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• Announcing Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g

  - by [email protected]

  Today Oracle announced Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g. This is a major release for us, and reinforces our three key themes at Oracle: Complete New in this release - Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a single, unified repository. Every piece of content - documents, HTML pages, digital assets, scanned images - is stored and accessbile directly from the repository, whether you are working on websites, creating brand logos, processing accounts payable invoices, or running records and retention functions. It makes complete, end-to-end management of content possible, from the point it enters the organization, through its entire lifecycle. Also new in this release, the installation, access, monitoring and administration of Oracle ECM Suite 11g is centralized. As a complete system, organizations can lower the costs of training and usage by having a centralized source of information that is easily administered. As part of this new unified repository release, Oracle has released a benchmarking white paper that shows the extreme performance and scalability of Oracle ECM Suite. When tested on a two node UCM Server running on Sun Oracle DB Machine Half Rack Hardware with an Exadata storage server, Oracle ECM Suite 11g is able to ingest over 178 million documents per day. Open Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a service-oriented architecture. All functions are available through standards-based services calls in Web Services or Java. In this release Oracle unveils Open Web Content Management. Open Web Content Management is a revolutionary approach to web content management that decouples the content management process from the process of creating web applications. One piece of this approach is our one-click web content management. With one click, a web application builder can drag content services into their application, enabling their users to also edit content with just one click. Open Web Content Management is also open because it enables Web developers to add Web content management to new and existing JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces applications Open content distribution - Oracle ECM Suite 11g offers flexible deployment options with a built-in smart cache so organizations can deliver Web sites or Web applications without requiring Oracle ECM Suite as part of the delivery system Integrated Oracle ECM Suite 11g also offers a series of next generation desktop integrations, providing integrations such as: New MS Office integration with menus to access managed content, insert managed links, and compare managed documents using standard MS Office reviewing tools Automatic identity tagging of documents on download - to help users understand which versions they are viewing and prevent duplicate content items in the content repository. New "smart productivity folders" to show a users workflow inbox, saved searches and checked out content directly from Windows Explorer Drag and drop metadata pop-ups Check in and check out for all file formats with any standard WebDAV server As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents initiative, Oracle Content Management 11g also provides certified application integrations with solution templates You can read the press release here. You can see more assets at the launch center here. You can sign up for the announcement webinar and hear more about the new features here. You can read the benchmarking study here.

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• Tom Cruise: Meet Fusion Apps UX and Feel the Speed

  - by ultan o'broin

  Unfortunately, I am old enough to remember, and now to admit that I really loved, the movie Top Gun. You know the one - Tom Cruise, US Navy F-14 ace pilot, Mr Maverick, crisis of confidence, meets woman, etc., etc. Anyway, one of more memorable lines (there were a few) was: "I feel the need, the need for speed." I was reminded of Tom Cruise recently. Paraphrasing a certain Senior Vice President talking about Oracle Fusion Applications and user experience at an all-hands meeting, I heard that: Applications can never be too easy to use. Performance can never be too fast. Developers, assume that your code is always "on". Perfect. You cannot overstate the user experience importance of application speed to users, or at least their perception of speed. We all want that super speed of execution and performance, and increasingly so as enterprise users bring the expectations of consumer IT into the work environment. Sten Vesterli (@stenvesterli), an Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Advocate, also addressed the speed point artfully at an Oracle Usability Advisory Board meeting in Geneva. Sten asked us that when we next Googled something, to think about the message we see that Google has found hundreds of thousands or millions of results for us in a split second (for example, About 8,340,000 results (0.23 seconds)). Now, how many results can we see and how many can we use immediately? Yet, this simple message communicating the total results available to us works a special magic about speed, delight, and excitement that Google has made its own in the search space. And, guess what? The Oracle Application Development Framework table component relies on a similar "virtual performance boost", says Sten, when it displays the first 50 records in a table, and uses a scrollbar indicating the total size of the data record set. The user scrolls and the application automatically retrieves more records as needed. Application speed and its perception by users is worth bearing in mind the next time you're at a customer site and the IT Department demands that you retrieve every record from the database. Just think of... Dave Ensor: I'll give you all the rows you ask for in one second. If you promise to use them. (Again, hat tip to Sten.) And then maybe think of... Tom Cruise. And if you want to read about the speed of Oracle Fusion Applications, and what that really means in terms of user productivity for your entire business, then check out the Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Fusion Applications white papers on the usable apps website.

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• Silverlight Cream for November 20, 2011 - 2 -- #1170

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Oliver Fuh, Jeremy Likness, Derik Whittaker, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Handling Extremely Large Data Sets in Silverlight" Jeremy Likness WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #8: Contacts API" Jeff Blankenburg LightSwitch: "LightSwitch Chat Application Using A Data Source Extension" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up Check out Shawn Wildermuth's take on the AppStore and WP7 in general: 40,000 Apps - What Does It Mean? Be sure to check out Jesse Liberty & Paul Betts new book: Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ, I've just had a little time to look at mine, but don't let the size fool you... this is the good stuff! From SilverlightCream.com: LightSwitch Chat Application Using A Data Source Extension In his latest LightSwitch post, Michael Washington gives up code that will enable two people using the same LightSwitch app to chat. Great detailed tutorial as usual! Handling AdControl Fetching Exception WindowsPhoneGeek turns the blog reigns over to Oliver Fuh for this post about using the AdControl in your WP7 app and handling a common exception you get with the Microsoft AdControl Handling Extremely Large Data Sets in Silverlight In this excerpt from his book, Jeremy Likness discusses reading *LARGE* data sets with Silverlight using 3 different patterns: OData, WCF RIA Services, and MVVM. Using MVVM with the AutoCompleteTextBox in Silverlight 4 Derik Whittaker takes a break from WinRT to discuss the Silverlight 4 AutoCompleteTextBox and MVVM ... including a custom Behavior to allow the backing property to be updated and a command to trigger background searches Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Jesse Liberty scored Peter Torr on his Latest Yet Another Podcast .. talking about Multitasking on Windows Phone including background agents, the backstack, and other Mango features 31 Days of Mango | Day #8: Contacts API Jeff Blankenburg's Day 8 is about a new namespace on WP7: Microsoft.Phone.UserData ... now giving us the ability to treat the user's contact list like a local database 31 Days of Mango | Day #9: Calendar API On Day 9 in his series, Jeff Blankenburg revisits the Microsoft.Phone.UserData namespace and looks at another set of data: the calendar Want to Decompile Silverlight XAP files? Try JustDecompile Beta! Michael Crump has a post up about the new free developer productivity tool from Telerik that provides assembly browsing and decompiling: JustDecompile ... Just download it! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• How to Code Faster (Without Sacrificing Quality)

  - by ashes999

  I've been a professional coder for a several years. The comments about my code have generally been the same: writes great code, well-tested, but could be faster. So how do I become a faster coder, without sacrificing quality? For the sake of this question, I'm going to limit the scope to C#, since that's primarily what I code (for fun) -- or Java, which is similar enough in many ways that matter. Things that I'm already doing: Write the minimal solution that will get the job done Write a slew of automated tests (prevents regressions) Write (and use) reusable libraries for all kinds of things Use well-known technologies where they work well (eg. Hibernate) Use design patterns where they fit into place (eg. Singleton) These are all great, but I don't feel like my speed is increasing over time. I do care, because if I can do something to increase my productivity (even by 10%), that's 10% faster than my competitors. (Not that I have any.) Besides which, I've consistently gotten this feeback from my managers -- whether it was small-scale Flash development or enterprise Java/C++ development. Edit: There seem to be a lot of questions about what I mean by fast, and how I know I'm slow. Let me clarify with some more details. I worked in small and medium-sized teams (5-50 people) in various companies over various projects and various technologies (Flash, ASP.NET, Java, C++). The observation of my managers (which they told me directly) is that I'm "slow." Part of this is because a significant number of my peers sacrificed quality for speed; they wrote code that was buggy, hard to read, hard to maintain, and difficult to write automated tests for. My code generally is well-documented, readable, and testable. At Oracle, I would consistently solve bugs slower than other team-members. I know this, because I would get comments to that effect; this means that other (yes, more senior and experienced) developers could do my work in less time than it took me, at nearly the same quality (readability, maintainability, and testability). Why? What am I missing? How can I get better at this? My end goal is simple: if I can make product X in 40 hours today, and I can improve myself somehow so that I can create the same product at 20, 30, or even 38 hours tomorrow, that's what I want to know -- how do I get there? What process can I use to continually improve? I had thought it was about reusing code, but that's not enough, it seems.

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• Oracle WebCenter: The Best of the Best

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  You may remember that the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  Last week, we provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter, and this week, we'll focus on Convergence and how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best..Our development team has been working very hard to bring all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform that provides a robust foundation for moving customers into the future.  Each of the development teams still maintain their existing products to support the current customers,  but they've been tasked with converging their unique best of breed features into the new WebCenter release so that it will meet the broadest set of use cases possible. For example, we've taken the fastest and most scalable portlet engine in the industry with Oracle WebLogic Portal, integrated it within WebCenter, and improved performance further, to deliver even more performance for our customers.  In addition, we've focused on extending the reach of all the different user experience resources so that customers can deliver robust capabilities into their existing portals, applications, composite applications, dashboards, mobile applications, really any channel that requires information.  And finally, we've combined a whole set of community and multi-site capabilities leveraging the pioneering capabilities of Plumtree portal directly into the new WebCenter release.  While at the same time we've built and delivered the new WebCenter release, we've also provided new feature releases of all the existing products.  In this way, customers can continue to gain value out of their existing investments while at the same time have the smoothest path to upgrading to the new WebCenter release. With the new WebCenter release, we are delivering a converged platform to address all portal requirements that have been delivered by different point products in our portal portfolio in the past. Additionally, this release delivers the most modern user experience that goes well beyond the experience the other portal products provided. This is because the new WebCenter release has been built from the ground up with modern technologies around rich clients, SOA, and customizations compared with other portal products whose architecture has been adapted to add capabilities like AJAX, personalization, and social computing.The new WebCenter release addresses the broadest set of use cases using single product set and single architecture spanning extranet sites to social communities. It helps customers manage, maintain and develop one technology set, but leverage it throughout their organization whether it's embedded in an application or a new destination for improved customer and employee productivity. Additionally, the new release of WebCenter leverages the best and most performant features of all the existing portfolio products to deliver the fastest and most scalable portal platform.  Most importantly, it supports the broadest development models spanning from J2EE/Java to HTML/REST to .NET.Keep checking back this week as we provide additional resources and information on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter is the Best of the Best - converging all the best capabilities from each of the existing portal products into one modern user experience platform.

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• User Experience Highlights in Siebel: Direct from George Jacob

  - by mvaughan

  By Misha Vaughan and Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience This is the first in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights coming in various Oracle product families. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, as well as a thoughtful approach to pushing UX capabilities into the underlying tooling. Of course, you can also expect to get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines.Today’s post is on Siebel. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend Siebel OpenWorld presentations. Our first interview is with George Jacob, the Group Vice President for CRM Applications. George Jacob Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of Siebel? A: Contemporary: Siebel runs in all browsers and all browser-capable devices using the latest web technology standards, such as Javascript, CSS, and HTML 5.Productive: Siebel is designed for a user experience that reduces clutter and user keystrokes.User-sensitive: The user experience enables Siebel to adapt easily to site and user preferences.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers? A:  Customers are very excited about our refresh of the Siebel user interface framework; the Siebel roadmap and user interface sessions at Oracle OpenWorld last year overflowed. We have had to turn back customer requests to participate in the early adopter program because we had more than we could handle. Customers are calling this a game-changer for Siebel.Q: So the UX highlights are popular? A: Yes, the UX highlights are very popular, although to a certain extent we expected this!  Q: What’s coming in Siebel on a mobile platform? A: Our current mobile offering is based on Windows Mobile (native application), and is fairly mature (over 5 years). The new Siebel Open User Interface Framework, by virtue of working on all browsers, will run – when it is released this year – on tablets and smartphones. This is one of the reasons a number of customers are most excited about our UX changes. Views of Siebel data on mobile devices Q: What are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at OOW? A: We are working on the Siebel Open User Interface Framework, to be released this year in the Siebel 2012 8.1.1.9 & 8.2.2.2 innovation packs. We are also working on Connected Mobile applications for Sales, Service, Consumer Goods and Pharmaceuticals, and Disconnected Mobile applications for Pharmaceuticals in the same release. We are building specialized applications that exploit the new UI framework for Telco Order Capture and for Life Sciences healthcare professional visits. Our 2012 delivery will be the foundation for further user experience enhancements, next year and beyond.Q: What do you want Siebel customers to know? A:  We are excited to be focused on improving the user experience of Siebel applications, and it is encouraging to see the positive feedback from Siebel customers and partners.If you would like to see more in the Siebel user experience, be sure to check out these sessions at OpenWorld: CON9700 - Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap CON9703 - User Interface Innovations with the New Siebel “Open UI” CON9705 - Unleash the Power of “Open UI” CON9697 - Mobile Solutions for Siebel CRM

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• A New Home for E-Business Suite Customer Adoption Information

  - by linda.fishman.hoyle

  Phew! I made it! A new home with my name. Let's talk about E-Business Suite. So much is going on and more and more customers are upgrading and implementing the latest release. I think I will highlight in this blog entry the most recent press release we issued 2 weeks ago about our Applications Unlimited success but in the release, we name several customers who are live on E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and then have a fabulous quote from a customer who is doing great things with our product.   Here is a link to the press release To make it easy for you, I am pulling out just the E-Business Suite information Oracle E-Business Suite: Oracle® E-Business Suite Release 12.1 provides organizations of all sizes, across all industries and regions, with a global business foundation that helps them reduce costs and increase productivity through a portfolio of rapid value solutions, integrated business processes and industry-focused solutions. The latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite was designed to help organizations make better decisions and be more competitive by providing a global or holistic view of their operations. Abu Dhabi Media Company, Agilysis, C3 Business Solutions, Chicago Public Schools, Datacard Group, Guidance Software, Leviton Manufacturing, McDonald's, MINOR International, Usana Health Sciences, Zamil Plastic Industries Ltd. and Zebra Technologies are just a few of the organizations that have deployed the latest release of the Oracle E-Business Suite to help them make better decisions and be more competitive, while lowering costs and increasing performance. Customer Speaks "Leviton Manufacturing makes a very diverse line of products including electrical devices and data center products that we sell globally. We upgraded to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to support our service business with change management, purchasing, accounts payable, and our internal IT help desk," said Bob MacTaggart, CIO of Leviton Manufacturing. "We consolidated seven Web sites that we used to host individually onto iStore. In addition, we run a site, using the Oracle E-Business Suite configurator, pricing and quoting for our sales agents to do configuration work. This site can now generate a complete sales proposal using Oracle functionality; we actually generate CAD drawings - the actual drawings themselves - based on configuration results. It used to take six to eight weeks to generate these drawings and now it's all done online in an hour to two hours by our sales agents themselves, totally self-service. It does everything they need. From our point of view that is a major business success. Not only is it a very cool, innovative application, but it also puts us about two years ahead of our competition."

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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• Silverlight Cream for April 27, 2010 -- #849

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mike Snow, Kunal Chowdhury, Giorgetti Alessandro, Alexander Strauss, Corey Schuman, Kirupa, John Papa, Miro Miroslavov, Michael Washington, and Jeremy Likness. Shoutouts: Erik Mork and crew have posted their latest This Week In Silverlight April 23 2010 The Silverlight Team announced Microsoft releases Silverlight-powered Windows Intune beta Jesse Liberty has posted his UK and Ireland Slides and Links The Expression Blend and Design Blog reports a Minor Update to The Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Tip of the Day #6 – Toast Notifications Mike Snow has Tip #6 up today and it's about Toast notifications in OOB apps: Restrictions, creation, showing, and the code. Silverlight Tutorials Chapter 2: Introduction to Silverlight Application Development Part 2 of Kunal Chowdhury's Introductory tutorial set is up ... he's covering how to create a Silverlight project, what's contained in it, and creating a User Control. Silverlight, M-V-VM ... and IoC - part 3 Giorgetti Alessandro has part 3 of his Silverlight, IOC, and MVVM series up... this one with an example using the code discussed previously. The project is on CodePlex, and he's not done with the series. Application Partitioning with MEF, Silverlight and Windows Azure – Part I Alexander Strauss is discussing Silverlight and MEF for loosely-coupled and partitioned apps. He's also using Azure in this discussion. geekSpeak Recording - Five Key Developer Features in Expression Blend with Corey Schuman Check out the latest geekSpeak on Channel 9 where Corey Schuman talks about the 5 key Developer Features in Expression Blend that will improve your productivity. Using the ChangePropertyAction Kirupa is discussing and demonstrating ChangePropertyAction. Check out the demo near the top of the post, then read how to do it, and download the source. 3 Free Silverlight Demos John Papa blogged about the 2 demos (with source) that have been updated to SL4, and a new one all by Microsoft Luminaries Karen Corby, Adam Kinney, Mark Rideout, Jesse Bishop, and John Papa: "ScrapBook", "HTML and Video Puzzle", and "Rich Notepad". Floating Visual Elements I like Miro Miroslavov's comment: "every Silverlight application “must” have some objects floating around in a quite 3D manner" :) ... well they do that on the CompletIT site, and this is part 2 of their explanation of how all that goodness works. MVVM – A Total Design Change Of Your Application With No Code With some Blend goodness, Michael Washington completely reorganizes the UI of an MVVM application without touching any code ... project included MVVM with Transaction and View Locator Example Jeremy Likness responded to reader requests and has an example up, with explanation, of marrying his last two posts: transactions with MVVM and View Model Locator. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQL SERVER – Sharing your ETL Resources Across Applications with Ease

  - by pinaldave

  Frequently an organization will find that the same resources are used in multiple ETL applications, for example, the same database, general purpose processing logic, or file system locations.  Creating an easy way to reuse these resources across multiple applications would increase efficiency and reduce errors.  Moreover, not every ETL developer has the same skill set, and it is likely that one developer will be more adept at writing code while another is more comfortable configuring database connections.  Real productivity gains will come when these developers are able to work independently while still making their work available to others assigned to the same project.  These are the benefits of a centralized version control system. Of course, most version control systems could be used to store and serve files, but the real need is to store and serve entire ETL applications so that each developer’s ongoing work can immediately benefit from another developer’s completed work.  In other words, the version control system needs to be tightly integrated with the tools used to develop the ETL application. The following screen shot shows such a tool. Desktop ETL tool that tightly integrates with a central version control system Developers can checkout or commit entire projects or just a single artifact.  Each artifact may be managed independently so if you need to go back to an earlier version of one artifact, changes you may have made to other artifacts are not lost.  By being tightly integrated into the graphical environment used to create and edit the project artifacts, it is extremely easy and straight-forward to move your files to and from the version control system and there is no dependency on another vendor’s version control system.  The built in version control system is optimized for managing the artifacts of ETL applications. It is equally important that the version control system supports all of the actions one typically performs such as rollbacks, locking and unlocking of files, and the ability to resolve conflicts.  Note that this particular ETL tool also has the capability to switch back and forth between multiple version control systems. It also needs to be easy to determine the status of an artifact.  Not just that it has been committed or modified, but when and by whom.  Generally you must query the version control system for this information, but having it displayed within the development environment is more desirable. Who’s ETL tool works in this fashion?  Last month I mentioned the data integration solution offered by expressor software.  The version control features I described in this post are all available in their just released expressor 3.1 Standard Edition through the integration of their expressor Studio development environment with a centralized metadata repository and version control system. You can download their Studio application, which is free, or evaluate the full Standard Edition on your own hardware.  It may be worth your time. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• IT Admin for Thrill Seekers

  - by Tony Davis

  A developer suggested to me recently that the life of the DBA was, surely, a dull one. My first reaction was indignation, but quickly followed by the thought that for many people excitement isn't necessarily the most desirable aspect of their job. It's true that some aspects of the DBA role seem guaranteed to quieten the pulse; in the days of tape backups, time must have slowed to eternity for the person whose job it was to oversee this process, placing tapes into secure containers, ensuring correct labeling, and.sorry, I drifted off there for a second. On the other hand, if you follow the adventures of the likes of Brent Ozar or Tom LaRock, you'd be forgiven for thinking that much of a database guy's time is spent, metaphorically, diving through plate glass windows in tight fitting underwear in order to extract grateful occupants from burning database applications. Alas it isn't true of the majority, but it isn't as dull as some people imagine, and is a helter-skelter ride compared with some other IT roles. Every IT department has people who toil away in shadowy corners doing quiet but mysterious tasks. When you ask them to explain what they do, you almost immediately want them to stop, but you hear enough to appreciate that these tasks are often absolutely vital to the smooth functioning of an IT organization. Compared with them, the DBAs are prima donnas. Here are a few nominations: Installation engineer - install all of the company's laptops and workstations, and software, deal with licensing, shipping and data entry.many organizations, especially those subject to tight regulation, would simply grind to a halt without their efforts. Localization engineer - Not quite software engineering, not quite translation, the job is to rebuild a product in a different language and make sure everything still works. QA Tester - firstly, I should say that the testers at Red Gate seem to me some of the most-fulfilled in the company. I refer here to the QA Tester whose job is more-or-less entirely to read a script, click some buttons and make sure the actual and expected values match. Configuration manager - for example, someone whose main job is to configure build environments so that devs can access their source code; assuredly necessary for the smooth functioning and productivity of the team, and hopefully well-paid. So what other sort of job in IT should one choose if the work of a DBA proves to be too exciting? Or are these roles secretly more exciting than many imagine? I invite you all to put forward your own suggestions. Cheers, Tony.

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• Roll your own free .NET technical conference

  - by Brian Schroer

  If you can’t get to a conference, let the conference come to you! There are a ton of free recorded conference presentations online… Microsoft TechEd Let’s start with the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Recent TechEds have recorded the majority of presentations and made them available online the next day. Check out presentations from last month’s TechEd North America 2012 or last week’s TechEd Europe 2012. If you start at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd, you can also drill down to presentations from prior years or from other regional TechEds (Australia, New Zealand, etc.) The top presentations from my “View Queue”: Damian Edwards: Microsoft ASP.NET and the Realtime Web (SignalR) Jennifer Smith: Design for Non-Designers Scott Hunter: ASP.NET Roadmap: One ASP.NET – Web Forms, MVC, Web API, and more Daniel Roth: Building HTTP Services with ASP.NET Web API Benjamin Day: Scrum Under a Waterfall NDC The Norwegian Developer Conference site has the most interesting presentations, in my opinion. You can find the videos from the June 2012 conference at that link. The 2011 and 2010 pages have a lot of presentations that are still relevant also. My View Queue Top 5: Shay Friedman: Roslyn... hmmmm... what? Hadi Hariri: Just ‘cause it’s JavaScript, doesn’t give you a license to write rubbish Paul Betts: Introduction to Rx Greg Young: How to get productive in a project in 24 hours Michael Feathers: Deep Design Lessons ØREDEV Travelling on from Norway to Sweden... I don’t know why, but the Scandinavians seem to have this conference thing figured out. ØREDEV happens each November, and you can find videos here and here. My View Queue Top 5: Marc Gravell: Web Performance Triage Robby Ingebretsen: Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography Jon Skeet: Async 101 Chris Patterson: Hacking Developer Productivity Gary Short: .NET Collections Deep Dive aspConf - The Virtual ASP.NET Conference Formerly known as “mvcConf”, this one’s a little different. It’s a conference that takes place completely on the web. The next one’s happening July 17-18, and it’s not too late to register (It’s free!). Check out the recordings from February 2011 and July 2010. It’s two years old and talks about ASP.NET MVC2, but most of it is still applicable, and Jimmy Bogard’s Put Your Controllers On a Diet presentation is the most useful technical talk I have ever seen. CodeStock Videos from the 2011 edition of this Tennessee conference are available. Presentations from last month’s 2012 conference should be available soon here. I’m looking forward to watching Matt Honeycutt’s Build Your Own Application Framework with ASP.NET MVC 3. UserGroup.tv User Group.tv was founded in January of 2011 by Shawn Weisfeld, with the mission of providing User Group content online for free. You can search by date, group, speaker and category tags. My View Queue Top 5: Sergey Rathon & Ian Henehan: UI Test Automation with Selenium Rob Vettor: The Repository Pattern Latish Seghal: The .NET Ninja’s Toolbelt Amir Rajan: Get Things Done With Dynamic ASP.NET MVC Jeffrey Richter: .NET Nuggets – Houston TechFest Keynote

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• Using SQL Source Control and Vault Professional Part 4

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Two weeks ago I upgraded our installation of Fortress to the latest version, which is now named Vault Professional.  This is the version of Vault (i.e. Vault Standard 5.1 / Vault Professional 5.1) that will be officially supported with Red-Gate SQL Source Control 2.1.  While the folks at Red-Gate did a fantastic job of working with me to get SQL Source Control to work with the older Fortress version, we weren’t going to just sit on that.  There are a couple of things that Vault Professional cleaned up for us, such as improved integration with Visual Studio 2010, so it was a win all around. Shortly after that upgrade, I received notice from Red-Gate that they had a new Early Access version of SQL Source Control available that included the ability to source control static data.  The idea here is that you probably have a few fairly static lookup tables in your system, and those data values are similar in concept to source code, and should be versioned in your source control management system also.  I agree with this, but please be wise…somebody out there is bound to try to use this feature as their disaster recovery for their entire database, and that is NOT the purpose.  First off, you should never have your PROD (or LIVE, whatever you call it) system attached to source control.  Source Control is for development, not for PROD systems.  Second, use the features that are intended for this purpose, such as BACKUP and RESTORE. Laying that tangent aside, it is great that now you can include these critical values in your repository and make them part of a deployment process.  As you would guess, SQL Source Control uses SQL Data Compare to create the data change scripts just like it uses SQL Compare to create the schema change scripts.  Once again, they did a very good job with the integration to their other products.  At this point we are really starting to see some good payback on our investment in the full SQL Developer Bundle.  Those products were worth the investment back when we only used them sporadically for troubleshooting and DBA analysis, but now with SQL Source Control, they are becoming everyday-use products for the development team. I like this software (SQL Source Control) so much that I am about to break my own rules and distribute it to my team to use even though it is still in beta.  This is the first time that I have approved the use of any beta software in a production scenario (actively building our next versions of internal software) but I predict that the usability and productivity gain of using SQL Source Control over manual scripting is worth the risk.  Of course, I have also put this beta software through its paces pretty well to be comfortable with it, and Red-Gate has proven their responsiveness to issues that came up in my early beta testing, and so I am willing to bet on their continued support.  Likewise, SourceGear, the maker of Vault Professional, has proven itself to me as well, and so the combination of SQL Source Control with Vault Professional is the new standard for my development team.

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• ASP.Net or WPF(C#)?

  - by Rachel

  Our team is divided on this and I wanted to get some third-party opinions. We are building an application and cannot decide if we want to use .Net WPF Desktop Application with a WCF server, or ASP.Net web app using jQuery. I thought I'd ask the question here, with some specs, and see what the pros/cons of using either side would be. I have my own favorite and feel I am biased. Ideally we want to build the initial release of the software as fast as we can, then slow down and take time to build in the additional features/components we want later on. Above all we want the software to be fast. Users go through records all day long and delays in loading records or refreshing screens kills their productivity. Application Details: I'm estimating around 100 different screens for initial version, with plans for a lot of additional screens being added on later after the initial release. We are looking to use two-way communication for reminder and event systems Currently has to support around 100 users, although we've been told to allow for growth up to 500 users We have multiple locations Items to consider (maybe not initially in some cases but in future releases): Room for additional components to be added after initial release (there are a lot of of these... perhaps work here than the initial application) Keyboard navigation Performance is a must Production Speed to initial version Low maintenance overhead Future support Softphone/Scanner integration Our Developers: We have 1 programmer who has been learning WPF the past few months and was the one who suggested we use WPF for this. We have a 2nd programmer who is familiar with ASP.Net and who may help with the project in the future, although he will not be working on it much up until the initial release since his time is spent maintaining our current software. There is me, who has worked with both and am comfortable in either We have an outside company doing the project management, and they are an ASP.Net company. We plan on hiring 1-2 others, however we need to know what direction we are going in first Environment: General users are on Windows 2003 server with Terminal Services. They connect using WYSE thin-clients over an RDP connection. Admin staff has their own PCs with XP or higher. Users are allowed to specify their own resolution although they are limited to using IE as the web browser. Other locations connects to our network over a MPLS connection Based on that, what would you choose and why? I am asking here instead of SO because I am looking for opinions and not answers

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• Book &ldquo;Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter&rdquo; published

  - by terje

  During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Jakob Ehn has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores! The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing. Get it from http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389                     The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working.  It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites. Our good friend and fellow ALM MVP Mathias Olausson have done the review of the book, thanks again Mathias! We hope the book fills the gap between the different online guide sites and the more advanced books that are out. Book Description Your quick start guide to TFS 2012, top features, and best practices with hands on examples Overview Install TFS 2012 from scratch Get up and running with your first project Streamline release cycles for maximum productivity In Detail Team Foundation Server 2012 is Microsoft's leading ALM tool, integrating source control, work item and process handling, build automation, and testing. This practical "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide" will provide you with clear step-by-step exercises covering all major aspects of the product. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to set up, organize, and use TFS server. This hands-on guide looks at the top features in Team Foundation Server 2012, starting with a quick installation guide and then moving into using it for your software development projects. Manage your team projects with Team Explorer, one of the many new features for 2012. Covering all the main features in source control to help you work more efficiently, including tools for branching and merging, we will delve into the Agile Planning Tools for planning your product and sprint backlogs. Learn to set up build automation, allowing your team to become faster, more streamlined, and ultimately more productive with this "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide". What you will learn from this book Install TFS 2012 on premise Access TFS Services in the cloud Quickly get started with a new project with product backlogs, source control, and build automation Work efficiently with source control using the top features Understand how the tools for branching and merging in TFS 2012 help you isolate work and teams Learn about the existing process templates, such as Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Manage your product and sprint backlogs using the Agile planning tools Approach This Starter guide is a short, sharp introduction to Team Foundation Server 2012, covering everything you need to get up and running. Who this book is written for If you are a developer, project lead, tester, or IT administrator working with Team Foundation Server 2012 this guide will get you up to speed quickly and with minimal effort.

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• What's new in the RightNow November 2012 release?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  What new in the RightNow November 2012? In order to find out, please watch this tutorial with imbedded demonstration or read the November 2012 Release notes.   News Facts The November 2012 release of     Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service marks the completion of development efforts for 2012 and continues Oracle’s commitment to enhancing the Oracle RightNow offering following the acquisition. New release delivers key capabilities designed to help organizations improve customer experiences in order to increase customer acquisition and retention, while reducing total cost of ownership. Part of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service now integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service, helping organizations intelligently and proactively engage with customers through the right channel at the right time. Chat solutions have emerged as an important component of a cross-channel customer experience strategy. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011 from 19% to 37%, and it has the highest satisfaction level of all customer service channels at 62% satisfaction. (*) To help companies deliver enhanced customer experiences, Oracle has made significant investments in Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service throughout 2012. With the addition of rules-based engagement to existing capabilities such as co-browse, mobile chat, and cross-channel knowledge integration with the contact center, all delivered via the cloud, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is differentiated as the industry-leading chat solution. The Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software as-a-service applications, including Oracle Customer Service and Support Cloud Service, which is based on the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. New Capabilities Key Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and other cross-channel capabilities include: Chat Business Rules, with over 70 built-in rule conditions, leverage the Oracle Engagement Engine to help enable organizations capture rich visitor data and invoke complex actions and triggers. Chat Business Rules allow granular control over when to engage a customer via the chat channel based on customer behavior, customer profile information and operational information. Click-to-Call provides the option for a customer to engage with a live agent over the phone during the Web browsing experience. Chat Availability Controls provide organizations with the ability to throttle volume through the chat channel based on real-time agent availability and wait time thresholds. This ability to manage the channel more efficiently allows organizations to provide a better experience to customers using the chat channel. Strategic and Operational Chat Channel Analytics provide better insight into channel and agent productivity and utilization and effectiveness with both out-of-the-box reports and ad hoc reports. New chat channel analytics provide comprehensive metrics with full data transparency. Background Service Updates improve high availability metrics for Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service during service update periods, setting the industry leading standard for sales and service delivery to customers via the chat channel. Additional Capabilities include: Improved Web developer tools for more efficient self-service user interface design Improved administration for enhanced user sessions management Increased cross-channel community collaboration Enhanced extensibility widgets and syndication management Streamlined content management and analytics capabilities Read the full announcement here

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• Newbie worried about CASE tool.

  - by Jason Evans

  Hi there. I'm looking for some guidance on CASE tools and whether my concerns are valid. Recently I was in a meeting between my employer and an external software company which have a CASE tool currently in beta. They demonstrated this tool to us, showing how you build a UML model in Enterprise Architect (or something like it) and then, through their tool, that UML model is transformed into a Visual Studio project, with C# files, stored procedures for SQL Server, code for the data layer, WCF stuff, logging code and allsorts. Now, admittedly, I don't see the point in this, as in I'm not convinced it will save that much time (plus it feels like overkill). The tool authors said that a trial of the tool at another company had saved a team there 5 weeks of development time (from 6 weeks down to about 1 week) using this tool. I find the accuracy of that estimate hard to believe. My main concern is whether using this tool is going slow down my productivity. For example - Say I have a UML model which I built a VS solution from. Now, I want to rename a class method to something else; will this mean having to update the UML model first and then rebuilding the code? Is this how case tools normally work? Something I will need to check with the authors is the structure of the generated VS solution. I like the Domain Driven Design way of project structure - Infrstructure, Services, Model, etc. I doubt very much this tool will do that. Also, I've been playing around with Entity Framework Code First and think it's a great way to build the data model. I have nice repositories, unit of work classes and other design patterns that work well with EF. I have data anootations and stuff like that working great. By not having EF (the CASE tool uses it's own data layer code) I'm concerned that this tool's data layer code might not be a nice to integrate in the UoW pattern, repositories, etc. This I will need to verify when I get a closer look at the generated code. What are other people's experiences with CASE tools? Am I being paranoid about nothing? Am I being unfair - are my negativities unfounded? EDIT: I like to use TDD/BDD for building my code, and using a CASE tool looks like it will make this difficult. Again, any feedback on this would be great. Cheers. Jas.

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• Free eBook with SQL Server performance tips and nuggets

  - by Claire Brooking

  I’ve often found that the kind of tips that turn out to be helpful are the ones that encourage me to make a small step outside of a routine. No dramatic changes – just a quick suggestion that changes an approach. As a languages student at university, one of the best I spotted came from outside the lecture halls and ended up saving me time (and lots of huffing and puffing) – the use of a rainbow of sticky notes for well-used pages and letter categories in my dictionary. Simple, but armed with a heavy dictionary that could double up as a step stool, those markers were surprisingly handy. When the Simple-Talk editors told me about a book they were planning that would give a series of tips for developers on how to improve database performance, we all agreed it needed to contain a good range of pointers for big-hitter performance topics. But we wanted to include some of the smaller, time-saving nuggets too. We hope we’ve struck a good balance. The 45 Database Performance Tips eBook covers different tips to help you avoid code that saps performance, whether that’s the ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when using Object to Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, or what to be aware of for indexes, database design, and T-SQL. The eBook is also available to download with SQL Prompt from Red Gate. We often hear that it’s the productivity-boosting side of SQL Prompt that makes it useful for everyday coding. So when a member of the SQL Prompt team mentioned an idea to make the most of tab history, a new feature in SQL Prompt 6 for SQL Server Management Studio, we were intrigued. Now SQL Prompt can save tabs we have been working on in SSMS as a way to maintain an active template for queries we often recycle. When we need to reuse the same code again, we search for our saved tab (and we can also customize its name to speed up the search) to get started. We hope you find the eBook helpful, and as always on Simple-Talk, we’d love to hear from you too. If you have a performance tip for SQL Server you’d like to share, email Melanie on the Simple-Talk team ([email protected]) and we’ll publish a collection in a follow-up post.

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• Am 10.02. startet WebCast-Serie für Java Entwickler und WebLogic Interessenten: WebLogic Developer - Get the latest on Oracle WebLogic Server and Java EE 6

  - by Thomas Leopold

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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;} Accelerate Your Development with Oracle WebLogic Suite Many organisations are reducing travel, conference, and training budgets for their developers without any change to the results expected of those developers. So how can you keep up with the latest developments?By receiving training, delivered free of charge, at your desk!Join us during February and March for a series of online events designed and run by the development team at Oracle. Learn how Oracle WebLogic Suite enables a whole new level of productivity for enterprise developers.Virtual Developer Day - 10th FebruaryStarting with our Virtual Developer Day on 10th February, join us for a blend of hands-on labs, live chat and presentations covering the latest on WebLogic, Java EE 6 and the programming tenets that have made it a true platform breakthrough.Weekly WebLogic Webcasts from 17th February to 17th MarchAfterwards, join us every week from 17th February to 17th March for our weekly one-hour webcasts where we will show you how to build an application from the ground up using Java and JEE technologies. Presented by the engineering team for WebLogic, these webcasts will be of great value to developers and architects, not just those already using WebLogic.For registration, full session abstracts and schedule please click here. Don't miss out! Register now to join our virtual events and keep up with all the latest developments. Find out more and register now Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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• Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Developmen

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development Register now for this FREE hands-on online workshop Get up to date and learn everything you wanted to know about Oracle ADF & Fusion Development plus live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staffOracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is the standards based, strategic framework for Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware.  Oracle ADF’s integration with the Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BI creates a complete productive development platform for your custom applications. Join us at this FREE virtual event and learn the latest in Fusion Development including: Is Oracle ADF development faster and simpler than Forms, Apex or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle ADF development with Eclipse Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development Application Lifecycle Management with ADF Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration Live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staff Developer lead, manager or architect – this event has something for everyone. Don’t miss this opportunity.  Tuesday, July 10, 20129:00 a.m. PT. – 1:00 p.m. PT11:00 a.m. CT – 3:00 p.m. CT12:00 p.m. ET – 4:00 p.m. ET1:00 p.m. BRT – 5:00 p.m. BRT Register online now! for this FREE event Agenda 9:00 a.m. Opening 9:30 a.m. Keynote: Oracle Fusion Development Track 1Introduction to Fusion Development Track 2What's New in Fusion Development Track 3Fusion Development in the Enterprise 10:00 a.m. Is Oracle ADF Development Faster and Simpler than Oracle Forms, APEX or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development 11:00 a.m. Rich Web UI made simple – an ADF Faces Overview Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse - ADF Development Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM 12:00 noon Next Generation Controller for JSF Application Lifecycle Management for ADF Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration *Hands On Lab – WebCenter and ADF Lab w/ JDeveloper – Lab materials will be provided ahead of the event to give you ample time to work through the lab and increase the productivity of the live chat sessions the day of the event. Sessions abstractsRegister online now! for this FREE event Copyright © 2012, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Institute of Financing for Agriculture and Fisheries

  - by kellsey.ruppel

   Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryThe Institute of Financing for Agriculture and Fisheries (IFAP) provides access, process payments, and oversee the application of EU and domestic funds distribution to individuals and companies. IFAP business objectives were to establish electronic processing of EU funds, improve relations between government agencies and public in compliance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements for information management and security They implemented a complete solution for managing the entire document content life cycle through the use of Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Capture. IFAP improved relationships with the public by accelerating payments electronically to individuals and organizations engaged in agriculture and fisheries, which is much easier, faster, and more secure than paper-based payments and the solution complies with ISO information and security requirements.  Company OverviewAs part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development, and Fisheries, the mission of the Institute of Financing for Agriculture and Fisheries (IFAP) is to provide access, process payments, and oversee the application of European Union (EU) and domestic funds distribution to individuals and companies engaged in the agriculture, rural development, and fisheries industries. Business ChallengesIFAP main business objective was to establish electronic processing of EU funds invested in agriculture and fisheries, improve relations between government agencies and the public and  comply with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements for information management and security systems regarding access to stored documents. Solution DeployedIFAP implemented a complete solution for managing the entire document content life cycle through the use of Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Capture.  The use of paper was replaced with digital formats, accelerating internal processes and ensuring compliance with ISO requirements Business Results Scalability The number of documents included and managed in the document system, called iDOC, increased to a total of 490,847, of which 103,298 are internally generated, 113,824 are digitized correspondence, and 264,870 are forms that have been digitized or received via the institute’s Web site. Efficiency  IFAP improved relationships with the public by accelerating payments electronically to individuals and organizations engaged in agriculture and fisheries, which is much easier, faster, and more secure than paper-based payments. The overall productivity increased through the use of digital formats and citizens’ ID cards as digital signatures. Compliance The implemented solution complies with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements for information management and security systems regarding access to stored documents. Oracle Products and Services IFAP Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Capture Oracle Application Server Oracle Forms Oracle Reports

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• Does Your Customer Engagement Create an Ah Feeling?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  An (Oracle CX Blog) article by Christina McKeon Companies that successfully engage customers all have one thing in common. They make it seem easy for the customer to get what they need. No one would argue that brands don’t want to leave customers with this “ah” feeling. Since 94% of customers who have a low-effort service experience will buy from that company again, it makes financial sense for brands.1 Some brands are thinking differently about how they engage their customers to create ah feelings. How do they do it? Toyota is a great example of using smart assistance technology to understand customer intent and answer questions before customers hit the submit button online. What is unique in this situation is that Toyota captures intent while customers are filling out email forms. Toyota analyzes the data in the form and suggests responses before the customer sends the email. The customer gets the right answer, and the email never makes it to your contact center — which makes you and the customer happy. Most brands are fully aware of chat as a service channel, but some brands take chat to a whole new level. Beauty.com, part of the drugstore.com and Walgreens family of brands, uses live chat to replicate the personal experience that one would find at high-end department store cosmetic counters. Trained beauty advisors, all with esthetician or beauty counter experience, engage in live chat sessions with online shoppers to share immediate advice on the best products for their personal needs. Agents can watch customer activity online and determine the right time to reach out and offer help, just as help would be offered in a brick-and-mortar store. And, agents can co-browse along with the customer helping customers with online check-out. These personal chat discussions also give Beauty.com the opportunity to present products, advertise promotions, and resolve customer issues when they arise. Beauty.com converts approximately 25% of chat sessions into product orders. Photobox, the European market leader in online photo services, wanted to deliver personal and responsive service to its 24 million members. It ensures customer inquiries on personalized photo products are routed based on agent knowledge so customers get what they need from the company experts. By using a queuing system to ensure that the agent with the most appropriate knowledge handles the query, agent productivity increased while response times to 1,500 customer queries per day decreased. A real-time dashboard prevents agents from being overloaded with queries. This approach has produced financial results with a 15% increase in sales to existing customers and a 45% increase in orders from newly referred customers.

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• What if you could work on anything you wanted?

  - by red@work

  This week we've downed our tools and organised ourselves into small project teams or struck out alone. We're working on whatever we like, with whoever we like, wherever we like. We've called it Down Tools week and so far it's a blast. It all started a few months ago with an idea from Neil, our CEO. Neil wanted to capture the excitement, innovation, and productivity of Coding by the Sea and extend this to all Red Gaters working in Product Development. A brainstorm is always a good place to start for an "anything goes" project. Half of Red Gate piled into our largest meeting room (it's pretty big) armed with flip charts, post its and a heightened sense of possibility. An hour or so later our SQL Servery walls were covered in project ideas. So what would you do, if you could work on anything you wanted? Many projects are related to tools we already make, others are for internal product development use and some are, well, just something completely different. Someone suggested we point a web cam at the SQL Servery lunch queue so we can check it before heading to lunch. That one couldn't wait for Down Tools Week. It was up and running within a few days and even better, it captures the table tennis table too. Thursday is the Show and Tell - I am looking forward to seeing what everyone has come up with. Some of the projects will turn into new products or features so this probably isn't the time or place to go into detail of what is being worked on. Rest assured, you'll hear all about it! We're making a video as we go along too which will be up on our website as soon. In the meantime, all meetings are cancelled, we've got plenty of food in and people are being very creative with the £500 expenses budget (Richard, do you really need an iPad?). It's brilliant to see it all coming together from the idea stage to reality. Catch up with our progress by following #downtoolsweek on Twitter. Who knows, maybe a future Red Gate flagship tool is coming to life right now? By the way, it's business as usual for our customer facing and internal operations teams. Hmm, maybe we can all down tools for a week and ask Product Development to hold the fort? Post by: Alice Chapman

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Kicking off the ODI12c Blog Series

  - by Madhu Nair

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 It is always exciting to talk about a new release, especially one as significant as the newly released Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c). Why? Because it is packed with features that addresses many requirements for the user community. If you missed sneak previews at this year's Oracle Open World sessions, do not despair. Because over the coming weeks the ODI12c team of developers and consultants will be sharing their perspective on key features, experiences and best practices for ODI12c right here through a series of blogs. Before diving into feature details in subsequent blogs it helps to understand the overall themes that went into developing ODI12c. Let the Productivity Flow: Let us face it. Designing for developer user experience is always top of mind to any enterprise software. ODI12c addresses this through the introduction of declarative flow based mappings (the topic of our next ODI blog by the way!!). Reusability has been addressed though the introduction of reusable mappings cutting down development times for repeated logics. An enhanced debugger makes life easy for complex granular debugging scenarios. Unique repository IDs now allow you to manage multiple repositories. Performance is Paramount: Another major area of focus for ODI12c is performance. Increased parallelism (like the multiple target table load feature), reduced session overheads and ability to customize loads plans through physical views all empower the user to tune run times for extreme performances. mapping showing multiple target load physical representation allowing users to choose execution options Integrating it all: This release is not just about ODI12c as a standalone product. Closer integration with Oracle GoldenGate now brings Change Data Capture (CDC) capabilities into ODI12c. Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) jobs can now be executed and monitored from within ODI12c. And ODI12c is fast becoming the de facto standard for Oracle Applications that need data integration in their solutions. The best example being the latest release of the Oracle BI Applications technology. Even as we bring you in-depth write-ups about the features there are some great previews and resources that are already out there. Like this super entry by beta partner Rittman Mead Consulting and this ODI12c Key Features White Paper. You can download ODI12c here (this post helps). The best though is the upcoming Executive Webcast featuring customers and executives who have seen and conceived the product. Don’t miss it!

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