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• How many hours a day (of the standard 8) do you actually work? [closed]

  - by someone

  Possible Duplicate: How much do you [really] work a day When I started working (not so long ago), I was very conscientious about really working. If I didn't work for 10 minutes at a time, I felt like I was cheating. But as I started to look around me, I realized that I was the only one... and most of my coworkers were spending a big percentage of their time browsing the internet or playing solitaire. I started to slack off a little more than usual... while still basically getting all my work done. But while I do all that's required of me, and usually quickly, I no longer beg for work to fill up my spare time; I'm content to do what I'm told and play around when no one makes sure I'm busy enough. Which means that I'm often bored and underutilized. (Which I was even when I begged for work - people are pretty laid back about the workload and don't seem to realize how much I can get done if pushed to the fullest.) But I was just talking to a friend who graduated with me and also recently started working... and she came to me with the same concerns about slacking. She's working remotely, which means there are often gaps in communication when she can't really get anything done... And she's feeling guilty about it. Which made me rethink the whole thing... So, as workers, how many hours, out of the 8 standard average, are you actually working (honestly)? And, as bosses, how many hours do you expect your workers to work? And from an ethical standpoint, how much free time, or space out time, can workers have during the day without being considered to be "cheating" their office of labor and money?

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• Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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• Developer Training – Various Options for Maximum Benefit – Part 4

  - by pinaldave

  Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 If you have been reading this series, by now you are aware of all the pros and cons that can come along with training.  We’ve asked and answered hard questions, and investigated them “whys” and “hows” of training.  Now it is time to talk about all the different kinds of training that are out there! On Job Training The most common type of training is on the job training.  Everyone receives this kind of education – even experts who come in to consult have to be taught where the printer, pens, and copy machines are.  If you are thinking about more concrete topics, though, on the job training can be some of the easiest to come across.  Picture this: someone in the company whom you really admire is hard at work on a project.  You come up to them and ask to help them out – if they are a busy developer, the odds are that they will say “yes, please!”   If you phrase your question as an offer of help, you can receive training without ever putting someone in the awkward position of acting as a mentor.  However, some people may want the task of being a mentor.  It can never hurt to ask.  Most people will be more than willing to pass their knowledge along. Extreme Programming If your company and coworkers are willing, you can even investigate Extreme Programming.  This is a type of programming that allows small teams to quickly develop code and products that are released with almost immediate user feedback.  You can find more information at http://www.extremeprogramming.org/.  If this is something your company could use, suggest it to your supervisor.  Even if they say no, it will make it clear that you are a go-getter who is interested in new and exciting projects.  If the answer is yes, then you have the opportunity to get some of the best on the job training around. In Person Training Click on Image to Enlarge When you say the word “training,” most people’s minds go back to the classroom, an image they are familiar with.  While training doesn’t always have to be in a traditional setting, because it is so familiar it can also be the most valuable type of training.  There are many ways to get training through a live instructor.  Some companies may be willing to send a representative to you, where employees will get training, sometimes food and coffee, and a live instructor who can answer questions immediately.  Sometimes these trainers are also able to do consultations at the same time, which can invaluable to a company.  If you are the one to asks your supervisor for a training session that can also be turned into a consultation, you may stick in their minds as an incredibly dedicated employee.  If you can’t find a representative, local colleges can also be a good resource for free or cheap classes – or they may have representatives coming who are willing to take on a few more students. Benefits of On Demand Developer Training Of course, you can often get the best of all these types of training with online or On Demand training.  You can get the benefit of a live instructor who is willing to answer questions (although in this case, usually through e-mail or other online venues), there are often real-world examples to follow along – like on the job training – and best of all you can learn whenever you have the time or need.  Did a problem with your server come up at midnight when all your supervisors are safe at home and probably in bed?  No problem!  On Demand training is especially useful if you need to slow down, pause, or rewind a training session.  Not even a real-life instructor can do that! When I was writing this blog post, I felt that each of the subject, which I have covered can be blog posts of itself. However, I wanted to keep the the blog post concise and so touch based on three major training aspects 1) On Job Training 2) In Person Training and 3) Online training. Here is the question for you – is there any other kind of training methods available, which are effective and one should consider it? If yes, what are those, I may write a follow up blog post on the same subject next week. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8

  - by Jeff

  I remember sitting in Building 5 at Microsoft with some of my coworkers, when one of them came in with a shiny new 11” MacBook Air. It was nearly two years ago, and we found it pretty odd that the OEM’s building Windows machines sucked at industrial design in a way that defied logic. While Dell and HP were in a race to the bottom building commodity crap, Apple was staying out of the low-end market completely, and focusing on better design. In the process, they managed to build machines people actually wanted, and maintain an insanely high margin in the process. I stopped buying the commodity crap and custom builds in 2006, when Apple went Intel. As a .NET guy, I was still in it for Microsoft’s stack of development tools, which I found awesome, but had back to back crappy laptops from HP and Dell. After that original 15” MacBook Pro, I also had a Mac Pro tower (that I sold after three years for $1,500!), a 27” iMac, and my favorite, a 17” MacBook Pro (the unibody style) with an SSD added from OWC. The 17” was a little much to carry around because it was heavy, but it sure was nice getting as much as eight hours of battery life, and the screen was amazing. When the rumors started about a 15” model with a “retina” screen inspired by the Air, I made up my mind I wanted one, and ordered it the day it came out. I sold my 17”, after three years, for $750 to a friend who is really enjoying it. I got the base model with the upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM. It feels solid for being so thin, and if you’ve used the third generation iPad or the newer iPhone, you’ll be just as thrilled with the screen resolution. I’m typically getting just over six hours of battery life while running a VM, but Parallels 8 allegedly makes some power improvements, so we’ll see what happens. (It was just released today.) The nice thing about VM’s are that you can run more than one at a time. Primarily I run the Windows 8 VM with four cores (the laptop is quad-core, but has 8 logical cores due to hyperthreading or whatever Intel calls it) and 8 gigs of RAM. I also have a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM I spin up when I need to test stuff in a “real” server environment, and I give it two cores and 4 gigs of RAM. The Windows 8 VM spins up in about 8 seconds. Visual Studio 2012 takes a few more seconds, but count part of that as the “ReSharper tax” as it does its startup magic. The real beauty, the thing I looked most forward to, is that beautifully crisp C# text. Consolas has never looked as good as it does at 10pt. as it does on this display. You know how it looks great at 80pt. when conference speakers demo stuff on a projector? Think that sharpness, only tiny. It’s just gorgeous. Beyond that, everything is just so responsive and fast. Builds of large projects happen in seconds, hundreds of unit tests run in seconds… you just don’t spend a lot of time waiting for stuff. It’s kind of painful to go back to my 27” iMac (which would be better if I put an SSD in it before its third birthday). Are there negatives? A few minor issues, yes. As is the case with OS X, not everything scales right. You’ll see some weirdness at times with splash screens and icons and such. Chrome’s text rendering (in Windows) is apparently not aware of how to deal with higher DPI’s, so text is fuzzy (the OS X version is super sharp, however). You’ll also have to do some fiddling with keyboard settings to use the Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts. Overall, it’s as close to a no-compromise development experience as I’ve ever had. I’m not even going to bother with Boot Camp because the VM route already exceeds my expectations. You definitely get what you pay for. If this one also lasts three years and I can turn around and sell it, it’s worth it for something I use every day.

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• Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

  - by tom

  Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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• Why everybody should do Sales!

  - by FelixWehmeyer

  I speak with many business students and ask them what job they want to get into. Most of them tell me they want a job in Marketing, Management Consulting or Finance. I hardly ever hear “Sales, that is what I want to do”, and I often wonder why. I would like to start with a quote from Zig Ziglar, a successful salesman: "Nothing happens until someone sells something." But to get back to the main point, why wouldn’t you want to get in sales? When people think of sales, they picture a typical salesman in their head and think that selling is scary and all about manipulating, pressuring and pushing someone into buying something they don’t need. Are these stereotypes accurate? I don’t believe so: So why should you want to be in sales? If you think about selling as providing the solution for the problem and talking about the benefits of making a decision, then every job in this world comes out of selling. In every job you deal with coworkers that you want to convince of your ideas or convincing your boss that the project you want to work on is good for the company.  These days, consumers and businesses are very well informed about services and products. When we are talking about highly complex products, such as IT solutions, businesses don’t accept your run-of-the-mill salesman who is pushing a sale. These are often long projects where salespeople have a consulting and leading role. Salespeople need to be able to consult companies and customers with their problem and convince a client that their solution is the best fit. Next to the fact that sales, is by far, not as scary and shady as you thought, there are a few points that will make you want to consider a sales career: Negotiating skills – When you are in sales you will learn how to negotiate. Salespeople learn to listen to their customers and try to make them happy, overcoming objections and come to a final agreement that both parties are happy with. Persistence/Challenge – As a salesperson you will often hear a negative answer, in a sales role you will start to embrace this and see a ‘no’ as a challenge not as a rejection. This attitude change can help you a lot in your career, but also in your personal life. You will become more optimistic and gain a go-getter attitude. Salary – As salespeople are seen as the moneymakers for the company, companies often reward their sales teams generously. Most likely in a sales role, you will receive a good basic salary and often you get nice bonuses on top of that based on your performance. Oracle is, for instance, the company that offers the highest average commission in the world. Further you can expect many other benefits as companies know that there is a high demand for good salespeople. Teamwork – Sales is a lot like having your own business, you are responsible for your own territory or set of clients. You are the one who is responsible for the revenue coming from that territory. So in order to gain revenue you will have to work together with many departments and people to make that happen. Every (potential) client could be seen as a different project, and you are the project leader. Understanding customers and the business – From any job that you choose sales will get you the most insight in the market. Salespeople are usually well-connected, talk with different customers and learn about the market and are up-to-date about all latest changes. Even if you want to change to a different role in the long run, you have a great head start as you understand the market and customers like no one else. Job security – Look at all the job postings out there. Many of them are sales-related. So if you want to have a steady job, plenty of choice and companies willing to invest in you, sales could be something for you.  Are you interested in exploring a sales career? At Oracle we are always looking for good sales professionals and fresh graduates who want to get into sales! For many languages such as Flemish, Dutch, German, French, Swedish and Norwegian (and more) we are currently looking for graduates who want to develop their career in Oracle. Please have a look at this article for the experience of a Business Development Consultant at Oracle in Dublin. Want to learn more about this job check out this link or send an email to jessica.ebbelaar-at-oracle.com! Have a look at our website http://campus.oracle.com for all of our other latest sales and non-sales vacancies!

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• What Counts for A DBA - Logic

  - by drsql

  "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke."  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it to them are not likely going to be great technical professionals of any sort, much less a programmer or administrator who will be constantly dealing with the common failures that make up a DBA's day.  Many of these people will stare at this like a dog staring at a traffic signal and still have no more idea of how to decipher the riddle. Without explanation they will give up, call the joke "stupid" and, feeling quite superior, walk away indignantly to their job likely flipping patties of meat-by-product. As a data professional or any programmer who has strayed  to this very data-oriented blog, you would, if you are worth your weight in air, either have recognized immediately what was going on, or felt a bit ignorant.  Your friends are chuckling over the joke, but why is it funny? Unfortunately you left your smartphone at home on the dresser because you were up late last night programming and were running late to work (again), so you will either have to fake a laugh or figure it out.  Digging through the joke, you figure out that the word "two" is the most important part, since initially the joke mentioned 10. Hmm, why did they spell out two, but not ten? Maybe 10 could be interpreted a different way?  As a DBA, this sort of logic comes into play every day, and sometimes it doesn't involve nerdy riddles or Star Wars folklore.  When you turn on your computer and get the dreaded blue screen of death, you don't immediately cry to the help desk and sit on your thumbs and whine about not being able to work. Do that and your co-workers will question your nerd-hood; I know I certainly would. You figure out the problem, and when you have it narrowed down, you call the help desk and tell them what the problem is, usually having to explain that yes, you did in fact try to reboot before calling.  Of course, sometimes humility does come in to play when you reach the end of your abilities, but the ‘end of abilities’ is not something any of us recognize readily. It is handy to have the ability to use logic to solve uncommon problems: It becomes especially useful when you are trying to solve a data-related problem such as a query performance issue, and the way that you approach things will tell your coworkers a great deal about your abilities.  The novice is likely to immediately take the approach of  trying to add more indexes or blaming the hardware. As you become more and more experienced, it becomes increasingly obvious that performance issues are a very complex topic. A query may be slow for a myriad of reasons, from concurrency issues, a poor query plan because of a parameter value (like parameter sniffing,) poor coding standards, or just because it is a complex query that is going to be slow sometimes. Some queries that you will deal with may have twenty joins and hundreds of search criteria, and it can take a lot of thought to determine what is going on.  You can usually figure out the problem to almost any query by using basic knowledge of how joins and queries work, together with the help of such things as the query plan, profiler or monitoring tools.  It is not unlikely that it can take a full day’s work to understand some queries, breaking them down into smaller queries to find a very tiny problem. Not every time will you actually find the problem, and it is part of the process to occasionally admit that the problem is random, and everything works fine now.  Sometimes, it is necessary to realize that a problem is outside of your current knowledge, and admit temporary defeat: You can, at least, narrow down the source of the problem by looking logically at all of the possible solutions. By doing this, you can satisfy your curiosity and learn more about what the actual problem was. For example, in the joke, had you never been exposed to the concept of binary numbers, there is no way you could have known that binary - 10 = decimal - 2, but you could have logically come to the conclusion that 10 must not mean ten in the context of the joke, and at that point you are that much closer to getting the joke and at least won't feel so ignorant.

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• Is the Scala 2.8 collections library a case of "the longest suicide note in history" ?

  - by oxbow_lakes

  First note the inflammatory subject title is a quotation made about the manifesto of a UK political party in the early 1980s. This question is subjective but it is a genuine question, I've made it CW and I'd like some opinions on the matter. Despite whatever my wife and coworkers keep telling me, I don't think I'm an idiot: I have a good degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford and I've been programming commercially for almost 12 years and in Scala for about a year (also commercially). I have just started to look at the Scala collections library re-implementation which is coming in the imminent 2.8 release. Those familiar with the library from 2.7 will notice that the library, from a usage perspective, has changed little. For example... > List("Paris", "London").map(_.length) res0: List[Int] List(5, 6) ...would work in either versions. The library is eminently useable: in fact it's fantastic. However, those previously unfamiliar with Scala and poking around to get a feel for the language now have to make sense of method signatures like: def map[B, That](f: A => B)(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, B, That]): That For such simple functionality, this is a daunting signature and one which I find myself struggling to understand. Not that I think Scala was ever likely to be the next Java (or /C/C++/C#) - I don't believe its creators were aiming it at that market - but I think it is/was certainly feasible for Scala to become the next Ruby or Python (i.e. to gain a significant commercial user-base) Is this going to put people off coming to Scala? Is this going to give Scala a bad name in the commercial world as an academic plaything that only dedicated PhD students can understand? Are CTOs and heads of software going to get scared off? Was the library re-design a sensible idea? If you're using Scala commercially, are you worried about this? Are you planning to adopt 2.8 immediately or wait to see what happens? Steve Yegge once attacked Scala (mistakenly in my opinion) for what he saw as its overcomplicated type-system. I worry that someone is going to have a field day spreading fud with this API (similarly to how Josh Bloch scared the JCP out of adding closures to Java). Note - I should be clear that, whilst I believe that Josh Bloch was influential in the rejection of the BGGA closures proposal, I don't ascribe this to anything other than his honestly-held beliefs that the proposal represented a mistake.

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• Dealing with personal failure

  - by codeelegance

  A while ago I was given the task of updating and extending the functionality of a software project. I was given a year to make the needed changes working solo. A month into development I came to the conclusion that it would take longer to change the existing product than to rewrite it from the ground up. I'd never attempted a complete rewrite so I talked with my boss about it and he was thrilled with the idea. I'm a fan of agile development but had never had the opportunity to take advantage of all of the prescribed practices so when I set to work I tried to incorporate as many as I could. I didn't have direct access to the customer and my coworkers (non-programmers) knew the business domain but were already so busy they didn't really have time to participate in design meetings so I resigned to working in the dark and occasionally calling one of them over to my desk to get feedback on my progress. I used TDD and refactored mercilessly and even tried taking a domain driven design approach. Things went well for a while. As the deadline came closer and the complexity of the project grew my productivity start slipping. I found myself cutting corners and ignoring the practices I had established as the pressure increased to meet the deadline. I also started working late nights and weekends to keep up with the load. In the end it made little difference how hard I worked. The project missed its deadline and what was completed wasn't enough to give to the customer. I had failed. Not only had I not finished on time but the previous version had sat untouched for almost a year so it wouldn't be of any help. Luckily we had another product that offered some of the same functionality. My boss decided to cancel the project entirely and moved all our orphaned customers to the other product. I spent weeks (along with everyone else at the company) manning the phones providing technical support for those customers. After it was all over, my boss was gracious enough not to fire me for nearly ruining the company. I was moved to the other product and have been trying to redeem myself ever since. Where did I go wrong? Has anyone else had to deal with this kind of defeat? How did you recover?

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• DHCP and DNS services configuration for VOIP system, windows domain, etc

  - by Stemen

  My company has numerous physical offices (for purposes of this discussion, 15 buildings). Some of them are well-connected to our primary data center via fiber. Others will be connected to the data center by P2P T1. We are in the beginning stages of implementing an Avaya VOIP telephone system, and we will be replacing a significant portion of our network infrastructure in the process. In tandem with the phone system implementation, we are going to be re-addressing some of our networks, and consolidating most of our Windows domains into one (not all domains, just most). We currently have quite a few Windows domains, and they of course each have their own DNS zones. A few of those networks currently use DHCP, but the majority use static IP assignments for every device. I'm tired of managing static assignments -- I want to use DHCP configuration on everything except servers. Printers and etc will have DHCP reservations. The new IP phones will need to get IP addresses from DHCP, though they need to be in a separate VLAN from the computers/printers/etc. The computers and printers need to be registered in DNS. That's currently handled by the Windows DHCP servers on each of the respective domains. We need to place a priority on DHCP and DNS being available on a per-site basis (in case something were to interrupt the WAN connection) for computers and (primarily) phones. Smaller locations (which will have IP phones but not be a member of any Windows domain) will not have any Windows DNS/DHCP server(s) available. We also are looking for the easiest way to replace a part if it were to fail. That is to say, if a server/appliance/router hosting DHCP were to crash hard, and we couldn't extremely quickly recover the DHCP reservations and leases (and subsequently restore them onto a cold spare), we anticipate that bad things could happen. What is the best idea for how to re-implement DNS and DHCP keeping all of the above in mind? Some thoughts that have been raised (by myself or my coworkers): Use Windows DNS and DHCP servers, where they exist, and use IP helpers to route DHCP requests to some other Windows server if necessary. May not be acceptable if the WAN goes down and clients don't get a DHCP response. Use Windows DNS (everywhere, over WAN in some cases) and a mix of Windows DHCP and DHCP provided by Cisco routers. Every site would be covered for DHCP, but from what I've read, Cisco routers can't handle dynamic registration of DHCP clients to Windows DNS servers, which might create a problem where Cisco routers are used for DHCP. Use Windows DNS (everywhere, over WAN in some cases) and a mix of Windows DHCP and DHCP provided by some service running on an extremely low-price linux server. Is there any such software that would allow DHCP leases granted by these linux boxes to be dynamically registered on the Windows DNS servers? Come up with a Linux solution for both DNS and DHCP, and deploy low-price linux servers to every site. Requirements would be that the DNS zone be multi-master (like Windows DNS integrated with Active Directory), that DHCP be able to make dynamic DNS registrations in that zone, for every lease (where a hostname is provided and is thus possible), and that multiple servers be either authoritative for the same DHCP scope or at least receiving a real-time copy / replication / sync of the leases table so that if one server dies, we still know which MAC has what address. Purchase dedicated DNS/DHCP appliances, deploying to all sites. From what I read/see, this solves all of our technical problems. Then come the financial problems... I don't have a ton of money to spend on this. Or, some other solution that we've thus far overlooked and will consider upon recommendation. Can Cisco routers or Windows servers sync DHCP lease tables so that multiple servers can be authoritative (or active/passive for all I care) for the same scope, in case one of the partners were to fail? I've read online (repeatedly) that ISC's DHCP is able to maintain the same lease table across multiple servers, in order to solve this problem. Does anyone have any experience or advice to regarding that?

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• How do bots access directories on a server that are not DocumentRoot of public IP address? How do I stop them?

  - by tmsimont

  I have a local network set up with apache2 and "named" running on OpenSuse 13.1 Linux. I used the "named" service to use my computer as a domain server. I set up my router to point to ask my computer for domain lookups, so I have a chance to have it rewrite a bunch of domains on my network to its own local IP, 192.168.0.111 This works great. I use virtual host configuration to allow various domains and subdomains (re-routed to the same IP via named) to pull up different directories in my computer. For example: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName 192.168.0.111 ServerAlias fmb.wa.net DocumentRoot /home/work/wa.net/fmb </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName 192.168.0.111 ServerAlias postrecord.wa.net DocumentRoot /home/work/wa.net/postrecord </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName 192.168.0.111 ServerAlias cvalley.wa.net DocumentRoot /home/work/wa.net/cvalley_local </VirtualHost> This makes it possible for me to hit cvalley.wa.net from any device in my network and get the site that lives in /home/work/wa.net/cvalley_local I decided to forward port 80 to this computer, so I could share a few development sites with coworkers. I can't control which site they see with the same named service, because they'd have to use my computer as their domain name server... So I added a line like this: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName 192.168.0.111 ServerAlias MY.IP.XXX.XX DocumentRoot /home/work/wa.net/cvalley </VirtualHost> Where "MY.IP.XXX.XX" is my public IP address. This works as expected, when you hit my IP address from a public network you see the site that lives in /home/work/wa.net/cvalley. The point of confusion that I have is that there are public IP addresses in my logs in other sites. I would have expected it to be impossible to access other sites in my network, unless the public user somehow figured out what I'm calling my ServerAliases, and is mimicing my domain set up... How can public traffic be hitting my other local sites? How can I recreate this kind of access? Here are some examples of public IP's hitting my VirtualHost sites: 162.253.66.76 - - [15/Aug/2014:19:20:47 -0600] "GET /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 404 1004 "-" "-" 162.253.66.74 - - [16/Aug/2014:10:50:28 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 262 "-" "masscan/1.0 (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan)" 185.4.227.194 - - [16/Aug/2014:11:16:45 -0600] "GET http://24x7-allrequestsallowed.com/?PHPSESSID=1rysxtj500143WQMVT%5E_NAZ%5BQ HTTP/1.1" 200 262 "-" "-" 101.226.254.138 - - [16/Aug/2014:13:32:14 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" 162.253.66.74 - - [16/Aug/2014:14:26:19 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 262 "-" "masscan/1.0 (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan)" 212.129.2.119 - - [16/Aug/2014:16:00:51 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" 91.240.163.111 - - [16/Aug/2014:18:34:32 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 262 "-" "masscan/1.0 (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan)" 162.253.66.74 - - [16/Aug/2014:19:02:53 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 262 "-" "masscan/1.0 (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan)" 122.226.223.69 - - [17/Aug/2014:05:53:09 -0600] "GET http://www.k2proxy.com//hello.html HTTP/1.1" 404 1006 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)" ::1 - - [17/Aug/2014:10:19:26 -0600] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "Apache/2.4.6 (Linux/SUSE) OpenSSL/1.0.1e PHP/5.4.20 (internal dummy connection)" 162.209.65.196 - - [17/Aug/2014:15:31:53 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" 111.206.199.163 - - [18/Aug/2014:11:12:56 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" 37.187.180.168 - - [18/Aug/2014:15:40:00 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" 62.210.38.226 - - [18/Aug/2014:18:35:16 -0600] "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" 200 - "-" "-" Is there anything that I can do to reliably deny public access by default, but allow it only in one VirtualHost?

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• How to deal with a poor team leader and a tester manager from hell? [closed]

  - by Google

  Let me begin by explaining my situation and give a little context to the situation. My company has around 15 developers but we're split up on two different areas. We have a fresh product team and the old product team. The old product team does mostly bug fixes/maintenance and a feature here and there. The fresh product had never been released and was new from the ground up. I am on the fresh product team. The team consists of three developers (myself, another developer and a senior developer). The senior is also our team leader. Our roles are as follows: Myself: building the administration client as well as build/release stuff Other dev: building the primary client Team lead: building the server In addition to the dev team, we interact with the test manager often. By "we" I mean me since I do the build stuff and give him the builds to test. Trial 1: The other developer on my team and I have both tried to talk to our manager about our team leader. About two weeks before release we went in his office and had a closed door meeting before our team lead got to work. We expressed our concerns about the product, its release date and our team leader. We expressed our team leader had a "rosey" image of the product's state. Our manager seemed to listen to what we said and thanked us for taking the initiative to speak with him about it. He got us an extra two weeks before release. The situation with the leader didn't change. In fact, it got a little worse. While we were using the two weeks to fix issues he was slacking off quite a bit. Just to name a few things, he installed Windows 8 on his dev machine during this time (claimed him machine was broke), he wrote a plugin for our office messenger that turned turned messages into speech, and one time when I went in his office he was making a 3D model in Blender (for "fun"). He felt the product was "pretty good" and ready for release. During this time I dealt with the test manager on a daily basis. Every bug or issue that popped up he would pretty much attack me personally (regardless of which component the bug was in). The test manager would often push his "views" of what needed to be done with the product. He virtually ordered me to change text on our installer and to add features to the installer and administration client. I tried to express how his suggestions were "valid ideas" but it was too close to release to do those kinds of things and to make matters worse, our technical writer had already finished documentation and such a change would not only affect the dev team but would affect the technical writer and marketing as well. I expressed I wasn't going to make those changes without marketing's consent as well as the technical writer and my manager's. He pretty much said I don't care about the product and said I don't do my job. I would like to take a moment to say I take my job seriously and I do my best. I am the kind of person that goes to work 30-40 mins early and usually leaves 30 minutes later than everyone else. Saying I don't care or do my job is just insulting. His "attacks" on me grew from day to day. Every bug that popped up he would usually comment on in some manner that jabbed me and the other developer. "Oh that bug! Yeah that should have been fixed by now, figures! If someone would do their job!" and other similar kinds of comments. Keep in mind 8 out of 10 bugs were in the server and had nothing to do with me and the other developer. That didn't seem to matter.. On one occasion they got pretty bad and we almost got into a yelling match so I decided to stop talking to him all together. I carried all communication through office email (with my manager cc'd). He never attacked me via email. He still attempted to get aggressive with me in person but I completely ignore him and my only response to any question is, "Ask my team leader." or "Ask a product manager." The product launched after our two week extension. Trial 2: The day after the product launch our team leader went on vacation (thanks....). At this time we got a lot of questions from the tech support... major issues with the product. All of these issues were bugs marked "resolved" by our lovely team leader (a typical situation that often popped up). This is where we currently are. The other developer has been with the company for about three years (I've been there only five months) and told me he was going to speak with our manager alone and hoped it would help get our concerns across a little better in a one-on-one. He spoke with the manager and directly addressed all of our concerns regarding our team leader and the test manager giving us (mostly me) hell. Our manager basically said he understood how hard we work and said he noticed it and there's no doubt about it. He said he spoke with the test manager about his temper. Regarding the team leader, he didn't say a whole lot. He suggested we sit down with the team leader and address our concerns (isn't that the manager's job?). We're still waiting to see if anything has changed but we doubt it. What can we do next? 1) Talk to the team leader (may stress relationship and make work awkward) I admit the team leader is generally a nice guy. He is just a horrible leader and working closely with him is painful. I still don't believe bringing this directly to the team leader would help at all and may negatively impact the situation. 2) I could quit. Other than this situation the job is pretty fantastic. I really like my other coworkers and we have quite a bit of freedom. 3) I could take the situation with the team leader to one of the owners. I would then be throwing my manager under the bus. 4) I could take the situation with the test manager to HR. Any suggestions? Comments?

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• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster. Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users. Getting Started Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one. Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish. When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not. Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in. Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page. Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page. Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense. Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with. Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above. Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more. Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page. Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content. If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up. Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished. Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available. Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In. Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown. You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter. If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.   Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site. Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog. After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below. Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites. Conclusion If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us.  Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too! Link Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required) Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPAnnouncing the How-To Geek BlogsNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Fix Common Inkjet Printer Errors Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? 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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Productivity Tips

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  A few months ago during my first end of year review at Microsoft I was doing an assessment of my year.  One of my personal goals to come out of this reflection was to improve my personal productivity.  While I hear many people say “I wish I had more hours in the day so that I could get more done” I feel like that is the wrong approach.  There is an inherent assumption that you are being productive with your time that you already have and thus more time would allow you to be as productive given more time.    Instead of wishing I could add more hours to the day I’ve begun adopting a number of processes or behavior changes in my personal life to make better use of my time with the goal of improving productivity.  The areas of focus are as follows: Focus Processes Tools Personal health Email Note: A number of these topics have spawned from reading Scott Hanselman’s blog posts on productivity, reading of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and discussions with friends and coworkers who had great insights into this topic.   Focus Pre-reading / viewing: Overcome your work addiction Millennials paralyzed by choice Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (Scott Hanselman video)    I highly recommend Scott Hanselman’s video above and this post before continuing with this article.  It is well worth the 40+ mins price of admission for the video and couple minutes for article.  One key takeaway for me was listing out my activities in an average week and realizing which ones held little or no value to me.  We all have a finite amount of time to work each day.  Do you know how much time and effort you spend on various aspects of your life (family, friends, religion, work, personal happiness, etc.)?  Do your actions and commitments reflect your priorities?    The biggest time consumers with little value for me were time spent on social media services (Twitter and Facebook), playing an MMO video game, and watching TV.  I still check up on Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft internal chat forums, and other services to keep contact with others but I’ve reduced that time significantly.  As for TV I’ve cut the cord and no longer subscribe to cable TV.  Instead I use Netflix, RedBox, and over the air channels but again with reduced time consumption.  With the time I’ve freed up I’m back to working out 2-3 times a week and reading 4 nights a week (both of which I had been neglecting previously).  I’ll mention a few tools for helping measure your time in the Tools section.   Processes    Do not multi-task.  I’ll say it again.  Do not multi-task.  There is no such thing as multi tasking.  The human brain is optimized to work on one thing at a time.  When you are “multi-tasking” you are really doing 2 or more things at less than 100%, usually by a wide margin.  I take pride in my work and when I’m doing something less than 100% the results typically degrade rapidly.    Now there are some ways of bending the rules of physics for this one.  There is the notion of getting a double amount of work done in the same timeframe.  Some examples would be listening to podcasts / watching a movie while working out, using a treadmill as your work desk, or reading while in the bathroom.    Personally I’ve found good results in combining one task that does not require focus (making dinner, playing certain video games, working out) and one task that does (watching a movie, listening to podcasts).  I believe this is related to me being a visual and kinesthetic (using my hands or actually doing it) learner.  I’m terrible with auditory learning.  My fiance and I joke that sometimes we talk and talk to each other but never really hear each other.   Goals / Tasks    Goals can give us direction in life and a sense of accomplishment when we complete them.  Goals can also overwhelm us and give us a sense of failure when we don’t complete them.  I propose that you shift your perspective and not dwell on all of the things that you haven’t gotten done, but focus instead on regularly setting measureable goals that are within reason of accomplishing.    At the end of each time frame have a retrospective to review your progress.  Do not feel guilty about what you did not accomplish.  Feel proud of what you did accomplish and readjust your goals for the next time frame to more attainable goals.  Here is a sample schedule I’ve seen proposed by some.  I have not consistently set goals for each timeframe, but I do typically set 3 small goals a day (this blog post is #2 for today). Each day set 3 small goals Each week set 3 medium goals Each month set 1 large goal Each year set 2 very large goals   Tools    Tools are an extension of our human body.  They help us extend beyond what we can physically and mentally do.  Below are some tools I use almost daily or have found useful as of late. Disclaimer: I am not getting endorsed to promote any of these products.  I just happen to like them and find them useful. Instapaper – Save internet links for reading later.  There are many tools like this but I’ve found this to be a great one.  There is even a “read it later” JavaScript button you can add to your browser so when you navigate to a site it will then add this to your list. Stacks for Instapaper – A Windows Phone 7 app for reading my Instapaper articles on the go.  It does require a subscription to Instapaper (nominal $3 every three months) but is easily worth the cost.  Alternatively you can set up your Kindle to sync with Instapaper easily but I haven’t done so. SlapDash Podcast – Apps for Windows Phone and  Windows 8 (possibly other platforms) to sync podcast viewing / listening across multiple devices.  Now that I have my Surface RT device (which I love) this is making my consumption easier to manage. Feed Reader – Simple Windows 8 app for quickly catching up on my RSS feeds.  I used to have hundreds of unread items all the time.  Now I’m down to 20-50 regularly and it is much easier and faster to consume on my Surface RT.  There is also a free version (which I use) and I can’t see much different between the free and paid versions currently. Rescue Time – Have you ever wondered how much time you’ve spent on websites vs. email vs. “doing work”?  This service tracks your computer actions and then lets you report on them.  This can help you quantitatively identify areas where your actions are not in line with your priorities. PowerShell – Windows automation tool.  It is now built into every client and server OS.  This tool has saved me days (and I mean the full 24 hrs worth) of time and effort in the past year alone.  If you haven’t started learning PowerShell and you administrating any Windows OS or server product you need to start today. Various blogging tools – I wrote a post a couple years ago called How I Blog about my blogging process and tools used.  Almost all of it still applies today.   Personal Health    Some of these may be common sense or debatable, but I’ve found them to help prioritize my daily activities. Get plenty of sleep on a regular basis.  Sacrificing sleep too many nights a week negatively impacts your cognition, attitude, and overall health. Exercise at least three days.  Exercise could be lifting weights, taking the stairs up multiple flights of stairs, walking for 20 mins, or a number of other "non-traditional” activities.  I find that regular exercise helps with sleep and improves my overall attitude. Eat a well balanced diet.  Too much sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc. are not good for your body.  This is not a matter of losing weight but taking care of your body and helping you perform at your peak potential.   Email    Email can be one of the biggest time consumers (i.e. waster) if you aren’t careful. Time box your email usage.  Set a meeting invite for yourself if necessary to limit how much time you spend checking email. Use rules to prioritize your email.  Email from external customers, my manager, or include me directly on the To line go into my inbox.  Everything else goes a level down and I have 30+ rules to further sort it, mostly distribution lists. Use keyboard shortcuts (when available).  I use Outlook for my primary email and am constantly hitting Alt + S to send, Ctrl + 1 for my inbox, Ctrl + 2 for my calendar, Space / Tab / Shift + Tab to mark items as read, and a number of other useful commands.  Learn them and you’ll see your speed getting through emails increase. Keep emails short.  No one Few people like reading through long emails.  The first line should state exactly why you are sending the email followed by a 3-4 lines to support it.  Anything longer might be better suited as a phone call or in person discussion.   Conclusion    In this post I walked through various tips and tricks I’ve found for improving personal productivity.  It is a mix of re-focusing on the things that matter, using tools to assist in your efforts, and cutting out actions that are not aligned with your priorities.  I originally had a whole section on keyboard shortcuts, but with my recent purchase of the Surface RT I’m finding that touch gestures have replaced numerous keyboard commands that I used to need.  I see a big future in touch enabled devices.  Hopefully some of these tips help you out.  If you have any tools, tips, or ideas you would like to share feel free to add in the comments section.         -Frog Out   Links Scott Hanselman Productivity posts http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Productivity Overcome your work addiction http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2012/05/overcome-your-work-addiction.html?awid=5512355740280659420-3271   Millennials paralyzed by choice http://priyaparker.com/blog/millennials-paralyzed-by-choice   Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (video) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx   Cutting the cord – Jeff Blankenburg http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2011/04/06/cutting-the-cord/   Building a sitting standing desk – Eric Harlan http://www.ericharlan.com/Everything_Else/building-a-sitting-standing-desk-a229.html   Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com/u   Stacks for Instapaper http://www.stacksforinstapaper.com/   Slapdash Podcast Windows Phone -  http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/slapdash-podcasts/90e8b121-080b-e011-9264-00237de2db9e Windows 8 - http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/slapdash-podcasts/0c62e66a-f2e4-4403-af88-3430a821741e/m/ROW   Feed Reader http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/feed-reader/d03199c9-8e08-469a-bda1-7963099840cc/m/ROW   Rescue Time http://www.rescuetime.com/   PowerShell Script Center http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/bb410849.aspx

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• That Escalated Quickly

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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• Going Paperless

  - by Jesse

  One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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• Geolocation through Android's GPS Provider on a website?

  - by Corey Ogburn

  I'm trying to get the geolocation of the mobile device in a regular website, not a webview of an application or anything native like that. I'm getting a location, but it's highly inaccurate, the accuracy comes back as 3230 or some other outrageous number. I'm assuming that's in meters, either way it's not nearly accurate enough. By comparison, the same webpage on a laptop gets an accuracy of 30-40. My first thought was that it was using the Network Provider instead of the GPS Provider, telling me where I am based on tower location and reach. A little research later I found enableHighAccuracy and set it true in the options that I pass. After including that, I still notice no difference. Here's the test page's HTML/javascript: <html> <head> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> function OnLoad() { $("#Status").text("Init"); if (navigator.geolocation) { $("#Status").text("Supports Geolocation"); navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(HandleLocation, LocationError, { enableHighAccuracy: true }); $("#Status").text("Sent position request..."); } else { $("#Status").text("Doesn't support geolocation"); } } function HandleLocation(position) { $("#Status").text("Received response:"); $("#Position").text("(" + position.coords.latitude + ", " + position.coords.longitude + ") accuracy: " + position.coords.accuracy); var loc = new Microsoft.Maps.Location(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude); GetMap(loc); } function LocationError(error) { switch(error.code) { case error.PERMISSION_DENIED: alert("Location not provided"); break; case error.POSITION_UNAVAILABLE: alert("Current location not available"); break; case error.TIMEOUT: alert("Timeout"); break; default: alert("unknown error"); break; } } function GetMap(loc) { var map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(document.getElementById("mapDiv"), {credentials: "Aj59meaCR1e7rNgkfQy7j08Pd3mzfP1r04hGesGmLe2a3ZwZ3iGecwPX2SNPWq5a", center: loc, mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.road, zoom: 15}); } </script> </head> <body onload="javascript:OnLoad()"> <div id="Status"></div> <div id="Position"></div><br/> <div id='mapDiv' style="position:relative; width:600px; height:400px;"></div> </body> </html> I'm testing this on a rooted MyTouch 3G running Cyanogen 6.1 stable, Android 2.2 and GPS is enabled. In case rooting was a problem, I have also had various friends and coworkers try the webpage on their non-rooted 2.0+ Android devices. Each phone had various effects on the accuracy, but none were better than 1000, I attribute this to the different carriers. I have not (but eventually will) tested with iPhone or other location-aware cell phones.

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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