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• MS Tech Ed 2011 Coming Soon

  - by sonam

  Microsoft Tech ed 2010 was a great success. Infact  Most of such conferences always provide a great place to meet other  technology enthusiasts and ofcourse,whats in the pipeline for future products of a company or field.. And yet again,MS Tech ed India is coming on 23-25 march  in Banglore,India.Well,the place is  ofcourse right suited for any IT/Computing conference.After all,Its Silicon Valley of India.. From Last year.I remember  a session by Harish about  “Building pure client side apps with  Jquery and Microsoft Ajax .” Here’s the video: http://live.viasilverlight.com/TechEdOnDemand/Breakouts/TheWebSimplified1/Session4/AjaxClientSideApps.wmv At that time only,I got to know that jquery is so easy to use for  ajax or client side templating.Though I prefer jquery over  Microsoft Ajax many folds.UpdatePanel  is Dead for sure in my view. I believe,Web forms will be dead sooner or later with ASP.Net  MVC  gaining share many folds.(TODO:Learn MVC). The new standard is surely:JQUERY . Between,Last years videos and ppt’s  are available to browse and download: http://microsoftteched.in/2010/downloads.aspx After going through Tech Ad 2011 session agendas : http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2011/agenda.aspx Few of my personal choices to watch would be: Day 1: a) Identity And Access Control in the Cloud        b)Windows 7 at  Home:Digitizing your Home.(Sounds cool.)        c) And ofcourse,Jquery and MS ajax(Lets see if MS can do something that’s not already happening with their version Of Ajax).. Day 2:  a) Lap Around Silverlight 5 and Html 5 as I have heard some hot talks that html5 will kill Silverlight,(I don’t see it in near future though).        b) Html 5 more than “Html 5”…Google will be seeing this one. Day3: a) Cross Browser applications in Azure       b)VS 2010 sessions of automated testing azure apps etc. Windows Phone 7 sessions will surely be of more interest now after MS-Nokia Deal. Though,Personally,I would want atleast some worth of  sessions on MS  future in Robotics,AI.Perhaps  I am looking at wrong place..(When is PDC?) And Since,Bill Gates  consider Robotics as the next big thing, Refer  this one : http://www.cs.virginia.edu/robins/A_Robot_in_Every_Home.pdf  I am sure,they wont loose this new hot spot to competitors,  like how google rules in Online  Search now.Robotics and AI will surely provide a big battlefield  for future.See,What IBM is doing with IBM Watson. OR see this, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218083711.htm this is cool only if you can control your mind.Atleast,I’ll prefer regular driving (I would devote my mind seeing  people,places which we see on road).thats what jouney makes “cool”.:P.

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• Build Dependencies and Silverlight 4

  - by Kyle Burns

  At my current position, I’ve been doing quite a bit of Silverlight development and have also been working with TFS2010 build services to enable continuous integration.  One of the critical pieces of a successful continuous build setup (and also one of the benefits of having one) is that the build system should be able to “get latest” against the source repository and immediately build with no errors.  This can break down both in an automated build scenario and a “new guy” scenario when the solution has external dependencies that may not be present in the build environment. The method that I use to address the dependency issue is to store all of the binaries upon which my solution depends in a folder under the solution root called “Reference Items”.  I keep this folder as part of the solution and check all of the binaries into source control so when I get the latest version of the solution from source control all of the binaries are downloaded to my machine as well and gets me closer to the ideal where a new developer installs the development IDE, get latest and can immediately build and run unit tests before jumping into coding the feature of the day. This all sounds pretty good (and it is), but a little while back I ran into one of those little hiccups that requires a little manual intervention.  The issue that I ran into is that with Silverlight (at least version 4), the behavior of the “Add Reference” command when adding reference to a DLL that is present in the GAC is to omit the HintPath element that it includes with regular .Net projects, so even if the DLL is setting in the Reference Items folder and downloaded to the build machine it cannot be found at compile time and the build will fail. To work around this behavior, you need to be comfortable editing the XML project files generated by Visual Studio (in my case this is typically a .csproj file).  Simply open the project file in your favorite text editor, find the Reference element that refers to the component, and modify the XML to include the HintPath.  Here’s a before and after example of the component that ultimately led me to the investigation behind this post: Before: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL" /> After: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL">       <HintPath>..\Reference Items\Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll</HintPath>     </Reference>

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• WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear WebLogic Partner Community member, This month newsletter contains tons of Java material with the availability of Java EE7! Including many articles in the May/June Java Magazine and the Duke Award nomination! Thanks for all your efforts to become certified and Specialized. For all the experts who achieved the WebLogic Server 12c Certified Implementation Specialist  or ADF 11g Certified Implementation Specialist you can download a logo for your blog or business card at the Competence Center. For all the companies who achieved a WebLogic and ADF Specialization you can request a nice plaque for your office. Summer time is training time – make sure you attend our Fusion Middleware Summer Camps or one of our upcoming Exalogic Implementation Workshop by PTS in Spain, Turkey and Middle East. For those who can not make it we offers plenty of online courses like the New ADF Academy. Or the webcast The value of Engineered Systems for SAP. At our WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required) you can find Engineered Systems Strategy presentation. Thanks to the community for all the WebLogic best practice papers and tools like Automated provision of Oracle Weblogic Server Platform & Frank’s Coherence videos on YouTube & Create and deploy applications on the Oracle Java Cloud & WebLogic Application redeployment using shared libraries - without downtime & Oracle Traffic Director. The first tests deployments for WebLogic on Oracle Database Appliance are on the way, thanks to all who are their experience: Sizing & Configuration and Traffic Director. Virtualised Oracle Database Appliance Proof of Concept - #1 Planning from Simon Haslam. Would be great if you can also share your experience via twitter @wlscommunity! In the ADF section of the newsletter you find Tuning Application Module Pools and Connection Pools & List View - Cool Looking ADF PS6 Component for Collections & Insider Essential & User Interface & Skinning & Oracle Forms to ADF Modernization reference. Great summer time! Jürgen Kress Oracle WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/WebLogicnewsJune2013 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic Community newsletter,newsletter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Do you care about your Oracle System Support experience?

  - by user12244613

  It has been a while since I blogged about Systems Support within Oracle. I want to take this opportunity to raise awareness of how Oracle is communicating out to its systems customers. Previously every item to be communicated was sent independently via an email message however, not all messages appear to be being getting the attention they require. In an effort to ensure Oracle is reaching all of our Sun and Oracle System customers, we have created the Oracle Systems Support Newsletter. This monthly newsletter will have a summary of customer support relevant information for you to use and will cover topics that impact your support experience. For example: 1. Did you know that sending explorer content to email addresses with @sun.com is going away soon? For more information, review the Document 1362484.1 2. Are you an Auto Service Request (ASR) user? If yes, here are the latest changes: · ASR Manager accepts My Oracle Support User Name (email address) and password. [Doc ID 1345484.1] · ASR IP Address for secure file transfer has changed [Doc ID 1338575.1] · ASR No Heartbeat Status - Find out how to resolve [Doc ID 1346328.1] 3. Did you notice we have changed the Service Request options for Hardware and introduced a new problem category called “Automated Diagnosis”? This service streamlines the data you send in and then automatically provides an update of known issues found in your My Oracle Support Service Request. This feature also fast tracks hardware failures by sending parts as soon as the data is analyzed. Have you used this new feature? If yes tell us about it – take the 5minute survey 4. Are you being proactive or are you still ‘fire fighting’ in the reactive mode? If you are being proactive for your Oracle System products you might have used Oracle Sun System Analysis. Did you finding this helpful? Can we improve it? You tell us, take the 5minute survey 5. Are you aware that if you attach files to your Service Request it enables the support engineer to start work straight away? For a summary of products and files review the Newsletter. 6. Are you struggling to find patches or firmware or product downloads? If yes, these types of issues are all addressed in the Newsletter. If this is the type of information you want to know about each month, then take time to read the Newsletter link and bookmark it in My Oracle Support so you can stay informed. Thanks for your time.

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• Use CSS Selectors with HtmlUnit

  - by kerry

  HtmlUnit is a great library for performing web integration tests in Java.  But sometimes node traversal can be somewhat cumbersome. Fear not fellow automated tester (good for you!).  I found a great little project on Github that will allow you to query your document for elements via css selectors similar to jQuery. The project is located at https://github.com/chrsan/css-selectors.  You can use Maven to build it, or download 1.0.2 here.  Beware.  I will not be updating this link so I suggest you download the latest code. In any case, you can use it like so: // from HtmlUnit getting started final WebClient webClient = new WebClient(); final HtmlPage page = webClient.getPage("http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net"); final DOMNodeSelector cssSelector = new DOMNodeSelector(page.getDocumentElement()); final Set elements = cssSelector.querySelectorAll("div.section h2"); final Node first = elements.iterator().next(); assertThat(first.getTextContent(), equalTo("HtmlUnit")); The only problem here is that the querySelectAll returns a Set<Node>.  Not HtmlElement like we may want in some cases.   However, if you were to reflect on the Set, you would find that it is indeed a Set of HtmlElement objects. Typically, I like to create a base class for my web tests.  Just for fun, I am using the $ method similar to jQuery. public class WebTestBase { protected WebClient webClient; protected HtmlPage htmlPage; protected void goTo(final String url){ return (HtmlPage)webClient.getPage(url); } protected List $(final String cssSelector) { final DOMNodeSelector cssSelector = new DOMNodeSelector(htmlPage.getDocumentElement()); final Set nodes = cssSelector.querySelectorAll("div.section h2"); // for some reason Set cannot be cast to Set? final List elements = new ArrayList(nodes.size()); for (final Node node : nodes) { elements.add((HtmlElement)node); } return elements; } } Now we can write tests like this: public class LoginWebTest extends WebTestBase { @Test public void login_page_has_instructions() throws Exception { goTo(baseUrl + "/login") assertThat( $("p.instructions").size(), equalTo(1) ); } }

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• Why do some user agents have spam urls in them?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  If you go to (say) the last 100 entries (visits) to the botsvsbrowsers.com website (exact link, feel free to take a look: http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html ), you'd notice that almost every User Agent that has the keywords "Opera" and "Presto" inside them, will almost certainly have a web link (URL/Web Address) inside it, and it won't just be a normal web address, but a HTML anchor tag/link to that address. Why is this so, I could not even find a single discussion about it on the internet, nowhere, I tried varying my search terms many times. If the user agent contains the words "Opera" and "Presto" it doesnt mean it will have this weblink, but it means there is about an 80% change that it will. A typical anchor tag/link inside a user agent will look like this: Mozilla/4.0 <a href="http://osis-uk.co.uk/disabled-equipment">disability equipment</a> (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60 If you check it out at the website, http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html you will notice that the back and forward arrows are in there unescaped format. This isn't just true for botsvsbrowsers, but several other user agent listing sites. I'm really confused and feel line I'm in a room full of 10,000 people and am the only one seeing this ghost :). If I'm doing statistical analysis, should I include or exclude this type of user agent from my listing (ie: are these just normal users who've set their user agents to attempt to drive some traffic to their sites as they browser the web), or is there something else going on? The fact that it is so consistent in terms of its format leads me to believe that it is an automated process (the setting or alteration of the user agent) so I cannot decide or understand the process by which this change is made (I know how to change a user agent), but unsure which program or facility is doing this, especially since it is exclusive to Opera (Presto) user agents that are beyond I think an 8 or 9 point something browser version. I've run some statistical tests, parsing entries from all over the place, writing custom programs, to get a better understanding of this. Keep in mind that I see normal URL's in user agents infrequently, they are just text such as +http://www.someSite.com appended to a user agent normally, especially if its a crawler or bot it provided its service URL, this is normal and isnt done with an embedded link (A HREF=) etc, so I'm not talking about "those".

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• Evaluating Scrum - is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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• Oracle's Integrated Systems Management and Support Experience

  - by Scott McNeil

  With its recent launch, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduced a new approach to integrated systems management and support. What this means is taking both areas of IT management and vendor support and combining them into one integrated comprehensive and centralized platform. Traditional Ways Under the traditional method, IT operational teams would often focus on running their systems using management tools that weren’t connected to their vendor’s support systems. If you needed support with a product, administrators would often contact the vendor by phone or visit the vendor website for support and then log a service request in order to fix the issues. This method was also very time consuming, as administrators would have to collect their software configurations, operating systems and hardware settings, then manually enter them into an online form or recite them to a support analyst on the phone. For the vendor, they had to analyze all the configuration data to recreate the problem in order to solve it. This approach was very manual, uncoordinated and error-prone where duplication between the customer and vendor frequently occurred. A Better Support Experience By removing the boundaries between support, IT management tools and the customer’s IT infrastructure, Oracle paved the way for a better support experience. This was achieved through integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and My Oracle Support. Administrators can not only manage their IT infrastructure and applications through Oracle Enterprise Manager’s centralized console but can also receive proactive alerts and patch recommendations right within the console they use day-in-day-out. Having one single source of information saves time and potentially prevents unforeseen problems down the road. All for One, and One for All The first step for you is to allow Oracle Enterprise Manager to upload configuration data into Oracle’s secure configuration repository, where it can be analyzed for potential issues or conflicts for all customers. A fix to a problem encountered by one customer may actually be relevant to many more. The integration between My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager allows all customers who may be impacted by the problem to receive a notification about the fix. Once the alert appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager’s console, the administrator can take his/her time to do further investigations using automated workflows provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager to analyze potential conflicts. Finally, administrators can schedule a time to test and automatically apply the fix to all the systems that need it. In the end, this helps customers maintain their service levels without compromise and avoid experiencing unplanned downtime that may result from potential issues or conflicts. This new paradigm of integrated systems management and support helps customers keep their systems secure, compliant, and up-to-date, while eliminating the traditional silos between IT management and vendor support. Oracle’s next generation platform also works hand-in-hand to provide higher quality of service to business users while at the same time making life for administrators less complicated. For more information on Oracle’s integrated systems management and support experience, be sure to visit our Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Resource Center for the latest customer videos, webcast, and white papers.

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• 2011 - ALMs for your development team and the people they work with.

  - by David V. Corbin

  Welcome to 2011, it is already shaping up to be a very exciting year. The title of the post is not about charitable giving, although that is also a great topic. Application Lifecycle Management and the Systems that support the environment is, and 2011 will be a year where I expect many teams to invest heavily in this area. For those not familiar with ALM, it can be simplified down to "A comprehensive view of all of the iteas, requirements, activities and artifacts that impact an application over the course of its lifecycle, from concept until decommissioning". Obviously, this encompases a large number of different areas even for relatively small and medium sized projects. In recent years, many teams have adapted methodoligies which address individual aspects of this; but the majority of this adoption has resulted in "islands of improvement" rather than the desired comprehensive outcome...Until now! Last year Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 along with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition, and with these two in combination the situation has drastically changed. At last there is a single environment that is capable of handling all aspects of ALM, and is also capable of dealing with migration and integration with existing systems to make the transition to a single solution much easier. Thse possibilities (and practicalities) are nothing short of amazing, Architecture thru Testing integration? YES. Being able to correlate specific requirement items (and their history) to actual code (and code history)? YES. Identification of which tests will be potentially impacted by a given code change? YES. Resiliant Automated Testing of User Interfaces? YES. Automatic Deployment Management? YES. Integraton Level testing as part of (designated) Builds? YES. I could easily double or triple the above list, but these items should be enough to get you thinking about the "pain points" your team and organization currently face and the fact that there IS a way to relieve the pain. Over the course of the year, I am hoping to bring together some of the "best of breed" information, along with hosting (and participating in) discussions with various experts in the field. There are already a number of groups (including many on LinkedIn) that have an ALM focus, and I encourage everyone out to check them out. I will be posting a list of the ones I find most helpful in the not too distant future. As I said at the beginning, 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting (and productive) year. Why wait to start investigating and adopting ALM? ps: For those interested in becoming an "Alms Giver" in the charitable sense, I highly recommend checking out GiveCamp. A group of developers, designers and others get together to create a solution for a charity in just under 48 hours. I will be attending the GiveCamp in New York City on Jan 14-16, more information is available at nycgivecamp.org/

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

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

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• CAM v2.0 ships – all new foundation version

  - by drrwebber

  The latest release of the CAM editor toolset is now available on Sourceforge.net – search NIEM. In this all new version the support from Oracle has enabled a transformation of the editor underpinning Java framework and results in 3x performance improvement and 50% better memory utilization. The result of nearly six months of improvements are catalogued in the release notes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor/files/CAM%20Editor/Releases/2.0/CAM_Editor_2-0_Release_Notes.pdf/download However here I’d like to talk about the strategic vision and highlight specific new go to features that make a difference for exchange schema designers and with a focus on the NIEM community. So why is this a foundation version? Basically the new drag and drop designer tool allows you to tailor your own dictionary collection of components and then simply select and position those into your resulting exchange structure. This is true global reuse enabled from a canonical domain dictionary collection. So instead of grappling with XSD Schema syntax, or UML model nuances – this is straightforward direct WYSIWYG visual engineering – using familiar sets of business components. Then the toolkit writes the complex XSD Schema for you, along with test samples, documentation, XMI/UML models, Mindmaps and more. So how do you get a set of business components? The toolkit allows you to harvest these from existing schema collections or enterprise data models, or as in the case of NIEM, existing domain dictionary collections. I’ve been using this for the latest IEEE/OASIS/NIST initiative on a Common Data Format (CDF) for elections management systems. So you can download those from OASIS and see how this can transform how you build actual business exchanges – improving the quality, consistency and usability – and dramatically allowing automated generation of artifacts you only dreamed of before – such as a model of your entire major exchange collection components. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=election So what we have here is a foundation version – setting the scene and the basis for changing how people can generate and manage information exchanges. A foundation built using the OASIS CAM standard combined with aspects of the NIEM Naming and Design Rules and the UN/CEFACT Core Components specifications and emerging work on OASIS CIQ name and address and ANSI/ISO code list schema. We still have a raft of work to do to integrate this into SOA best practices and extend the dictionary capabilities to assist true community development. Answering questions such as: - How good is my canonical component collection? - How much reuse is really occurring? - What inconsistencies and extensions are there in the dictionary components? Expect us to begin tackling these areas now that the foundation is in place. The immediate need is to develop training and self-start materials – so we will be focusing there for the next couple of months and especially leading up to the IJIS industry event in July in New Jersey, and the NIEM NTE event in August in Philadelphia. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor

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• Single Responsibility Principle Implementation

  - by Mike S

  In my spare time, I've been designing a CMS in order to learn more about actual software design and architecture, etc. Going through the SOLID principles, I already notice that ideas like "MVC", "DRY", and "KISS", pretty much fall right into place. That said, I'm still having problems deciding if one of two implementations is the best choice when it comes to the Single Responsibility Principle. Implementation #1: class User getName getPassword getEmail // etc... class UserManager create read update delete class Session start stop class Login main class Logout main class Register main The idea behind this implementation is that all user-based actions are separated out into different classes (creating a possible case of the aptly-named Ravioli Code), but following the SRP to a "tee", almost literally. But then I thought that it was a bit much, and came up with this next implementation class UserView extends View getLogin //Returns the html for the login screen getShortLogin //Returns the html for an inline login bar getLogout //Returns the html for a logout button getRegister //Returns the html for a register page // etc... as needed class UserModel extends DataModel implements IDataModel // Implements no new methods yet, outside of the interface methods // Haven't figured out anything special to go here at the moment // All CRUD operations are handled by DataModel // through methods implemented by the interface class UserControl extends Control implements IControl login logout register startSession stopSession class User extends DataObject getName getPassword getEmail // etc... This is obviously still very organized, and still very "single responsibility". The User class is a data object that I can manipulate data on and then pass to the UserModel to save it to the database. All the user data rendering (what the user will see) is handled by UserView and it's methods, and all the user actions are in one space in UserControl (plus some automated stuff required by the CMS to keep a user logged in or to ensure that they stay out.) I personally can't think of anything wrong with this implementation either. In my personal feelings I feel that both are effectively correct, but I can't decide which one would be easier to maintain and extend as life goes on (despite leaning towards Implementation #1.) So what about you guys? What are your opinions on this? Which one is better? What basics (or otherwise, nuances) of that principle have I missed in either design?

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• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Today I’m excited to share that the Windows Azure Mobile Services public preview is now available. This preview provides a turnkey backend cloud solution designed to accelerate connected client app development. These services streamline the development process by enabling you to leverage the cloud for common mobile application scenarios such as structured storage, user authentication and push notifications. If you’re building a Windows 8 app and want a fast and easy path to creating backend cloud services, this preview provides the capabilities you need. You to take advantage of the cloud to build and deploy modern apps for Windows 8 devices in anticipation of general availability on October 26th. Subsequent preview releases will extend support to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Features The preview makes it fast and easy to create cloud services for Windows 8 applications within minutes. Here are the key benefits:  Rapid development: configure a straightforward and secure backend in less than five minutes. Create modern mobile apps: common Windows Azure plus Windows 8 scenarios that Windows Azure Mobile Services preview will support include:  Automated Service API generation providing CRUD functionality and dynamic schematization on top of Structured Storage Structured Storage with powerful query support so a Windows 8 app can seamlessly connect to a Windows Azure SQL database Integrated Authentication so developers can configure user authentication via Windows Live Push Notifications to bring your Windows 8 apps to life with up to date and relevant information Access structured data: connect to a Windows Azure SQL database for simple data management and dynamically created tables. Easy to set and manage permissions. Pricing One of the key things that we’ve consistently heard from developers about using Windows Azure with mobile applications is the need for a low cost and simple offer. The simplest way to describe the pricing for Windows Azure Mobile Services at preview is that it is the same as Windows Azure Websites during preview. What’s FREE? Run up to 10 Mobile Services for free in a multitenant environment Free with valid Windows Azure Free Trial 1GB SQL Database Unlimited ingress 165MB/day egress  What do I pay for? Scaling up to dedicated VMs Once Windows Azure Free Trial expires - SQL Database and egress     Getting Started To start using Mobile Services, you will need to sign up for a Windows Azure free trial, if you have not done so already.  If you already have a Windows Azure account, you will need to request to enroll in this preview feature. Once you’ve enrolled, this getting started tutorial will walk you through building your first Windows 8 application using the preview’s services. The developer center contains more resources to teach you how to: Validate and authorize access to data using easy scripts that execute securely, on the server Easily authenticate your users via Windows Live Send toast notifications and update live tiles in just a few lines of code Our pricing calculator has also been updated for calculate costs for these new mobile services. Questions? Ask in the Windows Azure Forums. Feedback? Send it to [email protected].

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• Automate RAC Cluster Upgrades using EM12c

  - by HariSrinivasan

  One of the most arduous processes  in DB maintenance is upgrading Databases across major versions, especially for complex RAC Clusters.With the release of Database Plug-in  (12.1.0.5.0), EM12c Rel 3 (12.1.0.3.0)  now supports automated upgrading of RAC Clusters in addition to Standalone Databases. This automation includes: Upgrade of the complete Cluster across the nodes. ( Example: 11.1.0.7 CRS, ASM, RAC DB  ->   11.2.0.4 or 12.1.0.1 GI, RAC DB)  Best practices in tune with your operations, where you can automate upgrade in steps: Step 1: Upgrade the Clusterware to Grid Infrastructure (Allowing you to wait, test and then move to DBs). Step 2: Upgrade RAC DBs either separately or in group (Mass upgrade of RAC DB's in the cluster). Standard pre-requisite checks like Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) and RAC checks Division of Upgrade process into Non-downtime activities (like laying down the new Oracle Homes (OH), running checks) to Downtime Activities (like Upgrading Clusterware to GI, Upgrading RAC) there by lowering the downtime required. Ability to configure Back up and Restore options as a part of this upgrade process. You can choose to : a. Take Backup via this process (either Guaranteed Restore Point (GRP) or RMAN) b. Set the procedure to pause just before the upgrade step to allow you to take a custom backup c. Ignore backup completely, if there are external mechanisms already in place.  High Level Steps: Select the Procedure "Upgrade Database" from Database Provisioning Home page. Choose the Target Type for upgrade and the Destination version Pick and choose the Cluster, it picks up the complete topology since the clusterware/GI isn't upgraded already Select the Gold Image of the destination version for deploying both the GI and RAC OHs Specify new OH patch, credentials, choose the Restore and Backup options, if required provide additional pre and post scripts Set the Break points in the procedure execution to isolate Downtime activities Submit and track the procedure's execution status.  The animation below captures the steps in the wizard.  For step by step process and to understand the support matrix check this documentation link. Explore the functionality!! In the next blog, will talk about automating rolling Upgrades of Databases in Physical Standby Data Guard environment using Transient Logical Standby.

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• 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

  - by Mike Stiles

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

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: American Home Mortgage

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter Solution Summary American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. (AHMSI) is a 3,000 employee company based in Coppell, Texas and provides services to homeowners and loan investors. With a multibillion portfolio under management, AHMSI is one of the country's largest servicers of Alt-A and subprime loans. AHMSI implemented a public-facing secure Web portal using Oracle WebCenter Suite to help investors make informed decisions more quickly and automated much of the investor approval process AHMSI reduced the time needed to process loan modification from approximately 30 days to one week.  UsingOracle WebCenter Content AHMSI can now share strategic & sensitive content in compliance with the various governance regulations.  Company OverviewAmerican Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. provides services to homeowners and loan investors. Whether a borrower holds a traditional, Alt-A, payment option, or subprime loan, the company's highly trained experts are committed to providing high levels of service as they work to address each customer's needs. AHMSI also carefully manages the loan portfolios of investors. With a multibillion portfolio under management, AHMSI is one of the country's largest servicers of Alt-A and subprime loans.  Challenges AHMSI’s biggest challenge was to improve security by minimizing the use of e-mail and FTP sites to share sensitive mortgage loan data with third parties, including estate investors.  Solutions AHMSI implemented Oracle WebCenter Suite to deploy a public-facing Web portal, enabling authorized external users to view content stored on the content server and Oracle WebCenter Content  to create a secure storage area for daily, weekly, and monthly reports. They leveraged the standard group spaces in Oracle WebCenter Portal to enable business users to collaborate more effectively.  Results By automating much of the investor approval process, they reduced the time needed to process loan modifications from approximately 30 days to one week and greatly minimized the use of e-mail and FTP sites to share information. Investors can now view supporting materials including real-time loan information and call center data to help them make more informed decisions more quickly.  The implemented solution complies with various government regulations in dealings with real estate investors.  “To maintain our commitment to providing customers with the highest possible levels of services while creating a competitive advantage for our business, we needed to be able to share strategic and sensitive content in a safe and secure manner. With Oracle WebCenter, we have a flexible and modern user experience platform that allows us to securely, reliably and efficiently manage our portfolio of sensitive data and share it with our business partners. This not only helps ensure compliance with various government regulations, it accelerates processes and supports more informed decision making.” Vince Holt, Manager, Application Management, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc.  Additional Information AHMSI Customer Snapshot  Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Portal Oracle Fusion Middleware

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• NetBeans IDE 7.3 Knows Null

  - by Geertjan

  What's the difference between these two methods, "test1" and "test2"? public int test1(String str) {     return str.length(); } public int test2(String str) {     if (str == null) {         System.err.println("Passed null!.");         //forgotten return;     }     return str.length(); } The difference, or at least, the difference that is relevant for this blog entry, is that whoever wrote "test2" apparently thinks that the variable "str" may be null, though did not provide a null check. In NetBeans IDE 7.3, you see this hint for "test2", but no hint for "test1", since in that case we don't know anything about the developer's intention for the variable and providing a hint in that case would flood the source code with too many false positives:  Annotations are supported in understanding how a piece of code is intended to be used. If method return types use @Nullable, @NullAllowed, @CheckForNull, the value is considered to be "strongly possible to be null", as well as if the variable is tested to be null, as shown above. When using @NotNull, @NonNull, @Nonnull, the value is considered to be non-null. (The exact FQNs of the annotations are ignored, only simple names are checked.) Here are examples showing where the hints are displayed for the non-null hints (the "strongly possible to be null" hints are not shown below, though you can see one of them in the screenshot above), together with a comment showing what is shown when you hover over the hint: There isn't a "one size fits all" refactoring for these various instances relating to null checks, hence you can't do an automated refactoring across your code base via tools in NetBeans IDE, as shown yesterday for class member reordering across code bases. However, you can, instead, go to Source | Inspect and then do a scan throughout a scope (e.g., current file/package/project or combinations of these or all open projects) for class elements that the IDE identifies as potentially having a problem in this area: Thanks to Jan Lahoda, who reports that this currently also works in NetBeans IDE 7.3 dev builds for fields but that may need to be disabled since right now too many false positives are returned, for help with the info above and any misunderstandings are my own fault!

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• Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects Guidance?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Early on in the Team System (now Visual Studio ALM) cycle a new product surfaced within Team System that was affectionately called “Data Dude”, but had the more formal name of “Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals”. The purpose of this product was to try and make the database a “first class citizen” in the development world. Those that started using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (Data Dude) loved it, but everyone else did not get it. The capabilities were a little patchy, but the one thing it did bring to the party was the ability to put your database schema under source control. This was revolutionary as previously your DBA sat as far away from the team as possible, and usually in a dark cupboard, now they could partake of all the goodness of Version Control, Work Item Tracking and automated builds. The problem was that the understanding required to manage these projects was very different to that needed previously. Then the Visual Studio ALM Rangers got a hold of it…and produced some of the best guidance available. Figure: Download the guidance from http://vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com/ This guidance discusses scenarios and approaches of using the Database Projects in Visual Studio 2010 to help you use the tools more effectively and maximize their value to your organization This guidance is focused on these five areas: Solution and Project Management Source Code Control and Configuration Management Integrating External Changes with the Project System Build and Deployment Automation with Visual Studio Database Projects Database Testing and Deployment Verification Each of these areas has common guidance, usage scenarios, hands on labs, and lessons learned from real world engagements and the community discussions.   The guidance is broken down into three packages: Guidance documentation Hands-on-lab (HOL) documentation note: The documentation is available in XPS-only format packages or complete XPS,PDF,DOCX format packages HOL Package If you need assistance and no one else can help, then you may need to call the Visual Studio ALM Rangers. The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. They are supported by Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used. For more information on the Rangers please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee358786.aspx and for more a list of other Rangers projects please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee358787.aspx.

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• Maximum Availability with Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Irem Radzik

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oracle Database offers a variety of built-in and optional products for maximum availability, and it is well known for its robust high availability and disaster recovery solutions. With its heterogeneous, real-time, transactional data movement capabilities, Oracle GoldenGate is a key part of the Maximum Availability Architecture for Oracle Database. This week on Thursday Dec. 13th we will be presenting in a live webcast how Oracle GoldenGate fits into Oracle Database Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA). Joe Meeks from the Oracle Database High Availability team will discuss how Oracle GoldenGate complements other key products within MAA such as Active Data Guard. Nick Wagner from GoldenGate PM team will present how to upgrade to latest Oracle Database release without any downtime. Nick will also cover 2 new features of  Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2:  Integrated Capture for Oracle Database and Automated Conflict Detection and Resolution. Nick will provide in depth review of these new features with examples. Oracle GoldenGate also offers maximum availability for non-Oracle databases, such as HP NonStop, SQL Server, DB2 (LUW, iSeries, or zSeries) and more. The same robust, reliable real-time, bidirectional data movement capabilities apply to all supported databases.  I'd like to invite you to join us on Thursday Dec. 13th 10am PT/1pm ET to hear from the product experts on how to use GoldenGate for maximizing database availability and to ask your questions. You can find the registration link below. Webcast: Maximum Availability with Oracle GoldenGate Thursday Dec. 13th 10am PT/1pm ET Look forward to another great webcast with lots of interaction with the audience. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• TalkTalk Business Succeeds with Engaging Conversations on an Eloqua platform

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “Everybody from online, CRM and data, channel management, communications, and content had to pull together to deliver one campaign and Eloqua was the glue that held it all together.” says Paul Higgins, Marketing Director, TalkTalk Business (UK, telco) in this 2'23 video. Challenges Nurturing multiple sales channels with very diverse customers. Generating leads qualified to a very high standard. Engaging a fatigued and apathetic target audience. Positioning the brand as industry thought leaders. Solutions “What’s Your Business Grade?” campaign Eloqua automated email nurture strategy Eloqua Partner Network – Stein IAS Results ROI of 20:1. 40% uplift in sales opportunities in the smaller end with a 25% reduction in costs. 20–25% increase in sales qualified leads for mid-market, corporate, and enterprise customer sets. Open rate highs of 61.84% and click to open highs of 15.97%. /* 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;}

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• What are the drawbacks of sending XML to browsers and let them apply XSLT?

  - by MainMa

  Context Working as a freelance developer, I often made websites completely based on XSLT. In other words, on every request, an XML file is generated, containing everything we need to know about the page content: the name of the user currently logged in, the top menu entries, if this menu is dynamic/configurable, the text to display in a specific area of the page, etc. Then XSL process (caches, etc.) it to HTML/XHTML page to send to the browser. It has a good point to make it easier to create small-scale websites, especially with PHP. It is a sort of template engine, but which I prefer to other template engines because it's much more powerful than most of template engines, and because I know it better and like it. It is also possible, when need, to give an access to raw XML data on demand for an automated access, without the need to create separate APIs. Of course, it will fail completely on any medium-scale or large-scale website, since, even with good caching techniques, XSL still degrades overall website performance and requires more CPU serverside. Question Modern browsers have the ability to take an XML file and to transform it with an associated XSL file declared in XML like <?xml-stylesheet href="demo.xslt" type="text/xsl"?>. Firefox 3 can do it. Internet Explorer 8 can do it too. It means that it is possible to migrate XSL processing from the server to the client side for 50% of users (according on browser statistics on several websites where I may want to implement this). It means that those 50% of users will receive only the XML file at each request, thus reducing their and server's bandwidth (XML file being much shorter than its processed HTML analog), and reducing server's CPU usage. What are the drawbacks of this technique? I thought about several ones, but it doesn't apply in this situation: Difficult implementation and the need to choose, based on the browser request, when to send raw XML and when to transform it to HTML instead. Obviously, the system will not be much more difficult then the actual one. The only change to make is to add XSL file link to every XML, and to add a browser check. More IO and bandwidth usage, since the XSLT file will be downloaded by the browsers, instead of being cached by the server. I don't think it will be a problem, since XSLT file will be cached by the browsers (like images, or CSS, or JavaScript files are cached actually). Possibly some problems on client side, like maybe problems when saving a page in some browsers. Difficulty to debug code: it is impossible to obtain an HTML source the browser is actually using, since the only displayed source is the downloaded XML. On the other hand, I rarely go look at HTML code on client side, and in most cases, it is unusable directly (whitespace being removed).

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• Agile Documentation

  - by Nick Harrison

  We all know that one of the premises of the agile manifesto is to value Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation. This is a wonderful idea and it takes a tremendous burden off of project implementations. I have seen as many projects fail because of the maintenance weight of the project documentations as I have for any reason. But this goal as important as it is may not always be practical. Sometimes the client will simply insist on tedious documentation despite the arguments against it. This may be to calm a nervous client. This may be to satisfy an audit / compliance requirement. This may be a non-too subtle attempt at sabotaging the project. Ok, it is probably not an all out attempt to sabotage the project, but it will probably feel that way. So what can we do to keep to the spirit of the Agile Manifesto but still meet the needs of the client wanting the documentation? This is a good question that I have been puzzling over lately! I hope to explore some possible answers more fully here. A common theme that my solutions are likely to follow is the same theme that I often follow with simplifying complex business logic. Make it table driven! My thought is that the sought after documentation could be a report or reports out of a metadata repository. Reports are much easier to maintain than hand written documentation. Here are a few additional advantages that we can explore over time: Reports will take advantage of the fact that different people have different needs and different format requirements Reports and the supporting metadata are more easily validated and the validation can be automated. If the application itself uses this metadata than there never has to be a question as to whether or not the metadata is up to date. It is up to date or the application would not work. In many cases we should be able to automatically gather most of the Meta data that we need using reflection, system tables, etc. I think that this will lower the total cost of ownership for the documentation and may provide something useful beyond having a pretty document to look at.  What are your thoughts?

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• ITT Corporation Goes Live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM)!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Back in Q2 of FY12, a division of ITT invited Oracle to demo our CRM On Demand product while the group was considering Salesforce.com. Chris Porter, our Oracle Direct sales representative learned the players and their needs and began to develop relationships. We lost that deal, but not Chris's persistence. A few months passed and Chris called on the ITT Shape Cutting Division's Director of Sales to see how things were going. Chris was told that the plan was for the division to buy more Salesforce.com. In fact, he informed Chris that he had just sent his team to Salesforce.com training. During the conversation, Chris mentioned that our new Oracle Sales Cloud Service could run with Outlook. This caused the ITT Sales Director to reconsider the plan to move forward with our competition. Oracle was invited back to demo the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) and after it concluded, the Director stated, "That just blew your competition away." The deal closed on June 5th , 2012 Our Oracle Platinum Partner, Intelenex, began the implementation with ITT on July 30th. We are happy to report that on September 18th, the ITT Shape Cutting Division successfully went live on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM). About: ITT is a diversified leading manufacturer of highly engineered critical components and customized technology solutions for growing industrial end-markets in energy infrastructure, electronics, aerospace and transportation. Building on its heritage of innovation, ITT partners with its customers to deliver enduring solutions to the key industries that underpin our modern way of life. Founded in 1920, ITT is headquartered in White Plains, NY, with 8,500 employees in more than 30 countries and sales in more than 125 countries. The ITT Shape Cutting Division provides plasma lasers and controls with the Burny, Kaliburn, and AMC brands. Oracle Fusion Products: Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM) including: • Fusion CRM Base • Fusion Sales Cloud • Fusion Mobile and Desktop Integration • Automated Forecasting Adoption Model: SaaS Partner: Intelenex Business Drivers: The ITT Shape Cutting Division wanted to: better enable its Sales Force with email and mobile CRM capabilities simplify and automate its complex sales processes centrally manage and maintain customer contact information Why We Won: ITT was impressed with the feature-rich capabilities of Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service (Fusion CRM), including sales performance management and integration. The company also liked the product's flexibility and scalability for future growth. Expected Benefits: Streamlined accurate forecasting Increased customer manageability Improved sales performance Better visibility to customer information

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• Paranoid management, contractor checking work [closed]

  - by user833345

  Just wanted to get some opinions and experiences on an issue I'm having at work. First, a little background. I've been working at a company for some time (past any probation periods) and rewriting a horrendous system. No tests, incomplete and broken functionality everywhere, enough copypasta to feed a small village, redundant code, more unused SQL tables than used ones and terrible performance. I've never seen such bad code, pretty much all of it is worthy of being posted on TheDailyWTF. The company has been operating for a number of years and have had a string of bad developers working on this system. I made a call on rewriting instead of refactoring since I judged it to be less work overall and decided that the result will address the requirements more appropriately, since the central requirement is to have a future-proof system for the next decade with plenty of room to scale up. Refactoring would have entailed untangling a huge ball of yarn and at the same time integrating it with a proper foundation or building a foundation from scratch. I've introduced the latest spiffy framework, unit & functional testing, CI, a bug tracker and agile workflow to the environment. I've fixed most of the performance issues of the old system (there were no indexes on any of the tables, for example). I've created an automated deployment process for the old system. The CTO has been maintaining the old system while I have been building the new one and he has been advising management that everything is being done as per best practices. However, management is hiring a contractor to come in and verify my work. In my experience, this is unprecedented. I can understand their reasoning to an extent, since they've had bad luck in the past, but can't help but feel somewhat offended at the fact that they distrust two senior developers who have been working with them for some time enough that a third party is being brought in. And it's not just me who is under watch - people's emails are constantly checked, someone had a remote desktop application installed on their computer of which I was asked to check the usage logs to try to determine if they were stealing sensitive data and there are CCTV cameras in one of the rooms. It's the first time I've decided to disable my Skype history at work. Am I right to feel indignant here? Has anyone else ever encountered such a situation? If so, how did it work out in the end? Was it worth sticking around? Should I just find another job?

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• Is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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