact Center get to focus on the task at hand, the customer engagement, rather than stumbling their way through Lego blocks of complexity.  The Oracle Service Cloud is a modern approach to customer service that empowers your agents to achieve greater focus on improving your operational and strategic success through streamlined business processes.  Here are some of the recent May 2014 release highlights to the Oracle Service Cloud: Performance Enhanced Desktop UI A modern agent desktop interface that optimizes clumsy tasks, logins, screens and workflows and is optimized for agent and system performance. Improvements include performance for drag-and-drop configurable views, saved searches, and improved caching for high-speed performance even during disconnected or slow internet access.  Customer Experience Routing A streamlined automatic way to connect the right customer need to the best agent skills, based on multidimensional variables such as product skills, language skills, workload, call volume to optimize the connection and resolution experience. On-The-Go Mobile Improvements to the Agent mobile app that extend connectivity to websites, and customer surveys that are mobile-ready and rendered for any device, and ensure the customer’s voice is captured while the insight is still top of mind.  Infused Social Engagement Enhancements to infused social capabilities allow agents to respond in social threads directly from within the agent desktop, with the information becoming part of the incident record for automatic actions (such as replay or escalate) triggered off the response. Front-End Siebel Contact Center The market leading online Web Customer Self-Service interface from the Oracle Service Cloud, is now out-of-the-box ready for Oracle Siebel customers. Deploy a new online web self-service interface in a matter of weeks to have customers self-serve and self-solve answers, with escalated incidents routed directly into the Oracle Siebel Contact Center. For more information on the latest enhancements for the Oracle Service Cloud, please see the Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Capabilities and Benefits. Related blogs: Oracle Service Cloud Feb 2014

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• Windows Phone 7 + Azure.and a couple of nuggets

  I recently gave a talk about Windows Phone 7 at a Bizpark Camp in San Francisco.  The camp had two focuses: Azure and Windows Phone 7.  My presentation covered WP7 portion of the camp.  During my presentation I highlighted the phone platform and talked about some of the differentiators from design, technology and a business standpoint.    Whenever I watch presentations or go to tech meet-ups I feel like I get the most value when I can walk away with a few nuggets that I wouldnt necessarily have known about otherwise.  That said, I tried to add a few resources into my presentation that should be helpful when building WP7 apps.      Nuggets Seeing that the camp was focused on Azure and WP7 I decided to augment my presentation with a code sample.  The intention was to give some insight on how to approach building WP7 applications that talk to Azure.  Some colleges of mine here at Clarity have posted a sample on codeplex focused on getting up and running with WP7 and Azure..you can check it out HERE.   The project is not a hello world app, and is targeted at people who have some experience with the platform and a working knowledge of silverlight. Also, during my presentation I mentioned some limitations with the current phone sdk.  Our sample code on contains work-abounds for the following: #1 Panorama Control #2  Tilt effect #3   Animating Frame #4   Sample architecture (leveraging MVVM light)  and coding patterns.  Note: For the sample phone project we used an azure token that will expire in the next couple of months.  When that happensin the downloads section of the codeplex project there a link to a local development fabric that can be used for local development Presentation Admittedly, the slide deck is pretty design heavy, and doesnt contain much text.  This was semi-intentional to encourage people to come out to the camps and hear it first hand.  There is some additional info found the notes of the PPTX.  Dont forget to check out the full presentation at the Chicago Bizspark Camp on May 21st here at the Clarity Office.  Or on June 4th in  Los Angeles. You can DOWNLOAD the Slides here:  PPTX  |  PDF or view it inline below.  View more presentations from eklimcz. Cheers! Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Windows Phone 7 + Azure.and a couple of nuggets

  I recently gave a talk about Windows Phone 7 at a Bizpark Camp in San Francisco.  The camp had two focuses: Azure and Windows Phone 7.  My presentation covered WP7 portion of the camp.  During my presentation I highlighted the phone platform and talked about some of the differentiators from design, technology and a business standpoint.    Whenever I watch presentations or go to tech meet-ups I feel like I get the most value when I can walk away with a few nuggets that I wouldnt necessarily have known about otherwise.  That said, I tried to add a few resources into my presentation that should be helpful when building WP7 apps.      Nuggets Seeing that the camp was focused on Azure and WP7 I decided to augment my presentation with a code sample.  The intention was to give some insight on how to approach building WP7 applications that talk to Azure.  Some colleges of mine here at Clarity have posted a sample on codeplex focused on getting up and running with WP7 and Azure..you can check it out HERE.   The project is not a hello world app, and is targeted at people who have some experience with the platform and a working knowledge of silverlight. Also, during my presentation I mentioned some limitations with the current phone sdk.  Our sample code on contains work-abounds for the following: #1 Panorama Control #2  Tilt effect #3   Animating Frame #4   Sample architecture (leveraging MVVM light)  and coding patterns.  Note: For the sample phone project we used an azure token that will expire in the next couple of months.  When that happensin the downloads section of the codeplex project there a link to a local development fabric that can be used for local development Presentation Admittedly, the slide deck is pretty design heavy, and doesnt contain much text.  This was semi-intentional to encourage people to come out to the camps and hear it first hand.  There is some additional info found the notes of the PPTX.  Dont forget to check out the full presentation at the Chicago Bizspark Camp on May 21st here at the Clarity Office.  Or on June 4th in  Los Angeles. You can DOWNLOAD the Slides here:  PPTX  |  PDF or view it inline below.  View more presentations from eklimcz. Cheers! Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Swiss Re increases data warehouse performance and deploys in record time

  - by KLaker

  Great information on yet another data warehouse deployment on Exadata. A little background on Swiss Re: In 2002, Swiss Re established a data warehouse for its client markets and products to gather reinsurance information across all organizational units into an integrated structure. The data warehouse provided the basis for reporting at the group level with drill-down capability to individual contracts, while facilitating application integration and data exchange by using common data standards. Initially focusing on property and casualty reinsurance information only, it now includes life and health reinsurance, insurance, and nonlife insurance information. Key highlights of the benefits that Swiss Re achieved by using Exadata: Reduced the time to feed the data warehouse and generate data marts by 58% Reduced average runtime by 24% for standard reports comfortably loading two data warehouse refreshes per day with incremental feeds Freed up technical experts by significantly minimizing time spent on tuning activities Most importantly this was one of the fastest project deployments in Swiss Re's history. They went from installation to production in just four months! What is truly surprising is the that it only took two weeks between power-on to testing the machine with full data volumes! Business teams at Swiss Re are now able to fully exploit up-to-date analytics across property, casualty, life, health insurance, and reinsurance lines to identify successful products. These points are highlighted in the following quotes from Dr. Stephan Gutzwiller, Head of Data Warehouse Services at Swiss Re:  "We were operating a complete Oracle stack, including servers, storage area network, operating systems, and databases that was well optimized and delivered very good performance over an extended period of time. When a hardware replacement was scheduled for 2012, Oracle Exadata was a natural choice—and the performance increase was impressive. It enabled us to deliver analytics to our internal customers faster, without hiring more IT staff" “The high quality data that is readily available with Oracle Exadata gives us the insight and agility we need to cater to client needs. We also can continue re-engineering to keep up with the increasing demand without having to grow the organization. This combination creates excellent business value.” Our full press release is available here: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/customersearch/swiss-re-1-exadata-ss-2050409.html. If you want more information about how Exadata can increase the performance of your data warehouse visit our home page: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata-database-machine/overview/index.html

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• 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

  - by Mike Stiles

  If customers have changed, if the way they research and shop have changed, if their expectations have changed, if their ability to act on dissatisfaction has changed, but your customer experience has NOT changed, what was once “good enough” may now be crippling. Well, the customer has changed, and why wouldn’t they? You’ve probably changed too in your role as consumer. There’s more info available, it’s easier to get, there’s more choice, you’re more mobile, you’re more connected, it’s easier to buy, and yes, it’s easier to switch brands if experiences don’t meet your now higher expectations. Thanks to technological advances, we as marketers can increasingly work borderline miracles. But if we’re still not adamantly adopting customer centricity, and if we aren’t making the customer experience paramount amongst business goals, the tech is wasted. A far more modern customer experience is called for. Here are 6 ways to get there: 1. Modern Marketing: Marketing data is aggregated and targeted to the right customers, who are getting personal, relevant communications. In return, you’re getting insight that finally properly attributes revenue to your marketing efforts. 2. Modern Selling: Demand is being driven across all channels with modern selling tools. Productivity is up thanks to coordinated communication and selling, and performance is ever optimized using powerful analytics. 3. Modern CPQ: You’re cross-selling and upselling more effectively since reps and channel partners have been empowered with the ability to quickly, automatically generate 100% accurate, customer-friendly quotes complete with price controls and automated approvals. 4. Modern Commerce: You’re leveraging data and delivering personalized, targeted digital experiences to everyone. You’re attracting more visitors, and you’re able to scale and keep up with the market and control the experience. 5. Modern Service: You’re better serving your customers by making it easier for them to engage with your brand, plus you’re lowering your costs by increasing agent and tech support efficiencies. 6. Modern Social: You’re getting faster, deeper, more accurate insights from social and turning content around faster, which then goes out to the right people at the right time in the right place. You’ve also gotten proactive in your service, and customers love that. For far too many brands, the buying journey of Need, Research, Select, Buy, Use, Recommend across the multiple connect points of Social, Mobile, Store, Call Center, Site, Ecommerce is a disconnected mess. Oracle’s approach to CX is to connect every interaction your customer has with your brand, avoiding the revenue losses lousy customer experiences bring. How important is the experience to customers? 94% are willing to pay more of their hard-earned money to have better ones, while a meager 1% say they get the good, consistent experiences they expect. Brands, your words aren’t as loud anymore, so your actions as they relate to customer experience are going to have to do the talking. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Julien Tromeur, freeimages.com

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Businesses have long relied on data mining to elicit patterns and forecast future demand and supply trends. Improvements in computing hardware, specifically storage and compute capacity, have significantly enhanced the ability to store and analyze mountains of data in ever shrinking time-frames. Nevertheless, the reality is that data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months.Faced with this data explosion, businesses are exploring means to develop human brain-like capabilities in their decision systems (including BI and Analytics) to make sense of the data storm, in other words business events, in real-time and respond pro-actively rather than re-actively. It is more like having a little bit of the right information just a little bit before hand than having all of the right information after the fact. To appreciate this thought better let's first understand the workings of the human brain.Neuroscience research has revealed that the human brain is predictive in nature and that talent is nothing more than exceptional predictive ability. The cerebral-cortex, part of the human brain responsible for cognition, thought, language etc., comprises of five layers. The lowest layer in the hierarchy is responsible for sensory perception i.e. discrete, detail-oriented tasks whereas each of the above layers increasingly focused on assembling higher-order conceptual models. Information flows both up and down the layered memory hierarchy. This allows the conceptual mental-models to be refined over-time through experience and repetition. Secondly, and more importantly, the top-layers are able to prime the lower layers to anticipate certain events based on the existing mental-models thereby giving the brain a predictive ability. In a way the human brain develops a "memory of the future", some sort of an anticipatory thinking which let's it predict based on occurrence of events in real-time. A higher order of predictive ability stems from being able to recognize the lack of certain events. For instance, it is one thing to recognize the beats in a music track and another to detect beats that were missed, which involves a higher order predictive ability.Existing decision systems analyze historical data to identify patterns and use statistical forecasting techniques to drive planning. They are similar to the human-brain in that they employ business rules very much like mental-models to chunk and classify information. However unlike the human brain existing decision systems are unable to evolve these rules automatically (AI still best suited for highly specific tasks) and  predict the future based on real-time business events. Mistake me not,  existing decision systems remain vital to driving long-term and broader business planning. For instance, a telco will still rely on BI and Analytics software to plan promotions and optimize inventory but tap into business events enabled predictive insight to identify specifically which customers are likely to churn and engage with them pro-actively. In the next post, i will depict the technology components that enable businesses to harness real-time events and drive predictive decision making.

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• Manic Monday - More OpenWorld Solaris Sessions: Developers, Cloud, Customer Insights, Hardware Optimization

  - by Larry Wake

  We're overflowing with Monday sessions; literally more than one person can take in. Learn more about what's new in Oracle Solaris Studio, hear about the latest x86 and SPARC hardware optimizations, get some insights on cloud deployment strategies, and find out from your peers what they're doing with Oracle Solaris. If you're an OpenWorld attendee, go to to Schedule Builder to guarantee your space in any session or lab. See yesterday's blog post and the "Focus on Oracle Solaris" guide for even more sessions. Monday, October 1st: 10:45 AM - Maximizing Your SPARC T4 Oracle Solaris Application Performance(CON6382,  Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3) Hear how customers and commercial software partners have reached peak performance on SPARC T4 servers and engineered systems with Oracle Solaris Studio and its latest tools for analyzing, reporting, and improving runtime performance: Autoparallelizing, high-performance compilers Performance Analyzer (used to find performance hotspots) Thread Analyzer (to expose data races and deadlocks) Code Analyzer (used to discover latent memory corruption issues) 10:45 Cloud Formation: Implementing IaaS in Practice with Oracle Solaris(CON8787, Moscone South 302) Decisions, decisions--at the same time, we've got a session that covers why Oracle Solaris is the ideal OS for public or private clouds, IaaS or PaaS, with built-in features for elastic infrastructure, unrivaled security, superfast installation and deployment, nonstop availability, and crystal-clear observability. This session will include a customer study on how Oracle Solaris is used in the cloud today to implement the Oracle stack. 12:15 PM - Customer Insight: Oracle Solaris on Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and SPARC SuperCluster(CON8760, Moscone South 270) Hear from customers what benefits they have realized from using the Oracle stack on Oracle Exadata and Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster and from using Oracle Solaris on those engineered systems, taking advantage of built-in lightweight OS virtualization (Zones), enterprise reliability and scale, and other key features. 1:45 PM - Case Study: Mobile Tornado Uses Oracle Technology for Better RAS and TCO?(CON4281, Moscone West 2005) Mobile Tornado develops and markets instant communication platforms, replacing traditional radio networks with cellular networks. Its critical concern is uptime. Find out how they've used Oracle Solaris, Netra SPARC T4, and Oracle Solaris Cluster, including Oracle Solaris ZFS and Zones, for their Oracle Database deployments to improve reliability and drive down cost. 3:15 PM - Technical Panel: Developing High Performance Applications on Oracle Solaris(CON7196, Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2) Engineers from the Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle Tuxedo development teams, and Oracle ISV Engineering discuss how they develop high-performance enterprise applications that take advantage of Oracle's SPARC and x86 servers, with Oracle Solaris Studio and new Oracle Solaris 11 features. Topics will include developer tools, parallel frameworks, best practices, and methodologies, as well as insights and case studies on parallelizing and optimizing application performance on Oracle Solaris. Bring your best questions! 3:15 PM -  x86 Power Management with Oracle Solaris: Current State, Opportunities, and Future(CON6271, Moscone West 2012) Another option for this time slot: learn about how Intel Xeon and Oracle Solaris work together to reduce server power consumption. This presentation addresses some of the recent power management improvements in Oracle Solaris, opportunities to further improve energy efficiency, and some future directions for Oracle Solaris power management.

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• Oracle Partner Architects Training

  - by mseika

  Dear Oracle Partner, There is a lot more to Oracle technology than meets the eye. Sure, you already belong to a small circle of our most experienced and committed partners. But are you making the best use possible of our technology solutions? Put it to the test.  Join the “Oracle Partner Architects Training”. It is aimed at providing your experts, architects and consultants with in-depth architectural knowledge about Oracle technology. Here is your chance to learn from the best. Seasoned speakers, exclusive content and no product marketing. Oracle technology beyond the obvious. Choose from any of the 40 recorded training sessions. Topics include:  • Security• Service integration • Database and options• Data integration • BI and applications• Applications and infrastructure• Hardware and software combinations The market and Oracle value specialized partners More information about specialization can be found on opn.oracle.com. Click through to OPN Program/Specialize “What’s in it for us?” Quite simply: the opportunity to gain the differentiation and competitive edge you need to stand out in the marketplace. • Differentiate your company through expertise in leading Oracle IT solutions;• Get your experts, architects and consultants up to speed on specialized services and solutions;• Make our customers’ shortlists. They are looking for value-added solutions for their business.   Recordings All sessions are recorded. After registering for a session in oraevents, you will receive the info to access the webex recording. Your timing, your tempo.  Registration and more information Visit architects.oraevents.eu to sign up for the recorded sessions. NOTE: Looking to get your consultants Oracle certified? One more reason to join the Oracle Partner Architects Training. It is the fast track to getting their expertise validated with an Oracle certificate. Training schedule  Choose from any of the 40 recorded training sessions: SECURITY THE PRACTICAL APPROACH •  Identity governance• Access management• Data privacy and protection• End-to-end security, layers of exposures•  Identity & access management, why and where to start?• Data security, how? SERVICE INTEGRATION A NEW ROADTO ENTERPRISE-WIDE SERVICE INTEGRATION • Oracle RUEI: maximize business value by insight into real end-user experiences•  Governance challenges in the services landscape•  Creating an agile enterprise (by Jeff Davies)• Oracle’s approach to SOA (by Jeff Davies) - guiding and accelerating SOA success• Technical case study – the SOA challenge• Oracle’s unified business process management suite 11g (incl. demo) DATABASE DATABASE AND OPTIONS, GOINGWIDE •  Understanding service level agreements for databases• Database lifecycle management• Data centric information lifecycle management DATA INTEGRATION  DIS FOR ARCHITECTS • Data integration solutions: an overview• ODI and goldengate• Data quality

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• Dark Sun Dispatch 001.5 (a review of City Under The Sand)

  - by Chris Williams

  City Under The Sand - a review I'm moderately familiar with the Dark Sun setting. I've read the other Dark Sun novels, ages ago and I recently started running a D&D 4.0 campaign in the Dark Sun world, so I picked up this book to help re-familiarize myself with the setting. Overall, it did accomplish that, in a limited way. The book takes place in Nibenay and a neighboring expanse of desert that includes a formerly buried city, a small town and a bandit outpost. The book does a more interesting job of describing Nibenese politics and the court of the ruling Sorcerer King, his templars and the expected jockeying for position that occurs between the Templar Wives. There is a fair amount of combat, which was interesting and fairly well detailed. The ensemble cast is introduced and eventually brought together over the first few chapters. Not a lot of backstory on most of the characters, but you get a feel for them fairly quickly. The storyline was somewhat predictable after the first third of the book. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about the 2-dimensional characterizations, and yes there were some... but it's easy to ignore because there is a lot going on in the book... several interwoven plotlines that all eventually converge. Where the book falls short... First, it appears to have been edited by a 4th grader who knows how to use spellcheck but lacks the attention to detail to notice the frequent occurence of incorrect words that often don't make sense or change the context of the entire sentence. It happened just enough to be distracting, and honestly I expect better from WOTC. Second, there is a lot of buildup to the end of the story... the big fight, the confrontation between good and evil, etc... which is handled in just a few pages and then the story basically just ends. Kind of a letdown, honestly. There wasn't a big finish, and it wasn't a cliffhanger, it just wraps up neatly and ends. It felt pretty rushed. Overall, aside from the very end, I enjoyed it. I really liked the insight into that region of Athas and it gave me some good ideas for fleshing out my own campaign. In that sense, the book served its purpose for me. If you're looking for a light read (got a 5-6 hour flight somewhere?) or you want to learn more about the Dark Sun setting, then I'd recommend this book.

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• Managing Regulated Content in WebCenter: USDM and Oracle Offer a New Part 11 Compliant Solution for Life Sciences

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post today provided by Oracle partner, USDM  Regulated Content in WebCenterUSDM and Oracle offer a new Part 11 compliant solution for Life Sciences (White Paper) Life science customers now have the ability to take advantage of all of the benefits of Oracle’s WebCenter Content, a global leader in Enterprise Content Management.   For the past year, USDM has been developing best practice compliance solutions to meet regulated content management requirements for 21 CFR Part 11 in WebCenter Content. USDM has been an expert in ECM for life sciences since 1999 and in 2011, certified that WebCenter was a 21CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform (White Paper).  In addition, USDM has built Validation Accelerators Packs for WebCenter to enable life science organizations to quickly and cost effectively validate this world class solution.With the Part 11 certification, Oracle’s WebCenter now provides regulated life science organizations  the ability to manage REGULATORY content in WebCenter, as well as the ability to take advantage of ALL of the additional functionality of WebCenter, including  a complete, open, and integrated portfolio of portal, web experience management, content management and social networking technology.  Here are a few screen shot examples of Part 11 functionality included in the product: E-Sign, E-Sign Rendor, Meta Data History, Audit Trail Report, and Access Reporting. Gone are the days that life science companies have to spend millions of dollars a year to implement, maintain, and validate ECM systems that no longer meet the ever changing business and regulatory requirements.  Life science companies now have the ability to use WebCenter Content, an ECM system with a substantially lower cost of ownership and unsurpassed functionality.Oracle has been #1 in life sciences because of their ability to develop cost effective, easy-to-use, scalable solutions which help increase insight and efficiency to drive growth for their customers.  Adding a world class ECM solution to this product portfolio allows life science organizations the chance to get rid of costly ECM systems that no longer meet their needs and use WebCenter, part of the Oracle Fusion Technology stack, with their other leading enterprise applications.USDM provides:•    Expertise in Life Science ECM Business Processes•    Prebuilt Life Science Configuration in WebCenter •    Validation Accelerator Packs for WebCenterUSDM is very proud to support Oracle’s expanding commitment to Life Sciences…. For more information please contact:  [email protected] Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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• How do I take responsibility for my code when colleague makes unnecessary improvements without notice?

  - by Jesslyn

  One of my teammates is a jack of all trades in our IT shop and I respect his insight. However, sometimes he reviews my code (he's second in command to our team leader, so that's expected) without a heads up. So sometimes he reviews my changes before they complete the end goal and makes changes right away... and has even broken my work once. Other times, he has made unnecessary improvements to some of my code that is 3+ months old. This annoys me for a few reasons: I am not always given a chance to fix my mistakes He has not taken the time to ask me what I was trying to accomplish when he is confused, which could affect his testing or changes I don't always think his code is readable Deadlines are not an issue and his current workload doesn't require any work in my projects other than reviewing my code changes. Anyways, I have told him in the past to please keep me posted if he sees something in my work that he wants to change so that I could take ownership of my code (maybe I should have said "shortcomings") and he's not been responsive. I fear that I may come off as aggressive when I ask him to explain his changes to me. He's just a quiet person who keeps to himself, but his actions continue. I don't want to banish him from making code changes (not like I could), because we are a team--but I want to do my part to help our team. Added clarifications: We share 1 development branch. I do not wait until all my changes complete a single task because I risk losing some significant work--so I make sure my changes build and do not break anything. My concern is that my teammate doesn't explain the reason or purpose behind his changes. I don't think he should need my blessing, but if we disagree on an approach I thought it would be best to discuss the pros and cons and make a decision once we both understand what is going on. I have not discussed this with our team lead yet as I would prefer to resolve personal disagreements without getting management involved unless it is necessary. Since my concern seemed more of personal issue than a threat to our work, I chose to not bother the team lead. I am working on code review process ideas--to help promote the benefits of more organized code reviews without making it all about my pet peeves.

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• BI&EPM in Focus November 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE IBM is Embracing Oracle Exalytics: The Velocity of Thought and Action (link) Customers Ambulance Victoria, Australia, uses analytics and modelling to serve the expanding needs of a growing population (link) Cablemás Selects Oracle to Speed Customer Data Insights (link) National Instruments Introduces New Business Intelligence Solutions—Runs Reports up to 30x Faster, and Expands Customer Insight (link) FLSmidth Ensures Precise, Transparent Financial Reporting at All Business Levels, Reduces Financial Consolidation Time by up to 40% (link) Enterprise Performance Management Partner Edgewater Ranzal Webinar Series Mitigate Your Biggest EPM Project Risk - Thursday, 21st November - Register here:  4.00 GMT Capital Planning in the Energy Industry - Tuesday, 26th November - Register here:  4.00 GMT Driving Value in the Retail Industry Using Hyperion Strategic Finance (HSF)  - Tuesday, 10th December - Register here:  7.00 GMT Dec 11, Look Smarter Selling Hyperion Profitability & Cost Management (HPCM) Webcast (link) EPM System Infrastructure Tips & Tricks Support: November EPM Patch Set Updates released Business Analytics Monthly Index - October 2013 Hyperion Smart View Assistance with OBIEE 11.1.1.7 Hyperion Disclosure Management 11.1.2.3.330 PSU 17444967 [Doc ID 1592645.1] Hyperion Financial Close Management (FCM) 11.1.2.3.100 PSU 16989110 [Doc ID 1592644.1] Business  Intelligence BI-Apps Whitepaper: Packaged Analytic Applications: Accelerating Time and Value By Wayne Eckerson (link) BI Apps Blog: A Closer Look at Oracle Price Analytics (link) Blog: Taking Your Business Scorecard Golfing (link) Blog: Practical Uses of Business Scorecards, from Company-Wide to Process Specific (link) Nov 19, Big Data at Work Series: How Delphi Harnesses Big Data to Improve Warranty Response & Customer Satisfaction (link) Rittman Mead Blog: Oracle BI Apps 11.1.1.7.1 – GoldenGate Integration Support: OBIEE Suite Bundle Patches (understand OBIEE naming convention) [Doc ID 1591422.1] Support Blog: Java update alert: Essbase Administration Services (EAS) 11.1.2.3 (link) Support Blog: OBIEE 11.1.1.7.131017 now available (link) /* 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-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• The Softer Side of Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  It’s election season in the U.S., and you know what that means. It means I stop by the recycling bin in my garage before entering the house with the contents of my mailbox. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my usual direct mail purge when I came across a piece from The Container Store®. This piece would have gone straight to the recycling bin, but the title stopped me: Learn what WE STAND FOR! Under full disclaimer, I’m probably a “frequent flier” at The Container Store. One can never be too organized! Now, back to the direct mail piece. I opened it to discover that The Container Store has taken their customer experience beyond “a shopping experience that makes you smile” to giving customers more insight and transparency into how they feel about their employees, the vendors they partner with, and the communities they live in. The direct mail piece included several employees showcasing a skill, hobby or talent with their photo and a personal note that used one word to describe what these employees believe The Container Store stands for. I do not recall the last time I read through an entire piece of direct mail. But this time, I pored over all the comments and photos.  Summer, a salesperson, believes that one word is PASSION. Thomas in distribution center inventory systems chooses the word ACTION. The list goes on to include MATCHLESS, FUN, FAMILY, LOVE, and EMPOWERMENT. The Container Store is running a contest asking you to tell them what nonprofit organization you stand for. Anyone can submit their favorite nonprofit to win cash, products and services from The Container Store. Don’t forget about the softer side of customer experience. With many organizations working feverishly to transform their business into being more customer-centric, it’s easy to get caught up in processes and technology. Focusing on people and social responsibility often falls behind and becomes a lower priority. Keeping people and social responsibility at the forefront is crucial. Your customers will use your processes and technology, but they will see or hear your people and feel their passion. The latter is what they will remember most about your brand. I’m sure there are many other great examples of the softer side of customer experience. Please share your examples in the comments section.

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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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• Need help on a problemset in a programming contest

  - by topher

  I've attended a local programming contest on my country. The name of the contest is "ACM-ICPC Indonesia National Contest 2013". The contest has ended on 2013-10-13 15:00:00 (GMT +7) and I am still curious about one of the problems. You can find the original version of the problem here. Brief Problem Explanation: There are a set of "jobs" (tasks) that should be performed on several "servers" (computers). Each job should be executed strictly from start time Si to end time Ei Each server can only perform one task at a time. (The complicated thing goes here) It takes some time for a server to switch from one job to another. If a server finishes job Jx, then to start job Jy it will need an intermission time Tx,y after job Jx completes. This is the time required by the server to clean up job Jx and load job Jy. In other word, job Jy can be run after job Jx if and only if Ex + Tx,y = Sy. The problem is to compute the minimum number of servers needed to do all jobs. Example: For example, let there be 3 jobs S(1) = 3 and E(1) = 6 S(2) = 10 and E(2) = 15 S(3) = 16 and E(3) = 20 T(1,2) = 2, T(1,3) = 5 T(2,1) = 0, T(2,3) = 3 T(3,1) = 0, T(3,2) = 0 In this example, we need 2 servers: Server 1: J(1), J(2) Server 2: J(3) Sample Input: Short explanation: The first 3 is the number of test cases, following by number of jobs (the second 3 means that there are 3 jobs for case 1), then followed by Ei and Si, then the T matrix (sized equal with number of jobs). 3 3 3 6 10 15 16 20 0 2 5 0 0 3 0 0 0 4 8 10 4 7 12 15 1 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 8 10 4 7 12 15 1 4 0 50 50 50 50 0 50 50 50 50 0 50 50 50 50 0 Sample Output: Case #1: 2 Case #2: 1 Case #3: 4 Personal Comments: The time required can be represented as a graph matrix, so I'm supposing this as a directed acyclic graph problem. Methods I tried so far is brute force and greedy, but got Wrong Answer. (Unfortunately I don't have my code anymore) Could probably solved by dynamic programming too, but I'm not sure. I really have no clear idea on how to solve this problem. So a simple hint or insight will be very helpful to me.

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Develop web site from existing software or cherry pick and use a web framework?

  - by erisco

  A small team and I are tasked with developing a web site. The client has referenced a particular open source project (we'll call it X) when describing some of the features. Because of this, the team wants to start with X and adapt it to satisfy the client. I have looked at X and its code and, in my opinion, it would be unwise. However, my experience is limited, and could really benefit from the insights of others so that I can figure out what I should be asserting as the right direction for the team. My red flags are going up and this is why. X was developed in the earlier days of PHP; 500 line blocks of code are the norm; global variables are abundant; giant switch cases are the norm for switching between which page is shown. There is no clear mapping between URL and where the code for that page sits. From a feature-set standpoint, X is actually software specialized for a different task and has dozens of features we don't need or have use for that come as core assumptions. We will be unable to adapt X through its plugin system. That said, there are a few features which can be mapped, with some modification, to suit our purposes. I believe this is the attraction the team feels. I would feel comfortable if, instead of using X directly, we lifted what is salvageable and useful to us. We can then use that code, and the same 3rd party libraries X is using, in a new code base built on top of a PHP web framework (particularly Agavi, so you understand what I mean by 'web framework'). The web framework gives us a strong MVC structure and provides the common facilities for web development, or adapters to work with 3rd party libraries that do so. We will also have a clean slate feature-wise to work from, which means we can work additively instead of subtractively. Because the code base is better structured, and contains none of what we don't need, it will be easier to document, which is a critical requirement of our client. So to summarize, the team wants to use X, whereas I want to take the bits we can from X and use a web framework instead. I want to bounce this opinion off of other's experiences so that I can be more informed. Thanks for your insight.

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