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• The Application Architecture Domain

  - by Michael Glas

  I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Application Architecture in the context of EA. More specifically, as an Enterprise Architect, what do I need to consider when looking at/defining/designing the Application Architecture Domain?There are several definitions of Application Architecture. TOGAF says “The objective here [in Application Architecture] is to define the major kinds of application system necessary to process the data and support the business”. FEA says the Application Architecture “Defines the applications needed to manage the data and support the business functions”.I agree with these definitions. They reflect what the Application Architecture domain does. However, they need to be decomposed to be practical.I find it useful to define a set of views into the Application Architecture domain. These views reflect what an EA needs to consider when working with/in the Applications Architecture domain. These viewpoints are, at a high level:Capability View: This view reflects how applications alignment with business capabilities. It is a super set of the following views when viewed in aggregate. By looking at the Application Architecture domain in terms of the business capabilities it supports, you get a good perspective on how those applications are directly supporting the business.Technology View: The technology view reflects the underlying technology that makes up the applications. Based on the number of rationalization activities I have seen (more specifically application rationalization), the phrase “complexity equals cost” drives the importance of the technology view, especially when attempting to reduce that complexity through standardization type activities. Some of the technology components to be considered are: Software: The application itself as well as the software the application relies on to function (web servers, application servers). Infrastructure: The underlying hardware and network components required by the application and supporting application software. Development: How the application is created and maintained. This encompasses development components that are part of the application itself (i.e. customizable functions), as well as bolt on development through web services, API’s, etc. The maintenance process itself also falls under this view. Integration: The interfaces that the application provides for integration as well as the integrations to other applications and data sources the application requires to function. Type: Reflects the kind of application (mash-up, 3 tiered, etc). (Note: functional type [CRM, HCM, etc.] are reflected under the capability view). Organization View: Organizations are comprised of people and those people use applications to do their jobs. Trying to define the application architecture domain without taking the organization that will use/fund/change it into consideration is like trying to design a car without thinking about who will drive it (i.e. you may end up building a formula 1 car for a family of 5 that is really looking for a minivan). This view reflects the people aspect of the application. It includes: Ownership: Who ‘owns’ the application? This will usually reflect primary funding and utilization but not always. Funding: Who funds both the acquisition/creation as well as the on-going maintenance (funding to create/change/operate)? Change: Who can/does request changes to the application and what process to the follow? Utilization: Who uses the application, how often do they use it, and how do they use it? Support: Which organization is responsible for the on-going support of the application? Information View: Whether or not you subscribe to the view that “information drives the enterprise”, it is a fact that information is critical. The management, creation, and organization of that information are primary functions of enterprise applications. This view reflects how the applications are tied to information (or at a higher level – how the Application Architecture domain relates to the Information Architecture domain). It includes: Access: The application is the mechanism by which end users access information. This could be through a primary application (i.e. CRM application), or through an information access type application (a BI application as an example). Creation: Applications create data in order to provide information to end-users. (I.e. an application creates an order to be used by an end-user as part of the fulfillment process). Consumption: Describes the data required by applications to function (i.e. a product id is required by a purchasing application to create an order. Application Service View: Organizations today are striving to be more agile. As an EA, I need to provide an architecture that supports this agility. One of the primary ways to achieve the required agility in the application architecture domain is through the use of ‘services’ (think SOA, web services, etc.). Whether it is through building applications from the ground up utilizing services, service enabling an existing application, or buying applications that are already ‘service enabled’, compartmentalizing application functions for re-use helps enable flexibility in the use of those applications in support of the required business agility. The applications service view consists of: Services: Here, I refer to the generic definition of a service “a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage”. Functions: The activities within an application that are not available / applicable for re-use. This view is helpful when identifying duplication functions between applications that are not service enabled. Delivery Model View: It is hard to talk about EA today without hearing the terms ‘cloud’ or shared services.  Organizations are looking at the ways their applications are delivered for several reasons, to reduce cost (both CAPEX and OPEX), to improve agility (time to market as an example), etc.  From an EA perspective, where/how an application is deployed has impacts on the overall enterprise architecture. From integration concerns to SLA requirements to security and compliance issues, the Enterprise Architect needs to factor in how applications are delivered when designing the Enterprise Architecture. This view reflects how applications are delivered to end-users. The delivery model view consists of different types of delivery mechanisms/deployment options for applications: Traditional: Reflects non-cloud type delivery options. The most prevalent consists of an application running on dedicated hardware (usually specific to an environment) for a single consumer. Private Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers. Public Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for open use by the general public. Hybrid: The application is deployed on two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. While by no means comprehensive, I find that applying these views to the application domain gives a good understanding of what an EA needs to consider when effecting changes to the Application Architecture domain.Finally, the application architecture domain is one of several architecture domains that an EA must consider when developing an overall Enterprise Architecture. The Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework defines four Primary domains: Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, and Technology Architecture. Each domain links to the others either directly or indirectly at some point. Oracle links them at a high level as follows:Business Capabilities and/or Business Processes (Business Architecture), links to the Applications that enable the capability/process (Applications Architecture – COTS, Custom), links to the Information Assets managed/maintained by the Applications (Information Architecture), links to the technology infrastructure upon which all this runs (Technology Architecture - integration, security, BI/DW, DB infrastructure, deployment model). There are however, times when the EA needs to narrow focus to a particular domain for some period of time. These views help me to do just that.

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• How valuable are you to your organization?

  - by Lance Shaw

  I don't know about you but I find it easy to get bogged down with the daily list of tasks and deliverables.  We all have lots to do and it all seems to be due tomorrow.  If you are reading this blog, than your to-do list is almost certainly filled with tasks related to the management, processing and publishing of information.  As we get mired in the daily routine of making sure that the content management needs of the organizations are met, we can easily lose sight of the value that we bring.  After all, if information and content is the lifeblood of our organizations, then surely maintaining the healthy flow of that information has real value.  But how can you measure that value and bring it forward on your résumé or your list of achievements in time for your next performance review? The AIIM organization has spent a lot of time recently researching the value of certification for "information professionals".  When it comes to enterprise content management (ECM) there are many areas of specialization including records management, content archivist, digital asset manager, content librarian and more.  Specialization can clearly drive up your value but it can also lock you into a narrow niche area of focus.  AIIM has found that what companies also need is someone that can apply their knowledge of how information is managed within the operational scope of the business in order to drive real, measurable strategic value.  When you can showcase the value of a broader, business-wide mindset to your management, you have more opportunity to make professional progress and drive real growth where it counts, your paycheck.   We here on the Oracle WebCenter team partnered with AIIM on the research they performed around the value of an information professional certification program. In a webinar this week, Doug Miles of AIIM and I will be talking about the results of that recent survey and what it is going to mean in the future to be recognized as a "Certified Information Professional" (CIP).  Oracle sponsored this research to help individuals and companies understand the value of enterprise content management and what it means across the entire organization. I hope you will join us. If any of us were stopped in the street and were asked about it, I bet most of us would think of ourselves as an "Information Professional".  Now we have a way to actually prove it!  There's only one downside that I can see...  you will have to get your business cards updated to include the "CIP" acronym after your name.  I think you will agree that is a price worth paying!

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• Oracle ADF Mobile Video Series: Overview

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Many of you have asked for some information around Oracle ADF Mobile which announced availability on October 22nd. Today's video is a quick 3 minute overview of what ADFMobile brings to the mobile application developer community.  Next Wednesday's video will show our enthusiastic developers how to create an ADF Mobile application and deploying to a device.   Additional Information Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Engage Customers & Empower Employees

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Identity Management help people collaborate more efficiently with social tools that optimize connections between people, information and applications while ensuring timely, relevant and accurate information is always available. See this demo with Andy Kershaw, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle WebCenter. Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• I need help on my C++ assignment using MS Visual C++

  - by krayzwytie

  Ok, so I don't want you to do my homework for me, but I'm a little lost with this final assignment and need all the help I can get. Learning about programming is tough enough, but doing it online is next to impossible for me... Now, to get to the program, I am going to paste what I have so far. This includes mostly //comments and what I have written so far. If you can help me figure out where all the errors are and how to complete the assignment, I will really appreciate it. Like I said, I don't want you to do my homework for me (it's my final), but any constructive criticism is welcome. This is my final assignment for this class and it is due tomorrow (Sunday before midnight, Arizona time). This is the assignment: Examine the following situation: o Your company, Datamax, Inc., is in the process of automating its payroll systems. Your manager has asked you to create a program that calculates overtime pay for all employees. Your program must take into account the employee’s salary, total hours worked, and hours worked more than 40 in a week, and then provide an output that is useful and easily understood by company management. • Compile your program utilizing the following background information and the code outline in Appendix D (included in the code section). • Submit your project as an attachment including the code and the output. Company Background: o Three employees: Mark, John, and Mary o The end user needs to be prompted for three specific pieces of input—name, hours worked, and hourly wage. o Calculate overtime if input is greater than 40 hours per week. o Provide six test plans to verify the logic within the program. o Plan 1 must display the proper information for employee #1 with overtime pay. o Plan 2 must display the proper information for employee #1 with no overtime pay. o Plans 3-6 are duplicates of plan 1 and 2 but for the other employees. Program Requirements: o Define a base class to use for the entire program. o The class holds the function calls and the variables related to the overtime pay calculations. o Define one object per employee. Note there will be three employees. o Your program must take the objects created and implement calculations based on total salaries, total hours, and the total number of overtime hours. See the Employee Summary Data section of the sample output. Logic Steps to Complete Your Program: o Define your base class. o Define your objects from your base class. o Prompt for user input, updating your object classes for all three users. o Implement your overtime pay calculations. o Display overtime or regular time pay calculations. See the sample output below. o Implement object calculations by summarizing your employee objects and display the summary information in the example below. And this is the code: // Final_Project.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. // #include "stdafx.h" #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <iomanip> using namespace std; // //CLASS DECLARATION SECTION // class CEmployee { public: void ImplementCalculations(string EmployeeName, double hours, double wage); void DisplayEmployInformation(void); void Addsomethingup (CEmployee, CEmployee, CEmployee); string EmployeeName ; int hours ; int overtime_hours ; int iTotal_hours ; int iTotal_OvertimeHours ; float wage ; float basepay ; float overtime_pay ; float overtime_extra ; float iTotal_salaries ; float iIndividualSalary ; }; int main() { system("cls"); cout << "Welcome to the Employee Pay Center"; /* Use this section to define your objects. You will have one object per employee. You have only three employees. The format is your class name and your object name. */ std::cout << "Please enter Employee's Name: "; std::cin >> EmployeeName; std::cout << "Please enter Total Hours for (EmployeeName): "; std::cin >> hours; std::cout << "Please enter Base Pay for(EmployeeName): "; std::cin >> basepay; /* Here you will prompt for the first employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Example of Prompts Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will prompt for the second employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will prompt for the third employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will implement a function call to implement the employ calcuations for each object defined above. You will do this for each of the three employees or objects. The format for this step is the following: [(object name.function name(objectname.name, objectname.hours, objectname.wage)] ; */ /* This section you will send all three objects to a function that will add up the the following information: - Total Employee Salaries - Total Employee Hours - Total Overtime Hours The format for this function is the following: - Define a new object. - Implement function call [objectname.functionname(object name 1, object name 2, object name 3)] /* } //End of Main Function void CEmployee::ImplementCalculations (string EmployeeName, double hours, double wage){ //Initialize overtime variables overtime_hours=0; overtime_pay=0; overtime_extra=0; if (hours > 40) { /* This section is for the basic calculations for calculating overtime pay. - base pay = 40 hours times the hourly wage - overtime hours = hours worked – 40 - overtime pay = hourly wage * 1.5 - overtime extra pay over 40 = overtime hours * overtime pay - salary = overtime money over 40 hours + your base pay */ /* Implement function call to output the employee information. Function is defined below. */ } // if (hours > 40) else { /* Here you are going to calculate the hours less than 40 hours. - Your base pay is = your hours worked times your wage - Salary = your base pay */ /* Implement function call to output the employee information. Function is defined below. */ } // End of the else } //End of Primary Function void CEmployee::DisplayEmployInformation(); { // This function displays all the employee output information. /* This is your cout statements to display the employee information: Employee Name ............. = Base Pay .................. = Hours in Overtime ......... = Overtime Pay Amount........ = Total Pay ................. = */ } // END OF Display Employee Information void CEmployee::Addsomethingup (CEmployee Employ1, CEmployee Employ2) { // Adds two objects of class Employee passed as // function arguments and saves them as the calling object's data member values. /* Add the total hours for objects 1, 2, and 3. Add the salaries for each object. Add the total overtime hours. */ /* Then display the information below. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%% EMPLOYEE SUMMARY DATA%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%% Total Employee Salaries ..... = 576.43 %%%% Total Employee Hours ........ = 108 %%%% Total Overtime Hours......... = 5 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% */ } // End of function

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• I need help on my C++ assignment using Microsoft Visual C++

  - by krayzwytie

  Ok, so I don't want you to do my homework for me, but I'm a little lost with this final assignment and need all the help I can get. Learning about programming is tough enough, but doing it online is next to impossible for me... Now, to get to the program, I am going to paste what I have so far. This includes mostly //comments and what I have written so far. If you can help me figure out where all the errors are and how to complete the assignment, I will really appreciate it. Like I said, I don't want you to do my homework for me (it's my final), but any constructive criticism is welcome. This is my final assignment for this class and it is due tomorrow (Sunday before midnight, Arizona time). This is the assignment: Examine the following situation: Your company, Datamax, Inc., is in the process of automating its payroll systems. Your manager has asked you to create a program that calculates overtime pay for all employees. Your program must take into account the employee’s salary, total hours worked, and hours worked more than 40 in a week, and then provide an output that is useful and easily understood by company management. Compile your program utilizing the following background information and the code outline in Appendix D (included in the code section). Submit your project as an attachment including the code and the output. Company Background: Three employees: Mark, John, and Mary The end user needs to be prompted for three specific pieces of input—name, hours worked, and hourly wage. Calculate overtime if input is greater than 40 hours per week. Provide six test plans to verify the logic within the program. Plan 1 must display the proper information for employee #1 with overtime pay. Plan 2 must display the proper information for employee #1 with no overtime pay. Plans 3-6 are duplicates of plan 1 and 2 but for the other employees. Program Requirements: Define a base class to use for the entire program. The class holds the function calls and the variables related to the overtime pay calculations. Define one object per employee. Note there will be three employees. Your program must take the objects created and implement calculations based on total salaries, total hours, and the total number of overtime hours. See the Employee Summary Data section of the sample output. Logic Steps to Complete Your Program: Define your base class. Define your objects from your base class. Prompt for user input, updating your object classes for all three users. Implement your overtime pay calculations. Display overtime or regular time pay calculations. See the sample output below. Implement object calculations by summarizing your employee objects and display the summary information in the example below. And this is the code: // Final_Project.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application. // #include "stdafx.h" #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <iomanip> using namespace std; // //CLASS DECLARATION SECTION // class CEmployee { public: void ImplementCalculations(string EmployeeName, double hours, double wage); void DisplayEmployInformation(void); void Addsomethingup (CEmployee, CEmployee, CEmployee); string EmployeeName ; int hours ; int overtime_hours ; int iTotal_hours ; int iTotal_OvertimeHours ; float wage ; float basepay ; float overtime_pay ; float overtime_extra ; float iTotal_salaries ; float iIndividualSalary ; }; int main() { system("cls"); cout << "Welcome to the Employee Pay Center"; /* Use this section to define your objects. You will have one object per employee. You have only three employees. The format is your class name and your object name. */ std::cout << "Please enter Employee's Name: "; std::cin >> EmployeeName; std::cout << "Please enter Total Hours for (EmployeeName): "; std::cin >> hours; std::cout << "Please enter Base Pay for(EmployeeName): "; std::cin >> basepay; /* Here you will prompt for the first employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Example of Prompts Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will prompt for the second employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will prompt for the third employee’s information. Prompt the employee name, hours worked, and the hourly wage. For each piece of information, you will update the appropriate class member defined above. Enter the employee name = Enter the hours worked = Enter his or her hourly wage = */ /* Here you will implement a function call to implement the employ calcuations for each object defined above. You will do this for each of the three employees or objects. The format for this step is the following: [(object name.function name(objectname.name, objectname.hours, objectname.wage)] ; */ /* This section you will send all three objects to a function that will add up the the following information: - Total Employee Salaries - Total Employee Hours - Total Overtime Hours The format for this function is the following: - Define a new object. - Implement function call [objectname.functionname(object name 1, object name 2, object name 3)] /* } //End of Main Function void CEmployee::ImplementCalculations (string EmployeeName, double hours, double wage){ //Initialize overtime variables overtime_hours=0; overtime_pay=0; overtime_extra=0; if (hours > 40) { /* This section is for the basic calculations for calculating overtime pay. - base pay = 40 hours times the hourly wage - overtime hours = hours worked – 40 - overtime pay = hourly wage * 1.5 - overtime extra pay over 40 = overtime hours * overtime pay - salary = overtime money over 40 hours + your base pay */ /* Implement function call to output the employee information. Function is defined below. */ } // if (hours > 40) else { /* Here you are going to calculate the hours less than 40 hours. - Your base pay is = your hours worked times your wage - Salary = your base pay */ /* Implement function call to output the employee information. Function is defined below. */ } // End of the else } //End of Primary Function void CEmployee::DisplayEmployInformation(); { // This function displays all the employee output information. /* This is your cout statements to display the employee information: Employee Name ............. = Base Pay .................. = Hours in Overtime ......... = Overtime Pay Amount........ = Total Pay ................. = */ } // END OF Display Employee Information void CEmployee::Addsomethingup (CEmployee Employ1, CEmployee Employ2) { // Adds two objects of class Employee passed as // function arguments and saves them as the calling object's data member values. /* Add the total hours for objects 1, 2, and 3. Add the salaries for each object. Add the total overtime hours. */ /* Then display the information below. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%% EMPLOYEE SUMMARY DATA%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%% Total Employee Salaries ..... = 576.43 %%%% Total Employee Hours ........ = 108 %%%% Total Overtime Hours......... = 5 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% */ } // End of function

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• December release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available now.

  - by Jialiang

  The code samples in Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework are updated on 2010-12-13. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/57459#DownloadId=185534 Updated code sample index categorized by technologies: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=All-In-One%20Code%20Framework%20Sample%20Catalog (it also allows you to download individual code samples instead of the entire All-In-One Code Framework sample package.) If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please watch the introduction video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO5Li3APU58, or read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/,  and this Port25 article http://port25.technet.com/archive/2010/01/18/the-all-in-one-code-framework.aspx.  -------------- New ASP.NET Code Samples VBASPNETAJAXWebChat and CSASPNETAJAXWebChat Most of you have some experience in chatting with friends on the web. So you may want to know how to make a web chat application, it seems to be quite complicated. But ASP.NET gives you the power to buiild a chat room easily. In this code sample, we will construct our own web chat room with the amazing AJAX feature. The principle is simple relatively. As we all know, a base chat application need 4 base controls: one List control to show the chat room members, one List control to show the message list, one TextBox control to input messages and one button to send message. User inputs his message in the textbox first and then presses Send button, it will send the message to the server. The message list will update every 2 seconds to get the newest message list in the chat room from the server. We need to know, it is hard for us to make an AJAX web chat application like a windows form application because we cannot keep the connection after one web request ended. So a lot of events which communicates between client side and server side cannot be realized. The common workaround is to make web requests in every some seconds to check whether the server side has been updated. But another technique called COMET makes it possible. But it is different with AJAX and will not be talked in details in this KB. For more details about COMET, we can get some clues from the Reference.   CSASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList and VBASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList This sample demos a system that needs to display a list of current online users' information. As a matter of fact, Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline Method  can get the number of online users and there is a convenient approach to check whether the user is online by using Membership.GetUser(string userName).IsOnline property,however many asp.net projects are not using membership.So in this case,the sample shows how to display a list of current online users' information without using membership provider. It is not difficult to check whether the user is online by using session.Many projects tend to be used “Session_End” event to mark a user as “Offline”,however ,it may not be a good idea,because it can’t detect the user status accurately. In addition, "Session_End" event is only available in the "InProc" session mode. If you are storing session states in the State Server or SQL Server, "Session_End" event will never fire. To handle this issue, we need to save the user online status to a  global DataTable or  DataBase. In the sample application, define a global DataTable to store the information of online users.Use XmlHttpRequest in the pages to update and check user's last active time at intervals and also retrieve information on how many users are still online. The sample project can auto delete offline users' information from a global DataTable by checking users’ last active time. A step-by-step guide illustrating how to display a list of current online users' information without using membership provider: 1. Login page. Let user sign in and add current user’s information to a global datatable while Initialize the global datatable which used to store information of current online users. 2. Current online user list page. Use XmlHttpRequest in this page to update and check user's last active time at intervals and also retrieve information on how many users are still online. 3. If user closes the page without clicking  the sign out link button ,the sample project can auto mark the user as offline and delete offline users' information from a global DataTable which used to store information of current online users  by checking users’ last active time. Then the current online user list will be like this:   CSASPNETIPtoLocation This sample demonstrates how to find the geographical location from an IP address. As we know, it is not hard for us to get the IP address of visitors via Request.ServerVariable property, but it is really difficult for us to know where they come from. To achieve this feature, the sample uses a free third party web service from http://freegeoip.appspot.com/, which returns the information about an IP address we send to the server in the format of XML, JSON or CSV. It makes all things easier.   CSASPNETBackgroundWorker Sometimes we do an operation which needs long time to complete. It will stop the response and the page is blank until the operation finished. In this case, we want the operation to run in the background, and in the page, we want to display the progress of the running operation. Therefore, the user can know the operation is running and can know the progress. CSASPNETInheritingFromTreeNode In windows forms TreeView, each tree node has a property called "Tag" which can be used to store a custom object. Many customers want to implement the same tag feature in ASP.NET TreeView. This project creates a custom TreeView control named "CustomTreeView" to achieve this goal. CSASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload and VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload This code sample was created in response to a code sample request in our new code sample request frunction for customers. The code samples demonstrate uploading files to and downloading files from a remote HTTP or FTP server. In .NET Framework 2.0 and higher versions, there are some lightweight class libraries which support HTTP and FTP protocol transmission. By using these classes, we can achieve this programming requirement.   CSASPNETImageEditUpload and VBASPNETImageEditUpload This demo will shows how to insert, edit and update a common image with the type of "jpg", "png", "gif" or "bmp" . We mainly use two different SqlDataSources with the same database to bind to GridView and FormView in order to establish the “cascading” effort. Besides we apply our self-made ImageHanlder to encoding or decoding images of different types, and use context to output the stream of images. We will explicitly assign the binary streams of images through the event of “FormView_ItemInserting” or “Form_ItemUpdating” to synchronize the stream both in what we can see on an aspx page as well as in what’s really stored in the database.   WebBrowser Control, Network and other Windows General New Code Samples   CSWebBrowserSuppressError and VBWebBrowserSuppressError The sample demonstrates how to make WebBrowser suppress errors, such as script error, navigation error and so on.   CSWebBrowserWithProxy and VBWebBrowserWithProxy The sample demonstrates how to make WebBrowser use a proxy server.   CSWebDownloadProgress and VBWebDownloadProgress The sample demonstrates how to show progress during the download. It also supplies the features to Start, Pause, Resume and Cancel a download.   CppSetDesktopWallpaper, CSSetDesktopWallpaper and VBSetDesktopWallpaper This code sample application allows you select an image, view a preview (resized smaller to fit if necessary), select a display style among Tile, Center, Stretch, Fit (Windows 7 and later) and Fill (Windows 7 and later), and set the image as the Desktop wallpaper. CSWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty and VBWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty CSWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty example demonstrates how to use ChangeServiceConfig2 to configure the service "Recovery" properties in C#. This example operates all the options you can see on the service "Recovery" tab, including setting the "Enable actions for stops with errors" option in Windows Vista and later operating systems. This example also include how to grant the shut down privilege to the process, so that we can configure a special option in the "Recovery" tab - "Restart Computer Options...".   New Office Development Code Samples   CSOneNoteRibbonAddIn and VBOneNoteRibbonAddIn The code sample demonstrates a OneNote 2010 COM add-in that implements IDTExtensibility2. The add-in also supports customizing the Ribbon by implementing the IRibbonExtensibility interface. It is a skeleton OneNote add-in that developers can extend it to implement more functions. The code sample was requested by a customer in our code sample request service. We expect that this could help developers in the community.   New Windows Shell Code Samples   CppShellExtPreviewHandler, CSShellExtPreviewHandler and VBShellExtPreviewHandler In the past two months, we released the code samples of Windows Context Menu Handler, Infotip Handler, and Thumbnail Handler. This is the fourth part of the shell extension series: Preview Handler. The code samples demo the C++, C# and VB.NET implementation of a preview handler for a new file type registered with the .recipe extension. Preview handlers are called when an item is selected to show a lightweight, rich, read-only preview of the file's contents in the view's reading pane. This is done without launching the file's associated application. Windows Vista and later operating systems support preview handlers. To be a valid preview handler, several interfaces must be implemented. This includes IPreviewHandler (shobjidl.h); IInitializeWithFile, IInitializeWithStream, or IInitializeWithItem (propsys.h); IObjectWithSite (ocidl.h); and IOleWindow (oleidl.h). There are also optional interfaces, such as IPreviewHandlerVisuals (shobjidl.h), that a preview handler can implement to provide extended support. Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework makes the implementation of these interfaces very easy in .NET. The example preview handler provides previews for .recipe files. The .recipe file type is simply an XML file registered as a unique file name extension. It includes the title of the recipe, its author, difficulty, preparation time, cook time, nutrition information, comments, an embedded preview image, and so on. The preview handler extracts the title, comments, and the embedded image, and display them in a preview window.   In response to many customers' request, we added setup projects in every shell extension samples in this release. Those setup projects allow you to deploy the shell extensions to your end users' machines. ---------- Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/57459#DownloadId=185534 Updated code sample index categorized by technologies: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=All-In-One%20Code%20Framework%20Sample%20Catalog (it also allows you to download individual code samples instead of the entire All-In-One Code Framework sample package.) If you have any feedback for us, please email: [email protected]. We look forward to your comments.

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• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

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• Minimum team development sizes

  - by MarkPearl

  Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Android SDK Manager and AVD Manager doesn't have the correct information and fails to update on Ubun

  - by Johan Carlsson

  I'm trying to install Android SDK on Ubuntu but fail when I try to use the SDK Manager and AVD Manager to install Android platforms. I've downloaded: android-sdk_r04-linux_86.tgz The I start the SDK Manager and AVD Manager (UI) according to the README file: ./tools/android And I get the following Installed Packages: - Install SDK Tools, revision 4 Available Packages: - https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repoisotry/repository.xml - This repository requires a more recent version of the Tools. Please update- - Android SDK Tools, revision 4 - Archive for Linux (comment: funny since rev 4 seems to be what's installed this is what seems to be installed) Now doing an update of the Android SDK Tools, revision 4 or everything results in 99% progress and then the application hangs. Here's the console feedback: johanc@johan-desktop:~/android/android-sdk-linux_86$ tools/android Starting Android SDK and AVD Manager No command line parameters provided, launching UI. See 'android --help' for operations from the command line. Error: null In the app I choose to upgate the following package: Package Description Android SDK Tools, revision 4 Archive Description Archive for Linux Size: 15 MiB SHA1: 99380c9330c1c3728c836206947350cc00fa28c2 Site https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml The console output reads (and the app hangs at 99%): Exception in thread "Installing Archives" java.lang.AssertionError at com.android.sdkuilib.internal.tasks.ProgressTask.incProgress(ProgressTask.java:97) at com.android.sdkuilib.internal.repository.UpdaterData$2.run(UpdaterData.java:358) at com.android.sdkuilib.internal.tasks.ProgressTask$1.run(ProgressTask.java:135)

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• CakePHP sending multiple lines of same cookie information in response header. why??

  - by Vicer

  Hi all, I am having this problem with one of my cakePHP applications. My application displays a big html table on the page. I noticed that when the table goes beyond a certain size limit, IE cannot display that page. While trying to figure out why this happens, I noticed that my html response header contains a HUGE number of lines repeating the same thing. Response Headers ------------------------------ Date Thu, 20 May 2010 04:18:10 GMT Server Apache/2.0.63 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7m PHP/5.2.10 X-Powered-By PHP/5.2.10 P3P CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM" Set-Cookie CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:12 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1; expires=Sun, 20-May-2035 10:18:13 GMT; path=/mywebapp Keep-Alive timeout=15, max=100 Connection Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding chunked Content-Type text/html ========================================================================== Request Headers -------------------------- Host localhost:8080 User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive 115 Connection keep-alive Referer http://localhost:8080/mywebapp/section2/bigtable/1 Cookie CAKEPHP=q4tp37tn9gkhcpgmf1ftr1i6c1 Authorization Basic cGt1bWFyYTpwa3VtYXJh Notice the huge set of repeated lines at 'Set-Cookie' in the Response Header. This only happens when I try to display large tables. Does anyone have any clue to what might be causing this? Any help to find the issue is appreciated. I am using CakePHP 1.2.5. As far as I know, I am not messing with any set cookie functions. But yes I am using session variables.

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• Convert binary information to regular data type without outside modules in python.

  - by vgm64

  Hello World. I'm tasked with reading a poorly formatted binary file and taking in the variables. Although I need to do it in C++ (ROOT, specifically), I've decided to do it in python because python makes sense to me, but my plan is to get it working in python and then tackle re-writing in in C++, so using easy to use python modules won't get me too far later down the road. Basically, I do this: In [5]: some_value Out[5]: '\x00I' In [6]: ''.join([str(ord(i)) for i in some_value]) Out[6]: '073' In [7]: int(''.join([str(ord(i)) for i in some_value])) Out[7]: 73 And I know there has to be a better way. What do you think?

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• How to pass EventArgument information from view to view model in WPF?

  - by Ashish Ashu

  I have ListView control in my application which is binded to the collection of CustomObject List<CustomObject. The CustomObject has seperate view. This ListView has seperate view model. The collection List _customobject is containted in the ListView ViewModel class. My Query: I want to invoke a view that show properties of custom object, when user double click on any row of ListView. The ListView double click command is binded to the ListViewDoublClick Command in the view model. The CustomObject is in the event argument of listview double click command. To acheive this I have to pass the custom object ( or an unique id property of custom object through which I can retrieve the custom object from the collection) as command parameter. Please suggest me the solution!!

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• How do I encapsulate some text information in an image and extract it using MATLAB?

  - by user198729

  new_img = convert(img, text); (img, text) = convert_back(new_img); Can someone illustrate with a built-in image of MATALB?

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• Invoice & Invoice lines: How do you store customer address information?

  - by elviejo

  Hi I'm developing an invoicing application. So the general idea is to have two tables: Invoice (ID, Date, CustomerAddress, CustomerState, CustomerCountry, VAT, Total); InvoiceLine (Invoice_ID, ID, Concept, Units, PricePerUnit, Total); As you can see this basic design leads to a lot of repetiton of records where the client will have the same addrres, state and country. So the alternative is to have an address table and then make a relationship Address<-Invoice. However I think that an invoice is immutable document and should be stored just the way it was first made. Sometimes customers change their addresses, or states and if it was coming from an Address catalog that will change all the previously made invoices. So What is your experience? How is the customer address stored in an invoice? In the Invoice table? an Address Table? or something else? Can you provide pointers to a book, article or document where this is discussed in further detail?

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• How to retrieve user information from facebook using fqlquery?

  - by Ershad

  I have the fql query as shown below. Select uid,profile_url,pic_square from user where name="Ershad" here i am getting a response as below. xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" fql_query_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" list="true" But i want all the list.All the details uid,profile_url and pic_square. Please anyone help me out..

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• Does WCF always use SOAP to send information over your binding?

  - by SLC

  I understand you can choose from a range of bindings, such as TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. Am I correct in thinking it always uses SOAP to send data over this connection? I am watching a guide to WCF and it is talking about how exceptions are serialized into SOAP and sent to the client. I would have thought that not all bindings would use SOAP to send data, so I am a bit confused about how it works. Although I understand the fundamentals of WCF, how to set up services and use a proxy on the client, it doesn't seem to have explained exactly how the data is packaged up to send. Perhaps the answer is obvious, that it just uses XML / SOAP, but I would love to know for sure!

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• Get Contact Profile Information from Office Communicator (OCS) SDK in C#?

  - by Andrew

  Hi, My company uses MS Office Communicator Server (OCS) 2007 R2, and I am accessing with C# with the SDK. If I right click on a contact in OCS, I get the option to 'View Contact Card'. I want access to this via the API! Unfortunately I can find nothing in the SDK documentation to get at this. There is a method called 'ViewProfile' which is unsupported, and I can find nothing out there about it. I could of course go directly to the Active Directory account of the contact, but that would require my machine to connect to the organization via VPN. Since most of us work 'offline' I would prefer not to do this. (The data I need is anyway in OCS!) Thanks in advance, Andrew

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• How to get NUnit information into CruiseControl.Net 1.5 after NCover has run NUnit?

  - by Anders Juul

  Hi all, I've installed NCover 3.4 on my CruiseControl 1.5 and after some tinking, I've got the coverage reports shown in my cleanly installed CC. I can't see the test results however (and never could after installing CC Net 1.5, as I recall 1.4 it 'just worked'). How do I get the unit test results from NCover displayed in CC.net? (NUnit details and NUnit timings) Thanks, Anders, Denmark

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• Loose Coupling vs. Information Hiding and Ease of Change

  - by cretzel

  I'm just reading Code Complete by Steve McConell and I'm thinking of an Example he gives in a section about loose coupling. It's about the interface of a method that calculates the number of holidays for an employee, which is calculated from the entry date of the employee and her sales. The author suggests a to have entry date and sales as the parameters of the method instead of an instance of the employee: int holidays(Date entryDate, Number sales) instead of int holidays(Employee emp) The argument is that this decouples the client of the method because it does not need to know anything about the Employee class. Two things came to my mind: Providing all the parameters that are needed for the calculation breaks encapsulation. It shows the internals of the method on how it computes the result. It's harder to change, e.g. when someone decides that also the age of the employee should be included in the calculation. One would have to change the signature. What's your opinion?

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• Is there information about developing tibco custom palette elements?

  - by zoomer.hammerball

  I need to develop a generic entry point for tibco business works based on convention over configuration. Common wsdl that maps our internal complex data model schema in the form of key value approach. I need to develop a palette element that accepts requests and map them in a AESchema objects inside. I have searching about this kind of development with no success.

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• How to scale a sprite image without losing color key information?

  - by Michael P

  Hello everyone, I'm currently developing a simple application that displays map and draws some markers on it. I'm developing for Windows Mobile, so I decided to use DirectDraw and Imaging interfaces to make the application fast and pretty. The map moves when user moves finger on the touchscreen, so the whole map moving/scrolling animation has to be fast, but it is not. On every map update I have to draw portion of the map, control buttons, and markers - buttons and markers are preloaded on DirectDraw surface as a mipmap. So the only thing I do is BitBlit from the mipmap to a back buffer, and from the back buffer to a primary surface (I can't use page flipping due to the windowed mode of my application). Previously I used premultiplied-alpha surface with 32 bit ARGB pixel format for images mipmap, everything was looking good, but drawing entire "scene" was horribly slow - i could forget about smooth map scrolling. Now I'm using mipmap with native (RGB565) pixel format and fuchsia (0xFF00FF) color key. Drawing is much better my mipmap surface is generated on program loading - images are loaded from files, scaled (with filtering) and drawn on mipmap. The problem is, that image scaling process blends pixel colors, and those pixels which are on the border of a sprite region are blended with surrounding fuchsia pixels resulting semi-fuchsia color that is not treated as color key. When I do blitting with color key option, sprites have small fuchsia-like borders, and it looks really bad. How to solve this problem? I can use alpha blitting, but it is too slow - even in ARGB 1555 format.

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• Need strategy to phone home to a Pyton web app and check licensing information for a commercial Wind

  - by Cornish

  What's a good strategy for building licensing checking into a Windows desktop app using a Python web application? This is a very open ended question because I don't have the slightest clue how to start to build this feature. What I do have is a number of general concerns: I have developed a commercial Windows desktop application and I want to make money from it but I don't want to build the licensing into the app since it's inevitable that someone will create a keygen or a crack, circulate it online and then it's 'game over' for me. So my idea was to create a web application where people could purchase a license key that is generated by the web app and every time the desktop application is started up, it will 'phone home' to the web app to check whether the license is valid and whether it seems to be in use at multiple locations. I'm just not sure how to do this. Would appreciate any general technical strategies and/or pointers to libraries/modules that might be of use.

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• Could you help me write a proper query in rails for accessing the following information?

  - by aditi-syal

  @workname = [] @recos = [] @bas = [] if current_user.recommendations.size != 0 current_user.recommendations.each do |r| if r.work_type == 'J' @job = Job.find_by_id(r.work_id) @workname.push "#{@job.title} at #{@job.company.name}" else @qualification = Qualification.find_by_id(r.work_id) @workname.push "Student at #{@qualification.school_name}" end @recommender = User.find_by_id(r.recommender_id) if r.recommender_work_type == 'J' @job = Job.find_by_id(r.recommender_work_id) @recos.push "#{@recommender.first_name} #{@recommender.last_name}" @bas.push "#{r.basis.gsub("You","#{@job.title} at #{@job.company.name}")}" else @qualification = Qualification.find_by_id(r.recommender_work_id) @recos.push "#{@recommender.first_name} #{@recommender.last_name} as " @bas.push "#{r.basis.gsub("You","Student at #{@qualification.school_name}")}" end end end

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