oracle advanced planning command center - Page 446

Creating a new naming context in OUD

- by Sylvain Duloutre

A naming context (also known as a directory suffix) is a DN that identifies the top entry in a locally held directory hierarchy. A new naming context can be created using ODSM, the OUD gui admin console, as described in http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E29407_01/admin.111200/e22648/server_config.htm#CBDGCJGF It can also be created using the dsconfig command lione as described below: Creation of a new naming context consists in 3 steps: First create a Local Backend Workflow element (myNewDb in this exemple) , responsible for the naming context base dn, e.g o=example. dsconfig create-workflow-element \ --set base-dn:o=example \ --set enabled:true \ --type db-local-backend \ --element-name myNewDb \ --hostname <your host> \ --port <admin port> \ --bindDN cn=Directory\ Manager \ --bindPasswordFile ****** \ --no-prompt Second, create a Workflow element (workFlowForMyNewDb in this exemple) associated with the Local Backend Workflow element. WorkFlow elements are used to route LDAP requests to the appropriate database, based on the target base dn. dsconfig create-workflow \ --set base-dn:o=example \ --set enabled:true \ --set workflow-element:myNewDb \ --type generic \ --workflow-name workFlowForMyNewDb \ --hostname <your host name> \ --port <admin port>\ --bindDN cn=Directory\ Manager \ --bindPasswordFile ****** \ --no-prompt Then, the workflow element must be made visible outside of the directory, i.e added to the internal "routing table". This is done by adding the Workflow to the appropriate Network Group. A Network group is used to classify incoming client connections and route requests to workflows. dsconfig set-network-group-prop \ --group-name network-group \ --add workflow:workFlowForMyNewDb \ --hostname <your hostname> \ --port <admin port>\ --bindDN cn=Directory\ Manager \ --bindPasswordFile ****** \ --no-prompt At that stage, it is possible to import entries to the new naming context o=example.

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Hey Retailers, Are You Ready For The Holiday Season?

- by Jeri Kelley

With online holiday spending reaching $35.3 billion in 2011 and American shoppers spending just under $750 on average on their holiday purchases this year, how ready is your business for the 2012 holiday season? ?? Today’s shoppers do not take their purchases lightly. They are more connected, interact with more resources to make decisions, diligently compare products and services, seek out the best deals, and ask for input from friends and family. This holiday season, as consumers browse for apparel, tablets, toys, and much more, they will be bombarded with retailer communication - from emails and commercials to countless search engine results and social recommendations. With a flurry of activity coming at consumers from every channel and competitor, your success this year will rely on communicating a consistent, personalized message no matter where your customers are shopping. Here are a few ideas to help with your commerce strategy this holiday season: CONSISTENCY COUNTS FOR MULTICHANNEL SHOPPERS??According to a November 2011 study commissioned by Oracle, “Channel Commerce 2011: The Consumer View,” 54% of consumers in the U.S. and Canada regularly employ two or more channels before they make a purchase. While each channel has its own unique benefit, user profile, and purpose, it’s critical that your shoppers have a consistent core experience wherever they’re looking for information or making a purchase. Be sure consumers can consistently search and browse the same product information and receive the same promotions online, on their mobile devices, and in-store.? USE YOUR CUSTOMER’S CONTEXT TO SURFACE RELEVANT CONTENTYour Web site is likely the hub of your holiday activity. According to a Monetate infographic, 39% of shoppers will visit your Web site directly to find out about the best holiday deals. Use everything you know about your customers from past purchase data to browsing history to provide a relevant experience at every click, and assemble content in a context that entices shoppers to buy online, or influences an offline purchase.? TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MOBILE BEHAVIOR?Having a mobile program is no longer a choice. Armed with smartphones and tablets, consumers now have access to more and more product information and can compare products and prices from anywhere. In fact, approximately 52% of smartphone users will use their device to research products, redeem coupons and use apps to assist in their holiday gift purchase. At a minimum, be sure your mobile environment has store information, consistent pricing and promotions, and simple checkout capabilities. ARM IN-STORE ASSOCIATES WITH TABLETS?According to RISNews.com, 31% of retailers plan to begin testing tablets in stores in 2012, 22% have already begun such testing and 6% had fully deployed tablets within stores. Take advantage of this compelling sales tool to get shoppers interacting with videos, user reviews, how-to guides, side-by-side product comparisons, and specs. Automatically trigger upsell and cross sell suggestions for store associates to recommend for each product or category, build in alerts for promotions, and allow associates to place orders and check inventory from their tablet. ? WISDOM OF THE CROWDS IS GOOD, BUT WISDOM FROM FRIENDS IS BETTER?Shoppers who grapple with options are looking for recommendations; they’d rather get advice from friends, and they’re more likely to spend more while doing so. In fact, according to an infographic by Mr. Youth, 66% of social media users made a purchase on Black Friday or Cyber Monday as a direct result of social media interactions with brands or family. This holiday season, be sure you are leveraging your social channels from Facebook to Pinterest to drive consistent promotions and help your brand to become part of the conversation. So, are you ready for the holidays this year?

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Standards Corner: Preventing Pervasive Monitoring

- by independentid

Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt On Wednesday night, I watched NBC’s interview of Edward Snowden. The past year has been tumultuous one in the IT security industry. There has been some amazing revelations about the activities of governments around the world; and, we have had several instances of major security bugs in key security libraries: Apple's ‘gotofail’ bug the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, not to mention Java’s zero day bug, and others. Snowden’s information showed the IT industry has been underestimating the need for security, and highlighted a general trend of lax use of TLS and poorly implemented security on the Internet. This did not go unnoticed in the standards community and in particular the IETF. Last November, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) met in Vancouver Canada, where the issue of “Internet Hardening” was discussed in a plenary session. Presentations were given by Bruce Schneier, Brian Carpenter, and Stephen Farrell describing the problem, the work done so far, and potential IETF activities to address the problem pervasive monitoring. At the end of the presentation, the IETF called for consensus on the issue. If you know engineers, you know that it takes a while for a large group to arrive at a consensus and this group numbered approximately 3000. When asked if the IETF should respond to pervasive surveillance attacks? There was an overwhelming response for ‘Yes'. When it came to 'No', the room echoed in silence. This was just the first of several consensus questions that were each overwhelmingly in favour of response. This is the equivalent of a unanimous opinion for the IETF. Since the meeting, the IETF has followed through with the recent publication of a new “best practices” document on Pervasive Monitoring (RFC 7258). This document is extremely sensitive in its approach and separates the politics of monitoring from the technical ones. Pervasive Monitoring (PM) is widespread (and often covert) surveillance through intrusive gathering of protocol artefacts, including application content, or protocol metadata such as headers. Active or passive wiretaps and traffic analysis, (e.g., correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes), or subverting the cryptographic keys used to secure protocols can also be used as part of pervasive monitoring. PM is distinguished by being indiscriminate and very large scale, rather than by introducing new types of technical compromise. The IETF community's technical assessment is that PM is an attack on the privacy of Internet users and organisations. The IETF community has expressed strong agreement that PM is an attack that needs to be mitigated where possible, via the design of protocols that make PM significantly more expensive or infeasible. Pervasive monitoring was discussed at the technical plenary of the November 2013 IETF meeting [IETF88Plenary] and then through extensive exchanges on IETF mailing lists. This document records the IETF community's consensus and establishes the technical nature of PM. The draft goes on to further qualify what it means by “attack”, clarifying that The term is used here to refer to behavior that subverts the intent of communicating parties without the agreement of those parties. An attack may change the content of the communication, record the content or external characteristics of the communication, or through correlation with other communication events, reveal information the parties did not intend to be revealed. It may also have other effects that similarly subvert the intent of a communicator. The past year has shown that Internet specification authors need to put more emphasis into information security and integrity. The year also showed that specifications are not good enough. The implementations of security and protocol specifications have to be of high quality and superior testing. I’m proud to say Oracle has been a strong proponent of this, having already established its own secure coding practices.

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Get the Picture: Pinterest for Marketers

- by Mike Stiles

When trying to determine on which networks to conduct social marketing, the usual suspects immediately rise to the top; Facebook & Twitter, then LinkedIn (especially if you’re B2B), then maybe some Google Plus to hedge SEO bets. So at what juncture do brands get excited about Pinterest? Pinterest has been easy for marketers to de-prioritize thanks to the perception its usage is so dominated by women. Um, what’s wrong with that? Women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. So if there are indeed over 30 million US women active on it monthly, and they do 92% of the pinning, and 84% are still active on it after 4 years, when did an audience of highly engaged, very likely sales conversions become low priority? Okay, if you’re a tech B2B SaaS product like the Oracle Social Cloud, Pinterest may not be where you focus. But if you operate in the top Pinterest categories, which are truly far-reaching, it’s time to take note of Pinterest’s performance to date: 40.1 million monthly users in the US (eMarketer). Over 30 billion pins, half of which were pinned in the last 6 months. (Big momentum) 75% of usage is on their mobile app. (In solid shape for the mobile migration) Pinterest sharing grew 58% in 2013, beating Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. (ShareThis) Pinterest is the 3rd most popular sharing platform overall (over email), with 48% of all sharing on tablets. Users referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy on e-commerce sites and tend to spend twice that of users coming from Facebook. (Shopify) To be fair, brands haven’t had any paid marketing opportunities on that platform…until recently. Users are seeing Promoted Pins in both category and search feeds from rollout brands like Gap, ABC Family, Ziploc, and Nestle. Are the paid pins annoying users? It seems more so than other social networks, they’re fitting right in to the intended user experience and being accepted, getting almost as many click-throughs as user pins. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose laid it out succinctly; Pinterest offers a place that’s image-centric, search-friendly, makes things easy to purchase, makes things easy to share, and puts users in an aspirational mood to buy. Pinterest is very confident in the value of that combo and that audience, with CPM rates 5x that of the most expensive Facebook ad, plus (at least for now) required spending commitments and required pin review by Pinterest for quality. The latest developments; a continued move toward search and discovery with enhancements like Guided Search to help you hone in on what interests you, Custom Categories, and the rumored Visual Search that stands to be a liberation from text. And most recently, Pinterest has opened up its API so brands can get access to deeper insights into the best search terms and categories in which to play ball, as well as what kinds of pins stand to perform best in those areas. As we learned in our rundown this week of Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, around 50% of marketers specifically intend on upping their use of Pinterest. If you’re a big believer in fishing where the fish are, that’s probably an efficient position to take. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Adam Lambert_Gorwyn, freeimages.com

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Mind Reading with the Raspberry Pi

- by speakjava

Mind Reading With The Raspberry Pi At JavaOne in San Francisco I did a session entitled "Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi". As part of this I showed some demonstrations of things I'd done using Java on the Raspberry Pi. This is the first part of a series of blog entries that will cover all the different aspects of these demonstrations. A while ago I had bought a MindWave headset from Neurosky. I was particularly interested to see how this worked as I had had the opportunity to visit Neurosky several years ago when they were still developing this technology. At that time the 'headset' consisted of a headband (very much in the Bjorn Borg style) with a sensor attached and some wiring that clearly wasn't quite production ready. The commercial version is very simple and easy to use: there are two sensors, one which rests on the skin of your forehead, the other is a small clip that attaches to your earlobe. Typical EEG sensors used in hospitals require lots of sensors and they all need copious amounts of conductive gel to ensure the electrical signals are picked up. Part of Neurosky's innovation is the development of this simple dry-sensor technology. Having put on the sensor and turned it on (it powers off a single AAA size battery) it collects data and transmits it to a USB dongle plugged into a PC, or in my case a Raspberry Pi. From a hacking perspective the USB dongle is ideal because it does not require any special drivers for any complex, low level USB communication. Instead it appears as a simple serial device, which on the Raspberry Pi is accessed as /dev/ttyUSB0. Neurosky have published details of the command protocol. In addition, the MindSet protocol document, including sample code for parsing the data from the headset, can be found here. To get everything working on the Raspberry Pi using Java the first thing was to get serial communications going. Back in the dim distant past there was the Java Comm API. Sadly this has grown a bit dusty over the years, but there is a more modern open source project that provides compatible and enhanced functionality, RXTXComm. This can be installed easily on the Pi using sudo apt-get install librxtx-java. Next I wrote a library that would send commands to the MindWave headset via the serial port dongle and read back data being sent from the headset. The design is pretty simple, I used an event based system so that code using the library could register listeners for different types of events from the headset. You can download a complete NetBeans project for this here. This includes javadoc API documentation that should make it obvious how to use it (incidentally, this will work on platforms other than Linux. I've tested it on Windows without any issues, just by changing the device name to something like COM4). To test this I wrote a simple application that would connect to the headset and then print the attention and meditation values as they were received from the headset. Again, you can download the NetBeans project for that here. Oracle recently released a developer preview of JavaFX on ARM which will run on the Raspberry Pi. I thought it would be cool to write a graphical front end for the MindWave data that could take advantage of the built in charts of JavaFX. Yet another NetBeans project is available here. Screen shots of the app, which uses a very nice dial from the JFxtras project, are shown below. I probably should add labels for the EEG data so the user knows which is the low alpha, mid gamma waves and so on. Given that I'm not a neurologist I suspect that it won't increase my understanding of what the (rather random looking) traces mean. In the next blog I'll explain how I connected a LEGO motor to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and then used my mind to control the motor!

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How to ace Skype Interviews

- by FelixWehmeyer

Many companies these days opt to include a Skype interview in the recruitment process, as it comes close to a face-to-face interview without the time and costs involved for both the company and the candidate. In some cases during the recruitment process at Oracle you also might be asked to conduct a Skype interview. To help you get started with this, we researched some websites to give you several tips and tricks. What most of the bloggers say about this topic is collected in this article to help you prepare. It is all about Technology The bit that can make a Skype interview more complicated than a face-to-face or phone interview is the fact you are using additional technology. Always check the video and audio capabilities of your computer to make sure they work properly. Be prepared for connections to be limited during the interview. Using a webcam can also be confusing, if you do not have a lot of experience using it. Make sure you look at the camera and not the monitor to avoid the impression you are looking away. Practice If you do not feel comfortable using the camera, do a mock interview with a friend or family member before you have the actual interview. Be aware that facial impressions or reactions come across differently on a monitor, so make sure to practice how you come across during the interview. Good lighting in the room also helps you make you look the best for the interviewer. You and your room Dress code, as in any face-to-face interview,is important to think about. Dress the same way as you would for face-to-face interviews and avoid patterns or informal clothing. Another tip,is to be aware of your surroundings. Make sure the room you use looks good on camera, making sure it is neat and tidy, also think about how the walls look behind you. Also make sure you do not get distracted during the interview by anyone or anything, as this will directly have an impact on your interview and your ability to focus and concentrate. What is in a name What goes for any account that you share during the recruitment process, either your email address or Skype name, is to make sure it comes across as professional. Try to avoid using nicknames or strange words in your accounts, stick to using a first name – last name or an abbreviation of the same. If you would like to read more about this topic, have a look at the links below which we used as inspiration for this blog article. 7 Deadly Skype Interview Sins is fun to read and to gives you some good advice to keep in mind. · http://www.inc.com/guides/201103/4-tips-for-conducting-a-job-interview-using-skype.html · http://blog.simplyhired.com/2012/05/5-tips-to-a-great-skype-interview.html · http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/07/11/skype.interview.tips.cb/index.html http://www.ehow.com/how_5648281_prepare-skype-interview.html

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Programmatically disclosing a node in af:tree and af:treeTable

- by Frank Nimphius

A common developer requirement when working with af:tree or af:treeTable components is to programmatically disclose (expand) a specific node in the tree. If the node to disclose is not a top level node, like a location in a LocationsView -> DepartmentsView -> EmployeesView hierarchy, you need to also disclose the node's parent node hierarchy for application users to see the fully expanded tree node structure. Working on ADF Code Corner sample #101, I wrote the following code lines that show a generic option for disclosing a tree node starting from a handle to the node to disclose. The use case in ADF Coder Corner sample #101 is a drag and drop operation from a table component to a tree to relocate employees to a new department. The tree node that receives the drop is a department node contained in a location. In theory the location could be part of a country and so on to indicate the depth the tree may have. Based on this structure, the code below provides a generic solution to parse the current node parent nodes and its child nodes. The drop event provided a rowKey for the tree node that received the drop. Like in af:table, the tree row key is not of type oracle.jbo.domain.Key but an implementation of java.util.List that contains the row keys. The JUCtrlHierBinding class in the ADF Binding layer that represents the ADF tree binding at runtime provides a method named findNodeByKeyPath that allows you to get a handle to the JUCtrlHierNodeBinding instance that represents a tree node in the binding layer. CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) your_af_tree_reference.getValue(); JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding ) model.getWrappedData(); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding treeDropNode = treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(dropRowKey); To disclose the tree node, you need to create a RowKeySet, which you do using the RowKeySetImpl class. Because the RowKeySet replaces any existing row key set in the tree, all other nodes are automatically closed. RowKeySetImpl rksImpl = new RowKeySetImpl(); //the first key to add is the node that received the drop //operation (departments). rksImpl.add(dropRowKey); Similar, from the tree binding, the root node can be obtained. The root node is the end of all parent node iteration and therefore important. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rootNode = treeBinding.getRootNodeBinding(); The following code obtains a reference to the hierarchy of parent nodes until the root node is found. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding dropNodeParent = treeDropNode.getParent(); //walk up the tree to expand all parent nodes while(dropNodeParent != null && dropNodeParent != rootNode){ //add the node's keyPath (remember its a List) to the row key set rksImpl.add(dropNodeParent.getKeyPath()); dropNodeParent = dropNodeParent.getParent(); } Next, you disclose the drop node immediate child nodes as otherwise all you see is the department node. Its not quite exactly "dinner for one", but the procedure is very similar to the one handling the parent node keys ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding> childList = (ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding>) treeDropNode.getChildren(); for(JUCtrlHierNodeBinding nb : childList){ rksImpl.add(nb.getKeyPath()); } Next, the row key set is defined as the disclosed row keys on the tree so when you refresh (PPR) the tree, the new disclosed state shows tree.setDisclosedRowKeys(rksImpl); AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addPartialTarget(tree.getParent()); The refresh in my use case is on the tree parent component (a layout container), which usually shows the best effect for refreshing the tree component.

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What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

- by Christina McKeon

American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

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What is the difference between Workcenters, Dashboards, and the Interaction Hub?

- by Matthew Haavisto

Oracle Open World has just concluded. Over the course of the conference, we presented several sessions covering different aspects of the PeopleSoft user experience, including Workcenters, Dashboards, and the PeopleSoft Interaction Hub (formerly known as the PeopleSoft Applications Portal). Although we've produced collateral on these features and covered them in sessions, it became apparent at the conference that customers still have many questions about the these products, including how they are licensed, how they are installed, what their various purposes are, and how they can be used together synergistically. Let's Start with Licensing and Installation As you may know, we've extended the restricted use license (RUL) for the Interaction Hub. This grants customers with PeopleTools 8.52 licenses the right to install the Interaction Hub for free for use as specified in the Tools license notes. Note that this means customers receive a restricted use license for the Interaction Hub that doesn't cost them an additional license fee, but it is a separate product, not part of PeopleTools or PeopleSoft applications, and is a separate installation. This means customers must provide the infrastructure to install and run the Hub, just like any other application. The benefits of using the Hub to unify your PeopleSoft user experience can be great. PeopleSoft applications have not yet delivered instances of the Hub with their products, though they may in the future. Workcenters and Dashboards, on the other hand, are frameworks provided by PeopleTools. No other license is required, and no additional installation of a separate product is needed (apart from PeopleTools and PeopleSoft applications). PeopleSoft applications are delivering instances of the workcenters and dashboards with their products. Some are available now, and more are coming in future releases. These delivered workcenter and dashboard instances require no additional licenses, and no additional installations beyond Tools and the applications that provide them. In addition, the workcenter and dashboard frameworks provided by PeopleTools can be used by customers to build their own workcenters and dashboards, and it's quite easy and simple to do so. What are Their Differences? What Purposes do they Serve? Workcenters, Dashboards and the Interaction Hub appear somewhat similar. They all contain pagelets, and have some visual characteristics in common. However, their strengths and purposes are very different, and they were designed to provide different benefits to your PeopleSoft ecosystem. Workcenters and Dashboards have the following characteristics: Designed for specific roles Focus on the daily tasks of those roles Help to streamline the work performed most often Personal view of my work world Makes navigation and search easier and quicker, particularly for transactions and decision support Reports and data needed for day-to-day work Personalizable, but minimal Delivered by PS Apps, but can be altered by customer for their requirements Customers can create their own Workcenters can be used for guided processes The Interaction Hub is designed to aggregate content from multiple applications, and is is used to unify the user experience of those applications. It offers a rich, web site-based user experience, and is often used to provide access to infrequently performed activities like benefits enrollment, payroll inquiries, life event changes, onboarding, and so on. Full-featured and robust Centrally administered Pushed to large audience Broad info like Company News Infrequent activities like benefits, not day-to-day tasks Self-service, access to employer info Central launch point for other activities and can navigate to workcenters and dashboards Deployed by customers or consultants, instances not delivered by PeopleSoft (at this time) Content management Unified PS application navigation Although these products are quite different and serve different purposes in your PeopleSoft environment, they can be used together to provide a richer, more efficient and engaging user experience for your all your user communities.

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The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates

- by Kathryn Perry

A guest post by Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps In my previous post, I talked about the value of the mobile revolution on businesses and workers. Now let me put on a different hat and view the world from the IT department and the IT leader’s viewpoint. The IT leader has different concerns – around privacy, potential liability of information leakage, and intellectual property protection. These concerns and the leader’s goals create a healthy tension with the users. For example, effective device management becomes a must have for the IT leader, especially if you look at the Android ecosystem as an example. There are benefits to the Android strategy, but there are also drawbacks, such as uniformity – in device management, in operating systems, and in the application taxonomy and capabilities. Whereas, if you compare Android to iOS, Apple's operating system, iOS is more unified, more streamlined, and easier to manage. In either case, this is where mobile device management in the cloud makes good sense. I don't think IT departments should be hosting device management and managing that complexity. It should be a cloud service and I predict it's going to be key for our customers. A New Focus for IT Departments So where does that leave the IT departments? I think their futures are in governance, which is a more strategic play than a tactical one. Device management is tactical and it's the “now” topic. But the mobile phenomenon, if you will, is going to drive significant change in terms of how IT plans, hosts, and deploys enterprise applications. For example, opening up enterprise applications for mobile users presents some challenges unless you deploy more complicated network topologies, such as virtual private networks and threat protection technology. If you really want employees to be mobile you need to remove those kinds of barriers. But I don’t think IT departments want to wrestle with exposing their private enterprise data centers and being responsible for hosted business applications – applications in a sense that they’re making vulnerable to the public world. This opens up a significant need and a significant driver for cloud applications. However, it's not just about taking away the complexity – it's also about taking away the responsibility. Why should every business have to carry the responsibility and figure out all the nuts and bolts of how to protect themselves in this public, mobile world? When you use apps in the cloud, either your vendor or your hosting partner should have figured all that out. They need to assure the business that they are adhering to all sorts of security and compliance regulations so users can be connected and have access to information anywhere anytime. More Ideas and Better Service What’s more interesting is the world of possibilities that the connected, cloud-based world enables. I believe that the one-size-fits-all, uber-best practices, lowest-common denominator-like capabilities will go away. IT will now be able to solve very specific business challenges for the different corporate functions it serves. In this new world, IT will play a key role in enabling different organizations within a company to be best in class and delivering greater value to the line of business managers. IT will actually help to differentiate. Net result is a more agile workforce and business because each department is getting work done its own way.

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Social HCM: Is Your Team Listening?

- by Mike Stiles

Does integrating Social HCM into your enterprise make sense? Consider Sam and Christina. Sam is a new hire at a big company. On the job 3 weeks, a question has come up on how to properly file an expense report to get reimbursed. It was covered in the onboarding session, but shockingly enough, Sam didn’t memorize or write down every word of the session. The answer is probably in a handout, in a stack of handouts 2 inches thick. It also might be on the employee web site…somewhere. Christina is a new hire at a different big company. She has the same question. She logs into her company’s social network, goes to the “new hires” group, asks her question and gets an answer in seconds. Christina says, “Cool!” Sam says, “Grrrr.” It’s safe to say the qualified talent your company wants is accustomed to using social platforms to communicate and get quick answers. As such, Christina is comfortable at her new company, whereas Sam is wondering what he’s gotten himself into. Companies that cling to talent communication and management systems that don’t speak to talent’s needs or expectations put themselves at risk. Right from the recruiting stage, prospects can determine if a company has embraced the communications tools of the 21st century. If they don’t see it, alarm bells go off. With great talent more in demand than ever, enterprises should reconsider making “this is the way we do it, you adapt to us” their mantra. Other blogs have clearly outlined that apart from meeting top recruits’ expectations, Social HCM benefits the organization itself in terms of efficiency, talent performance & measurement. Recruiting: Jobvite shows 64% of companies hired using social. 89% of job seekers are using social in their search. Social can give employers access to relevant communities of prospects and advance the brand. Nucleus Research found general hiring software can provide over 1,000% ROI by reducing churn and improving screening. Social talent acquisition should perform at least as well. Learning & Development:Employees, learning from the company or from peers, can be kept on top of the latest needed skillsets and engage in self-paced training so as to advance within the company. Performance Management:Just as gamers are egged on by levels and achievements, talent can reach for workplace kudos, be they shout-outs from peers & managers or formally established milestones. Plus employee reviews become consistent and fair as managers have access to the cumulative feedback social offers. Workflow and Collaboration:With workforces dispersing in terms of physical location, social provides a platform that helps eliminate drawbacks that would have brought just 10 years ago. Finding and connecting with just the right colleague to get the most relevant info at any given time has never been more possible…or expected. While yes, marketing has taken the social lead inside the enterprise, HCM (with the word “human” right there in its name) is the obvious locale for the next big integration of social in business. The technology is there. At Oracle, Fusion HCM apps are deeply embedded with Social HCM…just one example of systems taking social across the enterprise. Christina’s company is communicating with her in ways she’s used to. Sam’s company may as well be trying to talk to him using signal flags. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.xchng

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Call For Papers Tips and Tricks

- by speakjava

This year's JavaOne session review has just been completed and by now everyone who submitted papers should know whether they were successful or not. I had the pleasure again this year of leading the review of the 'JavaFX and Rich User Experiences' track. I thought it would be useful to write up a few comments to help people in future when submitting session proposals, not just for JavaOne, but for any of the many developer conferences that run around the world throughout the year. This also draws on conversations I recently had with various Java User Group leaders at the Oracle User Group summit in Riga. Many of these leaders run some of the biggest and most successful Java conferences in Europe. Try to think of a title which will sound interesting. For example, "Experiences of performance tuning embedded Java for an ARM architecture based single board computer" probably isn't going to get as much attention as "Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java on the Raspberry Pi". When thinking of the subject and title for your talk try to steer clear of sessions that might be too generic (and so get lost in a group of similar sessions). Introductory talks are great when the audience is new to a subject, but beware of providing sessions that are too basic when the technology has been around for a while and there are lots of tutorials already available on the web. JavaOne, like many other conferences has a number of fields that need to be filled in when submitting a paper. Many of these are selected from pull-down lists (like which track the session is applicable to). Check these lists carefully. A number of sessions we had needed to be shuffled between tracks when it was thought that the one selected was not appropriate. We didn't count this against any sessions, but it's always a good idea to try and get the right one from the start, just in case. JavaOne, again like many other conferences, has two fields that describe the session being submitted: abstract and summary. These are the most critical to a successful submission. The two fields have different names and that is significant; a frequent mistake people make is to write an abstract for a session and then duplicate it for the summary. The abstract (at least in the case of JavaOne) is what gets printed in the show guide and is typically what will be used by attendees when deciding what sessions to attend. This is where you need to sell your session, not just to the reviewers, but also the people who you want in your audience. Submitting a one line abstract (unless it's a really good one line) is not usually enough to decide whether this is worth investing an hour of conference time. The abstract typically has a limit of a few hundred characters. Try to use as many of them as possible to get as much information about your session across. The summary should be different from the abstract (and don't leave it blank as some people do). This field is where you can give the reviewers more detail about things like the structure of the talk, possible demonstrations and so on. As a reviewer I look to this section to help me decide whether the hard-sell of the title and abstract will actually be reflected in the final content. Try to make this comprehensive, but don't make it excessively long. When you have to review possibly hundreds of sessions a certain level of conciseness can make life easier for reviewers and help the cause of your session. If you've not made many submissions for talks in the past, or if this is your first, try to give reviewers places to find background on you as a presenter. Having an active blog and Twitter handle can also help reviewers if they're not sure what your level of expertise is. Many call-for-papers have places for you to include this type of information. It's always good to have new and original presenters and presentations for conferences. Hopefully these tips will help you be successful when you answer the next call-for-papers.

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Call for Papers for both Devoxx UK and France now open!

- by Yolande

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The two conferences are taking place the last week of March 2013 with London on March 26th and 27 and Paris on March 28th and 29th. Oracle fully supports "Devoxx UK" and "Devoxx France" as a European Platinum Partner. Submit proposals and participate in both conferences since they are a two-hour train ride away from one another. The Devoxx conferences are designed “for developers by developers.” The conference committees are looking for speakers who are passionate developers unafraid to share their knowledge of Java, mobile, web and beyond. The sessions are about frameworks, tools and development with in-depth conference sessions, short practical quickies, and bird-of-a-feather discussions. Those different formats allow speakers to choose the best way to present their topics and can be mentioned during the submission process Devoxx has proven its success under Stephan Janssen, organizer of Devoxx in Belgium for the past 11 years. Devoxx has been the biggest Java conference in Europe for many years. To organize those local conferences, Stephan has enrolled the top community leaders in the UK and France. Ben Evans and Martijn Verberg are the leaders of London Java User Group (JUG) and are also known internationally for starting the Adopt-a-JSR program. Antonio Goncalves is the leader of the Paris JUG. He organized last year’s Devoxx France, which was a big success with twice the size first expected. The organizers made sure to add the local character to the conferences. "The community energy has to feel right," said Ben Evans and for that he picked an "old Victoria hall" for the venue. Those leaders are part of very dynamic Java communities in France and in the UK. France has 22 JUGs; the Paris JUG alone has 2,000 members. The UK has over 50,000 developers working in London and its surroundings; a lot of them are Java developers working in the financial industry. The conference fee is kept as low as possible to encourage those developers to attend. Devoxx promises to be crowded and sold out in advance. Make sure to submit your talks to both Devoxx UK and France before January 31st, 2013.

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Get Fanatical About Your Followers

- by Mike Stiles

In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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Managing Operational Risk of Financial Services Processes – part 2/2

- by Sanjeev Sharma

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} In my earlier blog post, I had described the factors that lead to compliance complexity of financial services processes. In this post, I will outline the business implications of the increasing process compliance complexity and the specific role of BPM in addressing the operational risk reduction objectives of regulatory compliance. First, let’s look at the business implications of increasing complexity of process compliance for financial institutions: · Increased time and cost of compliance due to duplication of effort in conforming to regulatory requirements due to process changes driven by evolving regulatory mandates, shifting business priorities or internal/external audit requirements · Delays in audit reporting due to quality issues in reconciling non-standard process KPIs and integrity concerns arising from the need to rely on multiple data sources for a given process Next, let’s consider some approaches to managing the operational risk of business processes. Financial institutions considering reducing operational risk of their processes, generally speaking, have two choices: · Rip-and-replace existing applications with new off-the shelf applications. · Extend capabilities of existing applications by modeling their data and process interactions, with other applications or user-channels, outside of the application boundary using BPM. The benefit of the first approach is that compliance with new regulatory requirements would be embedded within the boundaries of these applications. However pre-built compliance of any packaged application or custom-built application should not be mistaken as a one-shot fix for future compliance needs. The reason is that business needs and regulatory requirements inevitably out grow end-to-end capabilities of even the most comprehensive packaged or custom-built business application. Thus, processes that originally resided within the application will eventually spill outside the application boundary. It is precisely at such hand-offs between applications or between overlaying processes where vulnerabilities arise to unknown and accidental faults that potentially result in errors and lead to partial or total failure. The gist of the above argument is that processes which reside outside application boundaries, in other words, span multiple applications constitute a latent operational risk that spans the end-to-end value chain. For instance, distortion of data flowing from an account-opening application to a credit-rating system if left un-checked renders compliance with “KYC” policies void even when the “KYC” checklist was enforced at the time of data capture by the account-opening application. Oracle Business Process Management is enabling financial institutions to lower operational risk of such process ”gaps” for Financial Services processes including “Customer On-boarding”, “Quote-to-Contract”, “Deposit/Loan Origination”, “Trade Exceptions”, “Interest Claim Tracking” etc.. If you are faced with a similar challenge and need any guidance on the same feel free to drop me a note.

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Brazil is Hot for Social Media

- by Mike Stiles

Today’s guest blog is from Oracle SVP Product Development Reggie Bradford, fresh off a visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil where he spoke at the Dachis Social Business Summit and spent some time getting a personal taste for the astonishing growth of social in Brazil, both in terms of usage and engagement. I knew it was big, but I now have an all-new appreciation for why the Wall Street Journal branded Brazil the “social media capital of the universe.” Brazil has the world’s 5th largest economy, an expanding middle class, an active younger demo market, a connected & outgoing culture, and an ongoing embrace of the social media platforms. According to comScore's 2012 Brazil Digital Future in Focus report, 97% are using social media, and that’s not even taking mobile-only users into account. There were 65 million Facebook users in 2012, spending an average 535 minutes there, up 208%. It’s one of Twitter’s fastest growing markets and the 2nd biggest market for YouTube. Instagram usage has grown over 300% since last year. That by itself is exciting, but look at the opportunity for social marketing brands. 74% of Brazilian social users follow brands on Facebook, and 59% have praised a company on either Twitter or Facebook. A 2011 Oh! Panel study found 81% of social networkers there used social to research new products and 75% went there looking for discounts. B2C eCommerce sales in Brazil is projected to hit $26.9 billion by 2015. I bet I’m not the only one who sees great things ahead, and I was fortunate enough give a keynote ABRADI, an association of leading digital agencies in Brazil with 53 execs from 35 agencies attending. I was also afforded the opportunity to give my impressions of what’s going on in Brazil to Jornal Propoganda & Marketing, one of the most popular publications in Latin America for marketers. I conveyed that especially in an environment like Brazil, where social users are so willing to connect and engage brands, marketers need to back away from the heavy-handed, one-way messaging of old school advertising and move toward genuine relationships and trust-building. To aide in this, organizational and operation changes must be embraced inside the enterprise. We've talked often about the new, tighter partnership forming between the CIO and CMO. If this partnership is not encouraged, fostered and resourced, the increasing amount of time consumers spend on mobile and digital, and the efficiencies and integrations offered by cloud-based software cannot be exploited. These are the kinds of changes that can yield social data that, when combined with enterprise data, helps you come to know your social audiences intimately and predict their needs. Consumers are always connected and need your brand to be accessible at any time, be it for information or customer service. And, of course, all of this is happening quite publicly. The holistic, socially-enable enterprise connects social to customer service systems and all other customer touch points, facilitating the kind of immediate, real-time, gratifying response customers are coming to expect. Social users in Brazil are highly active and clearly willing to meet us as brands more than halfway. Empowering yourself with a social management technology platform will have you set up to maximize this booming social market…from listening & monitoring to engagement to analytics to workflow & automation to globalization & language support. Brands, it’s time to be as social as the great people of Brazil are. Obrigado! @reggiebradfordPhoto: Gualberto107, freedigitalphotos.net

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Finalists for Community Manager of the Year Announced

- by Mike Stiles

For as long as brand social has been around, there’s still an amazing disparity from company to company on the role of Community Manager. At some brands, they are the lead social innovators. At others, the task has been relegated to interns who are at the company temporarily. Some have total autonomy and trust. Others must get chain-of-command permission each time they engage. So what does a premiere “worth their weight in gold” Community Manager look like? More than anyone else in the building, they have the most intimate knowledge of who the customer is. They live on the front lines and are the first to detect problems and opportunities. They are sincere, raving fans of the brand themselves and are trusted advocates for the others. They’re fun to be around. They aren’t salespeople. Give me one Community Manager who’s been at the job 6 months over 5 focus groups any day. Because not unlike in speed dating, they must immediately learn how to make a positive, lasting impression on fans so they’ll want to return and keep the relationship going. They’re informers and entertainers, with a true belief in the value of the brand’s proposition. Internally, they live at the mercy of the resources allocated toward social. Many, whose managers don’t understand the time involved in properly curating a community, are tasked with 2 or 3 too many of them. 63% of CM’s will spend over 30 hours a week on one community. They come to intuitively know the value of the relationships they’re building, even if they can’t always be shown in a bar graph to the C-suite. Many must communicate how the customer feels to executives that simply don’t seem to want to hear it. Some can get the answers fans want quickly, others are frustrated in their ability to respond within an impressive timeframe. In short, in a corporate world coping with sweeping technological changes, amidst business school doublespeak, pie charts, decks, strat sessions and data points, the role of the Community Manager is the most…human. They are the true emotional connection to the real life customer. Which is why we sought to find a way to recognize and honor who they are, what they do, and how well they have defined the position as social grows and integrates into the larger organization. Meet our 3 finalists for Community Manager of the Year. Jeff Esposito with VistaprintJeff manages and heads up content strategy for all social networks and blogs. He also crafts company-wide policies surrounding the social space. Vistaprint won the NEDMA Gold Award for Twitter Strategy in 2010 and 2011, and a Bronze in 2011 for Social Media Strategy. Prior to Vistaprint, Jeff was Media Relations Manager with the Long Island Ducks. He graduated from Seton Hall University with a BA in English and a minor in Classical Studies. Stacey Acevero with Vocus In addition to social management, Stacey blogs at Vocus on influential marketing and social media, and blogs at PRWeb on public relations and SEO. She’s been named one of the #Nifty50 Women in Tech on Twitter 2 years in a row, as well as included in the 15 up-and-coming PR pros to watch in 2012. Carly Severn with the San Francisco BalletCarly drives engagement, widens the fanbase and generates digital content for America’s oldest professional ballet company. Managed properties include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and G+. Prior to joining the SF Ballet, Carly was Marketing & Press Coordinator at The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where she graduated with a degree in English. We invite you to join us at the first annual Oracle Social Media Summit November 14 and 15 at the Wynn in Las Vegas where our finalists will be featured. Over 300 top brand marketers, agency executives, and social leaders & innovators will be exploring how social is transforming business. Space is limited and the information valuable, so get more info and get registered as soon as possible at the event site.

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Two Weeks To Go, Still Time to Register

- by speakjava

Yes, it's now only two weeks to the start of the 17th JavaOne conference! This will be my ninth JavaOne, I came fairly late to this event, attending for the first time in 2002. Since then I've missed two conferences, 2006 for the birth of my son (a reasonable excuse I think) and 2010 for reasons we'll not go into here. I have quite the collection of show devices, I've still got the WoWee robot, the HTC phone for JavaFX, the programmable pen and the Sharp Zaurus. The only one I didn't keep was the homePod music player (I wonder why?) JavaOne is a special conference for many reasons, some of which I list here: A great opportunity to catch up on the latest changes in the Java world. This is not just in terms of the platform, but as much about what people are doing with Java to build new and cool applications. A chance to meet people. We have these things called BoFs, which stands for "Birds of a Feather", as in "Birds of a feather, flock together". The idea being to have sessions where people who are interested in the same topic don't just get to listen to a presentation, but get to talk about it. These sessions are great, but I find that JavaOne is as much about the people I meet in the corridors and the discussions I have there as it is about the sessions I get to attend. Think outside the box. There are a lot of sessions at JavaOne covering the full gamut of Java technologies and applications. Clearly going to sessions that relate to your area of interest is great, but attending some of the more esoteric sessions can often spark thoughts and stimulate the imagination to go off and do new and exciting things once you get back. Get the lowdown from the Java community. Java is as much about community as anything else and there are plenty of events where you can get involved. The GlassFish party is always popular and for Java Champions and JUG leaders there's a couple of special events too. Not just all hard work. Oracle knows how to throw a party and the appreciation event will be a great opportunity to mingle with peers in a more relaxed environment. This year Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon will be playing live. Add free beer and what more could you want? So there you have it. Just a few reasons for why you want to attend JavaOne this year. Oh, and of course I'll be presenting three sessions which is even more reason to go. As usual I've gone for some mainstream ("Custom Charts" for JavaFX) and some more 'out there' ("Java and the Raspberry Pi" and "Gestural Interfaces for JavaFX"). Once again I'll be providing plenty of demos so more than half my luggage this year will consist of a Kinect, robot arm, Raspberry Pis, gamepad and even an EEG sensor. If you're a student there's one even more attractive reason for going to JavaOne: It's Free! Registration is here. Hope to see you there!

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Setting MTU on Exalogic

- by csoto

For many reasons, a system administrator may want to change the MTU settings of a server. But in a system like Exalogic which contains lots of interconnected nodes and other various components, it's important to understand how this applies to the different networks. For example, when bringing up bonding of InfiniBand an error like the following may be thrown: Bringing up interface bond1: SIOCSIFMTU: Invalid argument Both scripts ifcfg-ib0 and ifcfg-ib1 (from the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ direectory) have MTU set to 65500, which is a valid MTU value only if all IPoIB slaves operate in connected mode and are configured with the same value, so the line below must be added to both network scripts and then restart the network: CONNECTED_MODE=yes By the way, an error of the form “SIOCSIFMTU: Invalid argument” indicates that the requested MTU was rejected by the kernel. Typically this would be due to it exceeding the maximum value supported by the interface hardware. In that case you must either reduce the MTU to a value that is supported or obtain more capable hardware. This problem has been seen when trying to modify the MTU using the ifconfig command, like the output of the example below: [root@elxxcnxx ~]# ifconfig ib1 mtu 65520 SIOCSIFMTU: Invalid argument It's important to insist that in most cases the nodes must be rebooted after the MTU size has been changed. Although in some circumstances it may work without a reboot, it is not how it is typically documented. Now, in order to achieve a reduced memory consumption and improve performance for network traffic received on IPoIB related interfaces, it is recommend to reduce the MTU value in interface configuration files for IPoIB related bonds from 65520 to 64000. The change needs to be made to interface configuration files under the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory and applies to the interface configuration files for bonds over IPoIB related slave devices, for example /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond1. However, keep in mind that the numeric portion of the interface filenames that corresponding to IPoIB interfaces is expected to vary across compute nodes and vServers and so cannot be relied upon to identify which interface files are for bonds are over IPoIB rather than EoIB related slave interfaces. To fix these MTU values to the recommended settings, there are very useful instructions and a script on the MOS Note 1624434.1, and it's applicable physical and virtual configurations of Exalogic. Regarding the recommended MTU value for EoIB related interfaces, its maximum appropriate value is 1500. If for some reason a vServer has been created with a higher value (set on the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 file), then it must be fixed. An error like the following could be thrown under this circumstance: [root@vServer ~]# service network restart ... Bringing up interface bond0: SIOCSIFMTU: Invalid argument Also an error like the one below can be seen on the /var/log/messages file of the vServer: kernel: T5074835532 [mlx4_vnic] eth1:vnic_change_mtu:360: failed: new_mtu 64000 2026 The MOS Note 1611657.1 is very useful for this purpose.

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All hail the Excel Queen

- by Tim Dexter

An excellent question this past week from dear ol Blighty; actually from Brian at Nextgen Clearing Ltd in the big smoke (London). Brian was developing an excel template and wanted to be able to reference the data fields multiple times inside the Excel template. Damn good question and I of course has some wacky solutions, from macros and cell referencing in Excel to pre-processing the data with an XSL stylesheet to copy the data multiple times so it could be referenced multiple times. All completely outlandish, enter our Queen of Excel, Shirley from the development team. Shirley is singlehandedly responsible for the Excel templates, I put her through six months of hell a few years back, with a host of Excel template requirements. She was more than up to the challenge and has developed some great features. One of those, is the ability to use the hidden XDO_METADATA sheet to map the data to custom named fields so they can be used multiple times in the template. So simple and very neat! Excel template and regular Excel users will know that you can only use the naming function once ie the names have to be unique across the workbook so you can not reuse a cell/group name. To get around this you can just come up with as many cell names as you want and map them in the XDO_METADATA sheet to the data columns/fields in your XML data set:. For example: XDO_?DEPTNO_SUMMARY? <?DEPTNO?> XDO_?DNAME_SUMMARY? <?DNAME?> XDO_GROUP_?G_D_DETAIL? <xsl:for-each-group select=".//G_D" group-by="./DEPTNO"> XDO_?DEPTNO_DETAIL? <?DEPTNO?> As you can see DEPTNO has been referenced twice and mapped to different named values in the left hand column. These values can then be used to name individual cells in the Excel template. You'll also notice a mix of Publisher <? ...?> and native XSL commands. So the world is your oyster on the mapping and the complexity you might need for calculations or string manipulation. Shirley has kindly built out a sample Excel template, data and result here so you can see how it all hangs together. the XDO_METADATA sheet is hidden, just right click on the sheet names and use the Unhide command to show it.

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MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.2 has been released

- by fernando

MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.2, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is the first of two beta releases intended to introduce users to the new features in the release. This release is feature complete it should be stable enough for users to understand the new features and how we expect them to work. As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment. It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6 It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.6 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features: * Stored routine debugging * Entity Framework 4.3 Code First support * Pluggable authentication (now third parties can plug new authentications mechanisms into the driver). * Full Visual Studio 2012 support: everything from Server Explorer to Intellisense & the Stored Routine debugger. Stored Procedure Debugging ------------------------------------------- We are very excited to introduce stored procedure debugging into our Visual Studio integration. It works in a very intuitive manner by simply clicking 'Debug Routine' from Server Explorer. You can debug stored routines, functions & triggers. Some of the new features in this release include: * Besides normal breakpoints, you can define conditional & pass count breakpoints. * Now the debugger editor shows colorizing. * Now you can change the values of locals in a function scope (previously caused deadlock due to functions executing within their own transaction). * Now you can also debug triggers for 'replace' sql statements. * In general anything related to locals, watches, breakpoints, stepping & call stack should work in a similar way to the C#'s Visual Studio debugger. Some limitations remains, due to the current debugger architecture: * Some MySQL functions cannot be debugged currently (get_lock, release_lock, begin, commit, rollback, set transaction level).. * Only one debug session may be active on a given server. The Debugger is feature complete at this point. We look forward to your feedback. Documentation ------------------------------------- The documentation is still being developed and will be readily available soon (before Beta 2). You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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MySQL Server 5.6 defaults changes

- by user12626240

We're improving the MySQL Server defaults, as announced by Tomas Ulin at MySQL Connect. Here's what we're changing: Setting Old New Notes back_log 50 50 + ( max_connections / 5 ) capped at 900 binlog_checksum off CRC32 New variable in 5.6 binlog_row_event_max_size 1k 8k flush_time 1800 Windows changes from 1800 to 0 Was already 0 on other platforms host_cache_size 128 128 + 1 for each of the first 500 max_connections + 1 for every 20 max_connections over 500, capped at 2000 New variable in 5.6 innodb_autoextend_increment 8 64 Now affects *.ibd files. 64 is 64 megabytes innodb_buffer_pool_instances 0 8. On 32 bit Windows only, if innodb_buffer_pool_size is greater than 1300M, default is innodb_buffer_pool_size / 128M innodb_concurrency_tickets 500 5000 innodb_file_per_table off on innodb_log_file_size 5M 48M InnoDB will always change size to match my.cnf value. Also see innodb_log_compressed_pages and binlog_row_image innodb_old_blocks_time 0 1000 1 second innodb_open_files 300 300; if innodb_file_per_table is ON, higher of table_open_cache or 300 innodb_purge_batch_size 20 300 innodb_purge_threads 0 1 innodb_stats_on_metadata on off join_buffer_size 128k 256k max_allowed_packet 1M 4M max_connect_errors 10 100 open_files_limit 0 5000 See note 1 query_cache_size 0 1M query_cache_type on/1 off/0 sort_buffer_size 2M 256k sql_mode none NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION See later post about default my.cnf for STRICT_TRANS_TABLES sync_master_info 0 10000 Recommend: master_info_repository=table sync_relay_log 0 10000 sync_relay_log_info 0 10000 Recommend: relay_log_info_repository=table. Also see Replication Relay and Status Logs table_definition_cache 400 400 + table_open_cache / 2, capped at 2000 table_open_cache 400 2000 Also see table_open_cache_instances thread_cache_size 0 8 + max_connections/100, capped at 100 Note 1: In 5.5 there was already a rule to make open_files_limit 10 + max_connections + table_cache_size * 2 if that was higher than the user-specified value. Now uses the higher of that and (5000 or what you specify). We are also adding a new default my.cnf file and guided instructions on the key settings to adjust. More on this in a later post. We're also providing a page with suggestions for settings to improve backwards compatibility. The old example files like my-huge.cnf are obsolete. Some of the improvements are present from 5.6.6 and the rest are coming. These are ideas, and until they are in an official GA release, they are subject to change. As part of this work I reviewed every old server setting plus many hundreds of emails of feedback and testing results from inside and outside Oracle's MySQL Support team and the many excellent blog entries and comments from others over the years, including from many MySQL Gurus out there, like Baron, Sheeri, Ronald, Schlomi, Giuseppe and Mark Callaghan. With these changes we're trying to make it easier to set up the server by adjusting only a few settings that will cause others to be set. This happens only at server startup and only applies to variables where you haven't set a value. You'll see a similar approach used for the Performance Schema. The Gurus don't need this but for many newcomers the defaults will be very useful. Possibly the most unusual change is the way we vary the setting for innodb_buffer_pool_instances for 32-bit Windows. This is because we've found that DLLs with specified load addresses often fragment the limited four gigabyte 32-bit address space and make it impossible to allocate more than about 1300 megabytes of contiguous address space for the InnoDB buffer pool. The smaller requests for many pools are more likely to succeed. If you change the value of innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf you will see a message like this in the error log file at the next restart, instead of the old error message: [Warning] InnoDB: Resizing redo log from 2*64 to 5*128 pages, LSN=5735153 One of the biggest challenges for the defaults is the millions of installations on a huge range of systems, from point of sale terminals and routers though shared hosting or end user systems and on to major servers with lots of CPU cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of fast disk space. Our past defaults were for the smaller systems and these change that to larger shared hosting or shared end user systems, still with a bias towards the smaller end. There is a bias in favour of OLTP workloads, so reporting systems may need more changes. Where there is a conflict between the best settings for benchmarks and normal use, we've favoured production, not benchmarks. We're very interested in your feedback, comments and suggestions.

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The Future of M2M in a Connected World

- by Kristin Rose

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} There is no denying that the technological landscape as we know it is drastically changing all thanks to three little words – Machine to Machine. The M2M platform has taken over as one of the industry’s main buzz words and there is no question as to why! Just 5 months ago we had a guest post on “Machine to Machine – The Internet of Things – It’s about the Data.” Now companies are extending the use of M2M data to increase opportunity and intelligence across the Enterprise. Just this week, Oracle announced the results of its “Designing an M2M Platform for the Connected World” research, examining the evolving drivers behind ‘Machine to Machine’ (M2M) projects and how those changes are impacting solution requirements. Be sure to read this exciting report here! To Infinity and Beyond, The OPN Communications Team Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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When should I use a Process Model versus a Use Case?

- by Dave Burke

This Blog entry is a follow on to https://blogs.oracle.com/oum/entry/oum_is_business_process_and and addresses a question I sometimes get asked…..i.e. “when I am gathering requirements on a Project, should I use a Process Modeling approach, or should I use a Use Case approach?” Not surprisingly, the short answer is “it depends”! Let’s take a scenario where you are working on a Sales Force Automation project. We’ll call the process that is being implemented “Lead-to-Order”. I would typically think of this type of project as being “Process Centric”. In other words, the focus will be on orchestrating a series of human and system related tasks that ultimately deliver value to the business in a cost effective way. Put in even simpler terms……implement an automated pre-sales system. For this type of (Process Centric) project, requirements would typically be gathered through a series of Workshops where the focal point will be on creating, or confirming, the Future-State (To-Be) business process. If pre-defined “best-practice” business process models exist, then of course they could and should be used during the Workshops, but even in their absence, the focus of the Workshops will be to define the optimum series of Tasks, their connections, sequence, and dependencies that will ultimately reflect a business process that meets the needs of the business. Now let’s take another scenario. Assume you are working on a Content Management project that involves automating the creation and management of content for User Manuals, Web Sites, Social Media publications etc. Would you call this type of project “Process Centric”?.......well you could, but it might also fall into the category of complex configuration, plus some custom extensions to a standard software application (COTS). For this type of project it would certainly be worth considering using a Use Case approach in order to 1) understand the requirements, and 2) to capture the functional requirements of the custom extensions. At this point you might be asking “why couldn’t I use a Process Modeling approach for my Content Management project?” Well, of course you could, but you just need to think about which approach is the most effective. Start by analyzing the types of Tasks that will eventually be automated by the system, for example: Best Suited To? Task Name Process Model Use Case Notes Manage outbound calls Ö A series of linked human and system tasks for calling and following up with prospects Manage content revision Ö Updating the content on a website Update User Preferences Ö Updating a users display preferences Assign Lead Ö Reviewing a lead, then assigning it to a sales person Convert Lead to Quote Ö Updating the status of a lead, and then converting it to a sales order As you can see, it’s not an exact science, and either approach is viable for the Tasks listed above. However, where you have a series of interconnected Tasks or Activities, than when combined, deliver value to the business, then that would be a good indicator to lead with a Process Modeling approach. On the other hand, when the Tasks or Activities in question are more isolated and/or do not cross traditional departmental boundaries, then a Use Case approach might be worth considering. Now let’s take one final scenario….. As you captured the To-Be Process flows for the Sales Force automation project, you discover a “Gap” in terms of what the client requires, and what the standard COTS application can provide. Let’s assume that the only way forward is to develop a Custom Extension. This would now be a perfect opportunity to document the functional requirements (behind the Gap) using a Use Case approach. After all, we will be developing some new software, and one of the most effective ways to begin the Software Development Lifecycle is to follow a Use Case approach. As always, your comments are most welcome.

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EPPM Is a Must-Have Capability as Global Energy and Power Industries Eye US$38 Trillion in New Investments

- by Melissa Centurio Lopes

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “The process manufacturing industry is facing an unprecedented challenge: from now until 2035, cumulative worldwide investments of US$38 trillion will be required for drilling, power generation, and other energy projects,” Iain Graham, director of energy and process manufacturing for Oracle’s Primavera, said in a recent webcast. He adds that process manufacturing organizations such as oil and gas, utilities, and chemicals must manage this level of investment in an environment of constrained capital markets, erratic supply and demand, aging infrastructure, heightened regulations, and declining global skills. In the following interview, Graham explains how the right enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) technology can help the industry meet these imperatives. Q: Why is EPPM so important for today’s process manufacturers? A: If the industry invests US$38 trillion without proper cost controls in place, a huge amount of resources will be put at risk, especially when it comes to cost overruns that may occur in large capital projects. Process manufacturing companies must not only control costs, but also monitor all the various contractors that will be involved in each project. If you’re not managing your own workers and all the interdependencies among the different contractors, then you’ve got problems. Q: What else should process manufacturers look for? A: It’s also important that an EPPM solution has the ability to manage more than just capital projects. For example, it’s best to manage maintenance and capital projects in the same system. Say you’re due to install a new transformer in a power station as part of a capital project, but routine maintenance in that area of the facility is scheduled for that morning. The lack of coordination could lead to unforeseen delays. There are also IT considerations that impact capital projects, such as adding servers and network cable for a control system in a power station. What organizations need is a true EPPM system that’s not just for capital projects, maintenance, or IT activities, but instead an enterprisewide solution that provides visibility into all types of projects. Read the complete Q&A here and discover the practical framework for successfully managing this massive capital spending.

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