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• BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

  - by StuartBrierley

  At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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• Wednesday at OpenWorld: Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  Divide and conquer! Yes, divide and conquer today at Oracle OpenWorld with your colleagues to make the most of all things Identity Management since there’s a lot going on. Here’ the line-up for today: Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9458: End End-User-Managed Passwords and Increase Security with Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Plus 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3008 Most customers have a broad variety of applications (internal, external, web, client server, host etc) and single sign-on systems that extend to some, but not all systems. This session will focus on how customers are using enterprise single sign-on can help extend single sign-on to virtually any application, without costly application modification while laying a foundation that will enable integration with a broader identity management platform. CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption.  Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience.  This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking Control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. EVENTS: Identity Management Customer Advisory Board 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., Four Seasons – Yerba Buena Room This invitation-only event is designed exclusively for Customer Advisory Board (CAB) members to provide product strategy and roadmap updates. Identity Management Meet & Greet Networking Event 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Meeting Session 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Cocktail Reception Yerba Buena Room, Four Seasons Hotel, 757 Market Street, San Francisco The CAB meeting will be immediately followed by an open Meet & Greet event hosted by Oracle Identity Management executives and product management team. Do take this opportunity to network with your peers and connect with the Identity Management customers. For a complete listing, refer to the Focus on Identity Management document. And as always, you can find us on @oracleidm on twitter and FaceBook. Use #oow and #idm to join in the conversation.

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

  I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• A little primer on using TFS with a small team

  - by johndoucette

  The scenario; A small team of 3 developers mostly in maintenance mode with traditional ASP.net, classic ASP, .Net integration services and utilities with the company’s third party packages, and a bunch of java-based Coldfusion web applications all under Visual Source Safe (VSS). They are about to embark on a huge SharePoint 2010 new construction project and wanted to use subversion instead VSS. TFS was a foreign word and smelled of “high cost” and of an “over complicated process”. Since they had no preconditions about the old TFS versions (‘05 & ‘08), it was fun explaining how simple it was to install a TFS server and get the ball rolling, with or without all the heavy stuff one sometimes associates with such a huge and powerful application management lifecycle product. So, how does a small team begin using TFS? 1. Start by using source control and migrate current VSS source trees into TFS. You can take the latest version or migrate the entire version history. It’s up to you on whether you want a clean start or need quick access to all the version notes and history of the bits. 2. Since most shops are mainly in maintenance mode with existing applications, begin using bug workitems for everything. When you receive an issue/bug from your current tracking system, manually enter the workitem in TFS right through Visual Studio. You can automate the integration to the current tracking system later or replace it entirely. Believe me, this thing is powerful and can handle even the largest of help desks. 3. With new construction, begin work with requirements and task workitems and follow the traditional sprint-based development lifecycle. Obviously, some minor training will be needed, but don’t fear, this is very intuitive and MSDN has a ton of lesson based labs and videos. 4. For the java developers, use the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 plugin (recently known as Teamprise). There is a seamless interface in Eclipse, but also a good command-line utility for other environments such as Dreamweaver. 5. Wait to fully integrate the whole workitem/project management/testing process until your team is familiar with the integrated workitems for bugs and code. After a while, you will see the team wanting more transparency into the work they are all doing and naturally, everyone will want workitems to help them organize the chaos! 6. Management will be limited in the value of the reports until you have a fully blown implementation of project planning, construction, build, deployment and testing. However, there are some basic “bug rate” reports and current backlog listings that can provide good information. Some notable explanations of TFS; Work Item Tracking and Project Management - A workitem represents the unit of work within the system which enables tracking of all activities produced by a user, whether it is a developer, business user, project manager or tester. The properties of a workitem such as linked changesets (checked-in code), who updated the data and when, the states and reasons for change, are all transitioned to a data warehouse within TFS for reporting purposes. A workitem can be defines as a "bug", "requirement", test case", or a "change request". They drive the work effort by the individual assigned to it and also provide a key role in defining what needs to be done. Workitems are the things the team needs to do to accomplish a goal. Test Case Management - Starting with a workitem known as a "test case", a tester (or developer) can now author and manage test cases within a formal test plan subsystem. Although TFS supports the test case workitem type, there is a new product known as the VS Test Professional 2010 which allows a tester to facilitate manual tests including fast forwarding steps in the process to arrive at the assertion point quickly. This repeatable process provides quick regression tests and can be conducted by the business user to ensure completeness during UAT. In addition, developers no longer can provide a response to a bug with the line "cannot reproduce". With every test run, attachments including the recorded session, captured environment configurations and settings, screen shots, intellitrace (debugging history), and in some cases if the lab manager is being used, a snapshot of the tested environment is available. Version Control - A modern system allowing shared check-in/check-out, excellent merge conflict resolution, Shelvesets (personal check-ins), branching/merging visualization, public workspaces, gated check-ins, security hierarchy capabilities, and changeset/workitem tracking. Knowing what was done with the code by any developer has become much easier to picture and resolve issues. Team Build - Automate the compilation process whether you need it to be whenever a developer checks-in code, periodically such as nightly builds for testers in the morning, or manual builds to be deployed into production. Each build can run through pre-determined tests, perform code analysis to see if the developer conforms to the team standards, and reject the build if either fails. Project Portal & Reporting - Provide management with a dashboard with insight into the project(s). "Where are we" in each step of the way including past iterations and the current burndown rate. Enabling this feature is easy as it seamlessly interfaces with existing SharePoint implementations.

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• Certify August Updates

  - by Sadia2

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We have added some release and platform certifications to MOS Certify. Applications : Oracle Demantra Demand Management 7.3.1.5, Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning 7.3.1.5, Oracle Demantra Sales and Operations Planning 7.3.1.5 Database: Oracle Database Client 12.1.0.1.0 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Real Application Clusters 11.2.0.4.0 E-Business Suite: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3, Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.2, Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1, Oracle E-Business Suite 12.0.6, Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10.2 Edge Applications: Oracle Transportation Management 6.3.2 Enterprise Manager: Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.0.1.0 Fusion Middleware: Discoverer Administrator 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Desktop 11.1.1.6.0, Forms Builder 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Application Development Framework 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Application Development Runtime 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Directory Services Manager 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Forms 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle GoldenGate 11.1.1.1.0, 11.1.1.1.2, 11.1.1.1.1, Oracle GoldenGate Application Adapters 11.1.1.1.1, Oracle Identity and Access Management 11.1.2.0.0, 11.1.2.1.0, Oracle Identity Federation 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Real-Time Decision Load Generator 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle Real-Time Decision Studio 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle Real-Time Decisions 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Reports 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Segmentation Server 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Virtual Directory 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Web Cache 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Imaging 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Inbound Refinery Server 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Records 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Rights 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content UI 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Enterprise Capture 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for EMC Documentum 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for File Systems and MS SharePoint 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: Community-Gadgets 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: Explorer 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Universal Content Management 11.1.1.8.0, Reports Builder 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Records 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content Rights 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Content UI 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: Developer Tools 11.1.1.8.0 FSGBU Insurance Group : Oracle Health Insurance Claims 2.13.3.0.0, 2.13.2.0.0, 2.13.1.0.0 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 9.1.3.0, 9.1.2.0, 9.1.0.0 JD Edwards World: JD Edwards World Service Enablement A93SE, A931SE PeopleSoft: PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.52 Siebel Enterprise: Siebel Application Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel CRM Desktop Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Database Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel HI Web Client 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Gateway Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Outlook Add-in Client 8.2.2.2.0, Siebel Remote Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Tools Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Web Server Extension 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0 /* 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

  - by manan.goel(at)oracle.com

  Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric's acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE's case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best - "vision without execution is hallucination". Conversely, it can be said that "execution without vision" is well may be "wishful thinking". Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap. Having established the severity and importance of the problem let's talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include: -        Lack of clearly defined goals -        Lack of consistent measure of success -        Lack of ownership -        Lack of alignment -        Lack of communication -        Lack of proper execution -        Lack of monitoring       There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll focus on technology.  Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like:  Complete -        Full functionality -        Rich end user access Open -        Any data source -        Any business application -        Any technology stack  Integrated -        Common metadata -        Common security -        Common system management From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities: Define -        Strategy -        Objectives -        Ownership -        KPI's Communicate -        Pervasive -        Collaborative -        Role based -        Secure Execute -        Integrated -        Intuitive -        Secure -        Ubiquitous Monitor -        Multiple styles and formats -        Exception based -        Push & Pull Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let's talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle's best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is ·         Complete - meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. ·         Open - meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources--including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP. ·         Integrated - meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture.  The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework. To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI's, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform's integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g. 

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• Cookbook: SES and UCM setup

  - by George Maggessy

  The purpose of this post is to guide you setting up the integration between UCM and SES. On my next post I’ll show different approaches to integrate WebCenter Portal, UCM and SES based on some common scenarios. Let’s get started. WebCenter Content Configuration WebCenter Content has a component that adds functionality to the content server to allow it to be searched via the Oracle SES. To enable the component installation, go to Administration -&gt; Admin Server and select SESCrawlerExport. Click the update button and restart UCM_server1 managed server. Once the managed server is back, we’ll configure the component. In the menu, under Administration you should see SESCrawlerExport. Click on the link. You’ll see the window below. Click on Configure SESCrawlerExport. Configure the values below: Hostname: SES hostname. Feed Location: Directory where data feeds will be saved. Metadata List: List of metadata that will be searchable by SES. After updating the values click on the Update button. Come back to the SESCrawlerExport Administration UI and click on Take Snapshot button. It will create the data feeds in the specified Feed Location. To check if the correct configuration was done, please access the following URL http://&lt;ucm_server&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWLOAD_CONFIG&amp;source=default. It should download config file in the format below: &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;rsscrawler xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/search/rsscrawlerconfig"&gt; &lt;feedLocation&gt;&lt;![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONTROL&amp;source=default]]&gt;&lt;/feedLocation&gt; &lt;errorFileLocation&gt;&lt;![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_STATUS&amp;IsJava=1&amp;source=default&amp;StatusFeed=]]&gt;&lt;/errorFileLocation&gt; &lt;feedType&gt;controlFeed&lt;/feedType&gt; &lt;sourceName&gt;default&lt;/sourceName&gt; &lt;securityType&gt;attributeBased&lt;/securityType&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="Account" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="DocSecurityGroup" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="Collab" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;/rsscrawler&gt; Make sure Account and DocSecurityGroup values are true. SES Configuration Let’s start by configuring the Identity Plug-ins in SES. Go to Global Settings -&gt; System -&gt; Identity Management Setup. Select Oracle Content Server and click the Activate button. We’ll populate the following values: HTTP endpoint for authentication: URL to WebCenter Content. Notice that /cs/idcplg was added at the end of the URL. Admin User: UCM Admin user. This user must have access to all CPOE content. Password: Password to Admin user. Authentication Type: NATIVE. Go back to the Home tab and click on Sources on the top left. Select Oracle Content Server on the right and click the Create button. Configuration URL: URL that point to the configuration file. Example: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONFIG&amp;source=default. User ID: UCM Admin user. Password: Password to Admin user. Click on the Authorization tab and add the appropriate values to the fields below. Make sure you see the ACCOUNT and DOCSECURITYGROUP security attributes at the end of the page. HTTP endpoint for authorization: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg. Display URL prefix: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs. Administrator user: UCM Admin user. Administrator password. On the Document Types tab, add the documents that should be indexed by SES. As our last step, we’ll configure the Federation Trusted Entities under Global Settings. Entity Name: The user must be present in both the identity management server configured for your WebCenter application and the identity management server configured for Oracle SES. For instance, I used weblogic in my sample. Password: Entity user password.\ Now you are ready to test the integration on the SES UI: http://&lt;ses hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/search/query/.

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

  - by David Swanger

  Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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• Exception when deploying a JSR 286 portlet into WebLogic+WebCenter 11g

  - by Rambaldi

  I get the following exception when deploying a JSR 286 portlet into Oracle WebLogic Server 11g (to deploy it later in Oracle WebCenter 11g): <19-ene-2010 13H32' CET> <Error> <oracle.portlet.server.containerimpl.PortletApplicationImpl> <BEA-000000> <Error al procesar el archivo "/WEB-INF/portlet.xml" en la lÝnea 6 columna 68. org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: cvc-elt.1: Cannot find the declaration of element 'portlet-app' The error message is in spanish. It means: "Error processing the file "/WEB-INF/portlet.xml at line 6 column 68" The portlet.xml of my portlet seems to be correct and I've deployed it in other portal servers. So I don't understand the error message. This is the portlet.xml of my portlet (eclipse XML validator said it was a valid XML) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <portlet-app version="2.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/portlet-app_2_0.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/portlet-app_2_0.xsd http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/portlet-app_2_0.xsd" xmlns:dnd="http://www.denodo.com/widget/portlet/portletjsr286"> <portlet> <description>Test Inter Portlet Communication (JSR286)</description> <portlet-name>Test IPC</portlet-name> <display-name>Test IPC</display-name> <portlet-class>com.denodo.ipc.TestIPCPortlet</portlet-class> <supports> <mime-type>text/html</mime-type> <portlet-mode>VIEW</portlet-mode> </supports> <supported-locale>en</supported-locale> <resource-bundle>PortletMessages</resource-bundle> <portlet-info> <title>Test IPC</title> <short-title>Test IPC</short-title> <keywords>Test IPC,Denodo</keywords> </portlet-info> </portlet> </portlet-app> How do I deploy my portlet I convert my portlet into to a WSRP portlet by executing java -jar wsrp-predeploy.jar source EAR target EAR as explained in http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/webcenter.1111/e12405/wcadm_portlet_prod.htm#CHDECJHI) I try to deploy it into WebLogic with the WebLogic Console and I get this exception. My Environment WebCenter Suite (11.1.1.2.0) + WebLogic Server (10.3.2) downloaded from the oracle.com. Default configuration S.O: Windows XP SP3 Thanks in advance for your time.

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• SharePoint 2010 Custom WCF Service - Windows and FBA Authentication

  - by e-rock

  I have SharePoint 2010 configured for Claims Based Authentication with both Windows and Forms Based Authentication (FBA) for external users. I also need to develop custom WCF Services. The issue is that I want Windows credentials passed into the WCF Service(s); however, I cannot seem to get the Windows credentials passed into the services. My custom WCF service appears to be using Anonymous authentication (which has to be enabled in IIS in order to display the FBA login screen). The example I have tried to follow is found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff521581.aspx. The WCF service gets deployed to _vti_bin (ISAPI folder). Here is the code for the .svc file <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="MyCompany.CustomerPortal.SharePoint.UI.ISAPI.MyCompany.Services.LibraryManagers.LibraryUploader, $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" Factory="Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Services.MultipleBaseAddressBasicHttpBindingServiceHostFactory, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerRuntime, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" CodeBehind="LibraryUploader.svc.cs" %> Here is the code behind for the .svc file [ServiceContract] public interface ILibraryUploader { [OperationContract] string SiteName(); } [BasicHttpBindingServiceMetadataExchangeEndpoint] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Required)] public class LibraryUploader : ILibraryUploader { //just try to return site title right now… public string SiteName() { WindowsIdentity identity = ServiceSecurityContext.Current.WindowsIdentity; ClaimsIdentity claimsIdentity = new ClaimsIdentity(identity); return SPContext.Current.Web.Title; } } The WCF test client I have just to test it out (WPF app) uses the following code to call the WCF service... private void Button1Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { BasicHttpBinding binding = new BasicHttpBinding(); binding.Security.Mode = BasicHttpSecurityMode.TransportCredentialOnly; binding.Security.Transport.ClientCredentialType = HttpClientCredentialType.Ntlm; EndpointAddress endpoint = new EndpointAddress( "http://dev.portal.data-image.local/_vti_bin/MyCompany.Services/LibraryManagers/LibraryUploader.svc"); LibraryUploaderClient libraryUploader = new LibraryUploaderClient(binding, endpoint); libraryUploader.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation; MessageBox.Show(libraryUploader.SiteName()); } I am somewhat inexperienced with IIS security settings/configurations when it comes to Claims and trying to use both Windows and FBA. I am also inexperienced when it comes to WCF configurations for security. I usually develop internal biz apps and let Visual Studio decide what to use because security is rarely a concern.

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• Is there anyway to exclude artifacts inherited from a parent POM?

  - by Miguel

  Artifacts from dependencies can be excluded by declaring an <exclusions> element inside a <dependency> But in this case it's needed to exclude an artifact inherited from a parent project. An excerpt of the POM under discussion follows: <project> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>test</groupId> <artifactId>jruby</artifactId> <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version> <parent> <artifactId>base</artifactId> <groupId>es.uniovi.innova</groupId> <version>1.0.0</version> </parent> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>com.liferay.portal</groupId> <artifactId>ALL-DEPS</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <scope>provided</scope> <type>pom</type> </dependency> </dependencies> </project> base artifact, depends on javax.mail:mail-1.4.jar, and ALL-DEPS depends on another version of the same library. Due to the fact that mail.jar from ALL-DEPS exist on the execution environment, although not exported, collides with the mail.jar that exists on the parent, which is scoped as compile. A solution could be to rid off mail.jar from the parent POM, but most of the projects that inherit base, need it (as is a transtive dependency for log4j). So What I would like to do is to simply exclude parent's library from the child project, as it could be done if base was a dependency and not the parent pom: ... <dependency> <artifactId>base</artifactId> <groupId>es.uniovi.innova</groupId> <version>1.0.0</version> <type>pom<type> <exclusions> <exclusion> <groupId>javax.mail</groupId> <artifactId>mail</artifactId> </exclusion> </exclusions> </dependency> ...

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• How Can I Populate Default Form Data with a ManyToMany Field?

  - by b14ck

  Ok, I've been crawling google and Django documentation for over 2 hours now (as well as the IRC channel on freenode), and haven't been able to figure this one out. Basically, I have a model called Room, which is displayed below: class Room(models.Model): """ A `Partyline` room. Rooms on the `Partyline`s are like mini-chatrooms. Each room has a variable amount of `Caller`s, and usually a moderator of some sort. Each `Partyline` has many rooms, and it is common for `Caller`s to join multiple rooms over the duration of their call. """ LIVE = 0 PRIVATE = 1 ONE_ON_ONE = 2 UNCENSORED = 3 BULLETIN_BOARD = 4 CHILL = 5 PHONE_BOOTH = 6 TYPE_CHOICES = ( ('LR', 'Live Room'), ('PR', 'Private Room'), ('UR', 'Uncensored Room'), ) type = models.CharField('Room Type', max_length=2, choices=TYPE_CHOICES) number = models.IntegerField('Room Number') partyline = models.ForeignKey(Partyline) owner = models.ForeignKey(User, blank=True, null=True) bans = models.ManyToManyField(Caller, blank=True, null=True) def __unicode__(self): return "%s - %s %d" % (self.partyline.name, self.type, self.number) I've also got a forms.py which has the following ModelForm to represent my Room model: from django.forms import ModelForm from partyline_portal.rooms.models import Room class RoomForm(ModelForm): class Meta: model = Room I'm creating a view which allows administrators to edit a given Room object. Here's my view (so far): def edit_room(request, id=None): """ Edit various attributes of a specific `Room`. Room owners do not have access to this page. They cannot edit the attributes of the `Room`(s) that they control. """ room = get_object_or_404(Room, id=id) if not room.is_owner(request.user): return HttpResponseForbidden('Forbidden.') if is_user_type(request.user, ['admin']): form_type = RoomForm elif is_user_type(request.user, ['lm']): form_type = LineManagerEditRoomForm elif is_user_type(request.user, ['lo']): form_type = LineOwnerEditRoomForm if request.method == 'POST': form = form_type(request.POST, instance=room) if form.is_valid(): if 'owner' in form.cleaned_data: room.owner = form.cleaned_data['owner'] room.save() else: defaults = {'type': room.type, 'number': room.number, 'partyline': room.partyline.id} if room.owner: defaults['owner'] = room.owner.id if room.bans: defaults['bans'] = room.bans.all() ### this does not work properly! form = form_type(defaults, instance=room) variables = RequestContext(request, {'form': form, 'room': room}) return render_to_response('portal/rooms/edit.html', variables) Now, this view works fine when I view the page. It shows all of the form attributes, and all of the default values are filled in (when users do a GET)... EXCEPT for the default values for the ManyToMany field 'bans'. Basically, if an admins clicks on a Room object to edit, the page they go to will show all of the Rooms default values except for the 'bans'. No matter what I do, I can't find a way to get Django to display the currently 'banned users' for the Room object. Here is the line of code that needs to be changed (from the view): defaults = {'type': room.type, 'number': room.number, 'partyline': room.partyline.id} if room.owner: defaults['owner'] = room.owner.id if room.bans: defaults['bans'] = room.bans.all() ### this does not work properly! There must be some other syntax I have to use to specify the default value for the 'bans' field. I've really been pulling my hair out on this one, and would definitely appreciate some help. Thanks!

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• Assign an existing click event function to another click event using jquery

  - by Peter Delahunty

  Ok so i have some html like this: <div id="navigation"> <ul> <li> <a>tab name</a> <span class="delete-tab">X</span> </li> <li> <a>tab name</a> <span class="delete-tab">X</span> </li> <li> <a>tab name</a> <span class="delete-tab">X</span> </li> <li class="selected"> <a>tab name</a> <span class="tab-del-btn">X</span> </li> </ul> </div> I then have javascript that is excuted on the page that i do not control (this is in liferay portal). I want to then manipulate things afterwards with my own custom javascript. SO... For each of the span.delete-tab elements an on-click event function has been assign earlier. It is the same function call for each span. I want to take that function (any) and call it from the click event of the span.tab-del-btn ? This is what i tried to do: var navigation = jQuery('#navigation'); var navTabs = navigation.find('.delete-tab'); var existingDeleteFunction = null; navTabs.each(function (i){ var tab = jQuery(this); existingDeleteFunction = tab.click; }); var selectedTab = jQuery('#navigation li.selected'); var deleteBtn = selectedTab.find('.tab-del-btn'); deleteBtn.click(function(event){ existingDeleteFunction.call(this); }); It does not work though. existingDeleteFunction is not the original function it is some jquery default function. Any ideas?

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• IPHONE DEVELOPMENT PROFILE EXPIRED - I TRIED EVERYTHING AND YES, I READ THE DOCS

  - by theiphoneguy

  I really combed this site and others. I read and re-read the related links here and the Apple docs. I'm sorry, but either I am obviously missing something right under my nose, or this Apple profile/certificate stuff is a bit convoluted. Here it is: I have a product in the App Store. I have updated it several times and users like it. My development profile recently expired just when I was improving the app for its next release. I can run the app in the simulator. I can compile and put the distribution build on my iPhone just fine. I went to the Apple portal and renewed the development profile. I downloaded it and installed it in Xcode. I see it in the Organize window. I see it on my iPhone. I CANNOT put the debug build on my iPhone to debug or run with Instruments. The message is that either there is not a valid signed profile or it is untrusted. I subsequently tried to download and install the certificate to my Mac's keychain. Still no success. I checked the code signing section of Project settings and also for the target and the root. All appears to indicate that it is using the expected development profile for debug. Yes, I had deleted the old profile from my iPhone, from the Organizer. I cleaned the Xcode cache and all targets. I have done all of this several times and in varying sequences to try to cover every possibility. I am ready to do anything to be able to debug with Instruments in order to check for leaks or high memory usage. Even though the distribution compile runs fine on my iPhone and plays well with other running processes, I will not release anything without a leaks/memory test. Any ideas will be appreciated. If I missed something obvious, please forgive me - it was not due to just posting a question without searching for similar postings. Thanks!

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• IPhone Development Profile Expired

  - by theiphoneguy

  I really combed this site and others. I read and re-read the related links here and the Apple docs. I'm sorry, but either I am obviously missing something right under my nose, or this Apple profile/certificate stuff is a bit convoluted. Here it is: I have a product in the App Store. I have updated it several times and users like it. My development profile recently expired just when I was improving the app for its next release. I can run the app in the simulator. I can compile and put the distribution build on my iPhone just fine. I went to the Apple portal and renewed the development profile. I downloaded it and installed it in Xcode. I see it in the Organize window. I see it on my iPhone. I CANNOT put the debug build on my iPhone to debug or run with Instruments. The message is that either there is not a valid signed profile or it is untrusted. I subsequently tried to download and install the certificate to my Mac's keychain. Still no success. I checked the code signing section of Project settings and also for the target and the root. All appears to indicate that it is using the expected development profile for debug. Yes, I had deleted the old profile from my iPhone, from the Organizer. I cleaned the Xcode cache and all targets. I have done all of this several times and in varying sequences to try to cover every possibility. I am ready to do anything to be able to debug with Instruments in order to check for leaks or high memory usage. Even though the distribution compile runs fine on my iPhone and plays well with other running processes, I will not release anything without a leaks/memory test. Any ideas will be appreciated. If I missed something obvious, please forgive me - it was not due to just posting a question without searching for similar postings. Thanks!

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• Strange enduser experience with Liferay, Glassfish and Apache on RedHat

  - by Pete Helgren

  Tried multiple forums to get to the bottom of this. I hope I can get some direction here: Here is the stack I am working with: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (Tikanga) Liferay 6.0.6 on Glassfish 3.0.1 MySQL 5.0.77 Apache 2.2.3 The Liferay portal provides a variety of portlets to end users. Static content (web pages), static resources (primarily pdf and mp3 files 1mb - 80mb in size), File upload and download capabilities (primarily 40-60mb mp3 files) and online streaming of those MP3 files. Here is the strange end user experiences: Under normal load: (20-30) users uploading, downloading or streaming files and 20-30 accessing static content (some of it downloads), we see the following: 1) Clicking a link triggers the download of a portion of an MP3 (the portion is a few seconds long). 2) Clicking on a link tiggers the download of the page content rather than rendering. 3) Clicking a link causes the page to dump binary data to the end user rather than the expected content. 4) Clicking a link returns the text of a javascript file rather than rendering the page. Each occurrence is totally random (or appears so). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It seems to have no relation to browser or client OS. The strange events seem to occur much more frequently when using an SSL connection rather than regular http. Apache serves as a proxy server only (reverse). It basically passes all the requests through to Glassfish. There isn't any static content proxy served by Apache. We rebuilt the entire stack from scratch and redeployed the portlet wars and still have the same issues. Liferay is running as a single server (not clustered). We disabled mod_cache in Apache. The problems are more frequent as the server load grows. This morning the load is pretty light and we are seeing few problems but the use of the site will grow, particularly tonight around 9pm CST through Wednesday morning. You could try the site (http://preview.bsfinternational.org) during those times and I would expect that you might experience one of the weirdnesses as you randomly click links on the site (https is invoked only when signed in). Again, https seems to exacerbate the issue. This seems very much like a caching issue but I don't know where in the stack to start peeling the onion. Apache? Liferay? Glassfish? MySQL? Maybe even Redhat? We are stumped and most forums we have posted to (LifeRay and Glassfish) have returned very few suggestions. I just need an idea of where to start looking. I understand that we could have a portlet EDIT: Opening the files in a Hex editor that appear to be pages that download rather than render, we see that the first 4000 characters are "junk" and then the "HTTP/1.1 ...." 'normal' header is seen. So something is dumping a jumble of characters up to offset 4000 (when viewing it in a Hex editor). Perhaps a clue? Ideas?

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• What would cause an .exe to vanish without a trace?

  - by Peter pete

  I have a few computers. One computer, at home, one day suddenly had its pgbouncer.exe vanish. The antivirus didn't have it in its virus chest [avast]. I couldn't find the bgbouncer anywhere. All the other pgbouncer files remained where they used to be, except the exe had vanished. I hadn't uninstalled it, nor had anyone else used the machine. I hadn't installed any new software since the previous time I had used it either. Just now, however, my TV computer was running out of disk space, which was weird because I had python setup to do transcoding and archiving. I logged in and voila! python.exe had vanished !! Once again, Avast.exe didn't have it in its virus chest, and dunno! I do this time, with the TV computer, know exactly the date that python vanished. Sat the 18th my python scripts ran fine. Sat the 19th python was gone. I'm going to do some hunting in the event log to see what happened that day. But if anyone has experienced vanishings before and has a clue what happened, I would like to know. FYI: Both computers (bgbouncer vanish and python vanish) were running Win7 with the RDP hack and both on SSDs and both with Avast. Both computers had all windows updates set to manual(to prevent random stuff changing!) and neither had recently had any windows updates manually applied. FYI2: Tv computer had since the beginning of October dropbox running all the time trying to download two files. Sadly, a temporary download of each of these two files by dropbox resulted in Avast freaking out and virus-chesting them, and then dropbox downloading them partially again, before being dropboxed. Now, these two files were binaries from a program I had personally written and were clean on other machines. Since the python vanishing I have deleted these two binaries from dropbox (using the website) and dropbox exe on the tv computer is now at peace. I don't think this should cause python.exe to vanish though :/ New edit: On the 18/10/2013, at 0742 my python script ended with an error: "file still in use" which was unexpected but I shrugged it off since sometimes media portal doesn't release the recording. But on second thoughts is weird since the show in use would have been finished recording the day before. On the 18/10/2013 at 0807 the windows event log complains that several drivers required for CutePDF, send to onenote 2010, send to onenote 2013, microsoft xps document writer aren't installed. I just checked now and indeed those printers have vanished! New update! I found my python.exe that had been removed. It was still in the C:\Python33\ directory except it had been renamed to a random string charater.tmp (ie, it was made into a temp file) with a creation date of 19/10/2013 at 0600:02 am. Now, the computer normally wakes at 6am to do transcoding. What could have moved my python file into a tmp file?

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• need assistance with my.cnf - 1500% CPU usage

  - by Alan Long

  I'm running into a few issues with our new database server. It is a HP G8 with 2 INTEL XEON E5-2650 processors and 32GB of ram. This server is dedicated as a MySQL server (5.1.69) for our intranet portal. I have been having issues with this server staying alive - I notice high CPU usage during certain times of day (8% ~ 1500%+) and see very low memory usage (7 ~ 15%) based on using the 'top' command. When the CPU usage passes 1000%, that is when the app usually dies. I'm trying to see what I'm doing wrong with the config file, hopefully one of the experts can chime in and let me know what they think. See below for my.cnf file: [mysqld] default-storage-engine=InnoDB datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock #user=mysql large-pages # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 max_connections=275 tmp_table_size=1G key_buffer_size=384M key_buffer=384M thread_cache_size=1024 long_query_time=5 low_priority_updates=1 max_heap_table_size=1G myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M concurrent_insert=2 table_cache=1024 sort_buffer_size=8M read_buffer_size=5M read_rnd_buffer_size=6M join_buffer_size=16M table_definition_cache=6k open_files_limit=8k slow_query_log #skip-name-resolve # Innodb Settings innodb_buffer_pool_size=18G innodb_thread_concurrency=0 innodb_log_file_size=1G innodb_log_buffer_size=16M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50 innodb_file_per_table #innodb_buffer_pool_instances=4 #eliminating double buffering innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT flush_time=86400 innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=40M #innodb_io_capacity = 5000 #innodb_read_io_threads = 64 #innodb_write_io_threads = 64 # increase until threads_created doesnt grow anymore thread_cache=1024 query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=4M query_cache_size=256M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 0 wait_timeout = 1800 connect_timeout = 10 interactive_timeout = 60 [mysqldump] max_allowed_packet=32M [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid log-slow-queries=/var/log/mysql/slow-queries.log long_query_time = 1 log-queries-not-using-indexes we connect to one database with 75 tables, the largest table has 1,150,000 entries and the second largest has 128,036 entries. I have also verified that our PHP queries are optimized as best as possible. Reference - MySQLtuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.69-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 420M (Tables: 75) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 75 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '[email protected]' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 1h 14m 50s (8M q [1K qps], 705 conn, TX: 6B, RX: 892M) [--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32% [--] Total buffers: 19.7G global + 35.2M per thread (275 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 29.1G (93% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (472/8M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 66% (183/275) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 384.0M/91.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (173 cached / 0 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 96.2% (7M cached / 7M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 553614 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (3 temp sorts / 1K sorts) [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 49% (3K on disk / 7K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 74% (183 created / 705 connections) [OK] Table cache hit rate: 97% (231 open / 238 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 0% (17/8K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (432K immediate / 432K locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 420.9M/18.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Temporary table size is already large - reduce result set size Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 256M) [see warning above] Thanks in advanced for your help!

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• Issue 15: The Benefits of Oracle Exastack

  - by rituchhibber

       SOLUTIONS FOCUS The Benefits of Oracle Exastack Paul ThompsonDirector, Alliances and Solutions Partner ProgramsOracle EMEA Alliances & Channels RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Ready Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Exastack Labs Video Tour SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Exastack is a revolutionary programme supporting Oracle independent software vendor partners across the entire Oracle technology stack. Oracle's core strategy is to engineer software and hardware together, and our ISV strategy is the same. At Oracle we design engineered systems that are pre-integrated to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance. Oracle innovates and optimises performance at every layer of the stack to simplify business operations, drive down costs and accelerate business innovation. Our engineered systems are optimised to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Our strategy of delivering a single-vendor stack simplifies and reduces costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments for our customers and partners. In parallel to this core engineered systems strategy, the Oracle Exastack Program enables our Oracle ISV partners to leverage a scalable, integrated infrastructure that delivers their applications tuned, tested and optimised for high-performance. Specifically, the Oracle Exastack Program helps ISVs run their solutions on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 - integrated systems products in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide OPN members with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Ready and Optimized Oracle Partners can now leverage our new Oracle Exastack Program to become Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized. Partners can achieve Oracle Exastack Ready status through their support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. By doing this, partners can demonstrate to their customers that their applications are available on the latest major releases of these products. The Oracle Exastack Ready programme helps customers readily differentiate Oracle partners from lesser software developers, and identify applications that support Oracle engineered systems. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status demonstrates that an OPN member has proven itself against goals for performance and scalability on Oracle integrated systems. This status enables end customers to readily identify Oracle partners that have tested and tuned their solutions for optimum performance on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. These ISVs can display the Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized or Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Optimized logos on websites and on all their collateral to show that they have tested and tuned their application for optimum performance. Deliver higher value to customers Oracle's investment in engineered systems enables ISV partners to deliver higher value to customer business processes. New innovations are enabled through extreme performance unachievable through traditional best-of-breed multi-vendor server/software approaches. Core product requirements can be launched faster, enabling ISVs to focus research and development investment on core competencies in order to bring value to market as quickly as possible. Through Exastack, partners no longer have to worry about the underlying product stack, which allows greater focus on the development of intellectual property above the stack. Partners are not burdened by platform issues and can concentrate simply on furthering their applications. The advantage to end customers is that partners can focus all efforts on business functionality, rather than bullet-proofing underlying technologies, and so will inevitably deliver application updates faster. Exastack provides ISVs with a number of flexible deployment options, such as on-premise or Cloud, while maintaining one single code base for applications regardless of customer deployment preference. Customers buying their solutions from Exastack ISVs can therefore be confident in deploying on their own networks, on private clouds or into a public cloud. The underlying platform will support all conceivable deployments, enabling a focus on the ISV's application itself that wouldn't be possible with other vendor partners. It stands to reason that Exastack accelerates time to value as well as lowering implementation costs all round. There is a big competitive advantage in partners being able to offer customers an optimised, pre-configured solution rather than an assortment of components and a suggested fit. Once a customer has decided to buy an Oracle Exastack Ready or Optimized partner solution, it will be up and running without any need for the customer to conduct testing of its own. Operational costs and complexity are also reduced, thanks to streamlined customer support through standardised configurations and pro-active monitoring. 'Engineered to Work Together' is a significant statement of Oracle strategy. It guarantees smoother deployment of a single vendor solution, clear ownership with no finger-pointing and the peace of mind of the Oracle Support Centre underpinning the entire product stack. Next steps Every OPN member with packaged applications must seriously consider taking steps to become Exastack Ready, or Exastack Optimized at the first opportunity. That first step down the track is to talk to an expert on the OPN Portal, at the Oracle Partner Business Center or to discuss the next steps with the closest Oracle account manager. Oracle Exastack lab environments and other technical enablement resources are available for OPN members wishing to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized. New Boot Camps and Guided Learning Paths (GLPs), tailored specifically for ISVs, are available for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle WebLogic Server. More information about these GLPs and Boot Camps (including delivery dates and locations) are posted on the OPN Competency Center and corresponding OPN Knowledge Zones. Learn more about Oracle Exastack labs and ISV specific enablement resources. "Oracle Specialized partners are of course front-and-centre, with potential customers clearly directed to those partners and to Exadata Ready partners as a matter of priority." --More OpenWorld 2011 highlights for Oracle partners and customers Oracle Application Testing Suite 9.3 application testing solution for Web, SOA and Oracle Applications Oracle Application Express Release 4.1 improving the development of database-centric Web 2.0 applications and reports Oracle Unified Directory 11g helping customers manage the critical identity information that drives their business applications Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g demonstrating continued commitment to the developer and open source communities Oracle Coherence 3.7.1, the latest release of the industry's leading distributed in-memory data grid Oracle Process Accelerators helping to simplify and accelerate time-to-value for customers' business process management initiatives Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on the iPad meeting the increasingly mobile demands of today's workforces Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Innovation Pack introducing industry-leading hosted call centre and enterprise-marketing capabilities designed to drive further revenue and productivity while reducing costs and improving the customer experience Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 9 for businesses delivering on project portfolio goals with increased versatility, transparency and accuracy Oracle's PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition helping customers manage their long-term investment in enterprise-wide business applications New versions of Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking and Oracle FLEXCUBE Investor Servicing for Financial Institutions, as well as Oracle Financial Services Enterprise Case Management, Oracle Financial Services Pricing Management, Oracle Financial Management Analytics and Oracle Tax Analytics Oracle Utilities Network Management System 1.11 offering new modelling and analysis features to improve distribution-grid management for electric utilities Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control 4.4 helping communications service providers (CSPs) offer their customers more flexible charging options Plus many, many more technology announcements, enhancements, momentum news and community updates -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 A date has already been set for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Held once again in San Francisco, exhibitors, partners, customers and Oracle people will gather from 30 September until 4 November to meet, network and learn together with the rest of the global Oracle community. Register now for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and save $$$! We'll reward your early planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with reduced rates. Super Saver deals are now available! -- Back to the welcome page

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