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• Volume licenced copy of MS Office 2007 shows "Non Commercial Use" in title bar

  - by Linker3000

  I have just removed the demo copy of Office 2007 preinstalled on a new laptop and replaced it with an install of the full professional edition downloaded from the MS Volume Licensing site and installed one of our volume licence keys, yet the apps (Word etc.) show "Non Commercial Use" in the title bar, which is what usually happens in the Home and Student edition. I have tried: Deleting the Office registration keys in the registry and using one of our other Office 2007 volume licence keys (we have 7) when prompted to re-register Uninstalling Office completely and reinstalling it from a newly-downloaded ISO burned to CD and also from a compressed file that installs from hard disk/USB stick (both from Microsoft - no dodgy stuff) Yet the non-commercial message persists. Although it's a cosmetic issue, the laptop is going to be used for customer presentations and so the sales person is rightly concerned about the image this portrays. I presume there may be something floating around the registry or in a file somewhere but I can't find it. Articles I have found elsewhere just refer to the message being related to the use of a Home and Student licence key, which is 100% not the case. Any thoughts? Thanks.

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• ADSL to T1, Is it worth it for us?

  - by Jack Hickerson

  The company I work for has roughly 45-55 simultaneous users (local and remote/VPN) logged in at a given time. We currently subscribe to an ADSL connection but we have been experiencing slower upload/download speeds as our number of users increase. So, I have a few questions with regards to upgrading our connection to a t1 line. I am aware that the number of channels on a t1 line are much greater then that of our current ADSL connection, but I have heard that the number of active users on a t1 line should be no greater than ~30 for optimal performance. I would think this statement is dependent on what each user was using the connection for and could change depending on this variable. That being said, I have tried to break down how the line would be used in our organization based on our major departments: Sales (~60% of total users) - Everyday surfing, email, research, occasional streaming media Marketing (~15% of total users) - Heavy reliance on uploading/downloading, streaming media, file sharing Other (~25% of total users) - email, rare use of any connection intensive activities. I have considered keeping the ADSL for our local users and dedicating the t1 to our remote users (or vice versa) but the cost is significantly higher then what we had hoped for. All factors being equal (# of users, frequency of downloads/uploads from our current activities) Would you suspect a significant performance increase in making the transition to a t1 line from our current ADSL line? What are your thoughts or recommendations?

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• My New Dell Workstation T-7500 gives electric shock

  - by Dan

  Just bought Dell T-7500 Workstation. When installation technician came to Install the workstation, he got an electric shock when he touched the Start Button. He also got shock when he touched Front Panel. No shock when touching rest of the Chassis. He called Dell Support & tried to troubleshoot by taking out various wires etc but did not help. I touched the same places & I also got shock. We checked everything possible including connecting to various outlets but it didn't solve the problem. Installation subcontractor said that they are not supposed to troubleshoot anything on new system, just install it & they made notes & left. I called my sales guy & it was weekend so he said he will take care of it on Monday. Here are my concerns : (1) Why does that happen ? Although it is a mild shock & it won't kill you but might damage other parts of workstation ? (2) Is this common for workstations ? (3) What should I do ? Of course Dell will try to troubleshoot again but should I let them do that OR ask for a New System ? (4) Wheat would happen if I continue using it till the new system arrives ? Thank You.

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• open-source LAMP package for simple accouting and receiving?

  - by user26664

  Hello. I am involved with a computer-based charity where we take donation of old equipment, often recycle it, mostly rehabilitate it and make it available through grants and 'adoptions', and sell some items. What we're looking for is a LAMP package that can handle our records of donations of equipment, print receipts for donators, and also track our thrift store sales with receipts. Donators will want receipts of their donations for tax deduction purposes. We'll want to print reports of incoming items from time to time, say monthly and yearly. For the thrift store, we'll also need receipts for that, reports of cash, especially for reconciling cash drops, and also reports of items sold from time to time. I'm thinking this might be a single package, but it might be two. We don't want to track our shop inventory with either of these programs -- that's another program/project. We just need to know what was donated and what was sold. It must be open source, and ideally we'd like it to run on LAMP -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, but we will consider other open-source platforms.

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• Is this way of using Excel 2007 Pivot table for BI scalable ?

  - by Sim

  Hi all, Background: We need to consolidate sales data across the country to do analysis Our Internet connection/IT expertise/IT investment is not quite strong, therefore full BI solution is out of question I tried several SaaS BI solution (GoodData, ZohoReports) and while they're good, they seem not to fully support what we need We're looking at 'bout 2 millions record for every 2 months My current approach Our (10) sites currently gathers data from all their branches and consolidate them into 1 Excel file with Pivot table and embed source data In HQ, I will request 10 sites to send back those Excel files periodically We will import those Excel to our MSSQL server There will be a master Excel file, that will also have the same pivot table (as those came from site Excel file), and datasource is the MSSQL server More details For testing, I currently use MSSQL 2008 Express on my laptop So far, I imported our transactions for the past 2 months and there are 2 millions+ row in 1 table in MSSQL (we just use 1 table, corresponding to our common pivot table structure). DB size is ~ 600 MB In the master Excel file, if not including the source data, it's just < 10MB. Including the source data will increase the size to 60 MB (so I supposed Office 2007 automatically zip the data ?) I try using the Pivot (drag-and-drop fields) and the performance so far is OK (my laptop specs: C2D T7200, 3GB RAM, Windows XP) So my question is : If we're looking at full year transaction (roughly 15 millions rows in MSSQL 2008 Express, 3.6 GB in size), is there any issue with that 15 million rows in 1 table in SQL Express ? Is there any performance issue with the pivot table at that time ? Can it still embed the source data ? (I google-ed but didn't find the maximum size of source data Excel 2007 can embed) Any other suggestions on how we can better do this ? Given that we can't afford the full BI solution, any light-weight/budget/SaaS BI that you can recommend ? Thanks

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• Scripted forwarding for Outlook 2003

  - by John Gardeniers

  We have a staff member in sales who has gone onto a 4 day week (getting ready for retirement), so each Thursday afternoon her email needs to be forwarded to another user and each Friday afternoon it needs to be set back. I'm using the VBS script below to do this, run via the Task Scheduler. Although the script appears to do it's job, based on what I see when I view the user's Exchange settings, Exchange doesn't always recognise that the setting has changed. e.g. Last Thursday the forwarding was a enabled and worked correctly. On Friday the script did it's thing to clear the forwarding but Exchange continued to forward messages all weekend. I found that I can force Exchange to honour the changed setting be merely opening and closing the user's properties in ADUC. Of course I don't want to have to do that. Is there a non-manual way I can have Exchange read and honour the setting? The script (VBS): ' Call this script with the following parameters: ' ' SrcUser - The logon ID of the suer who's account is to be modified ' DstUser - The logon account of the person to who mail is to be forwarded ' Use "reset" to clear the email forwarding SrcUser = WScript.Arguments.Item(0) DstUser = WScript.Arguments.Item(1) SourceUser = SearchDistinguishedName(SrcUser) 'The user login name Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & SourceUser) If DstUser = "reset" then objUser.PutEx 1, "altRecipient", "" Else ForwardTo = SearchDistinguishedName(DstUser)' The contact common name objUser.Put "AltRecipient", ForwardTo End If objUser.SetInfo Public Function SearchDistinguishedName(ByVal vSAN) Dim oRootDSE, oConnection, oCommand, oRecordSet Set oRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://rootDSE") Set oConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConnection.Open "Provider=ADsDSOObject;" Set oCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") oCommand.ActiveConnection = oConnection oCommand.CommandText = "<LDAP://" & oRootDSE.get("defaultNamingContext") & ">;(&(objectCategory=User)(samAccountName=" & vSAN & "));distinguishedName;subtree" Set oRecordSet = oCommand.Execute On Error Resume Next SearchDistinguishedName = oRecordSet.Fields("DistinguishedName") On Error GoTo 0 oConnection.Close Set oRecordSet = Nothing Set oCommand = Nothing Set oConnection = Nothing Set oRootDSE = Nothing End Function

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• Are there any disadvantages of having a "free fall sensor" on a hard disk drive?

  - by therobyouknow

  This is a general question that came out of a specific comparison between the Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEKT and Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BJKT (which is the same as the former but with a free fall sensor.) Note: I'm not asking for a review or appraisal of these specific drives, as the general question does apply on other brands as well. Though your input would help my decision. To break down the general question in order to answer it, I would be looking for comments on things like: if it's necessary to have differing physical dimensions between free fall sensor drives and those without, e.g. does it make it any thicker, and therefore reduce the systems where it can be installed - particularly smaller laptops? does it actually make the system less reliable - because of false alarms whereby the drive thought the laptop was falling but it wasn't? I suppose that the fact that a manufacturer produces both drives with and without free fall sensors says something about possible disadvantages. Or it could be standard marketing techniques where by making drives with and without results in larger sales volume than just those with the feature alone.

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• Microsoft Licensing Scenario/Questions [closed]

  - by user17455

  Possible Duplicate: Can you help me with my software licensing question? I am a member of a team developing a third party application (APP) that listens for and services connections from remote devices via TCP. Also, some of these remote devices allow 1 or more users to interact with the remote device. On some of the remote devices, it is impossible for a user to interact with the device. The user/remote device makes no use of any Windows Server service - not DHCP, not IIS, not File Server, not Print Serer, not AD. The remote device's only connection to the Windows Server machine is through the APP's TCP ports. Our company has no interaction with Microsoft. We do not have a Microsoft sales team. Past inquiries have determined that it is cheaper for us to buy Microsoft software (and CALs) retail than to enter into any kind of "arrangement" with Microsoft. I have many questions about SQL Server CALs and Windows Server 2008 CALs. How can I obtain authoritative/legally binding answers? I am not looking for FREE legal advice. I AM looking for FREE advice about who/what/where I can responsibly spend my money to get meaningful information. I fear that passing this on to the local company law firm will just mean that I will be paying them to educate themselves on Microsoft licensing. And if that's like writing code to a new Microsoft API - they are not going to get it right the first time. Going to Microsoft for answers sounds like swimming up to a hungry shark and asking "One leg or two?" I am hoping someone has been down this road before and knows a law firm/lawyer that is experienced in these matters. Any help/suggestion welcome. Thanks.

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• How to replicate a windows servers (IIS,Files,ConfigurationState)?

  - by Geo

  Maybe a better question is: What is the closest competitor for DoubleTake? I am looking to replicate a windows production server in case it fails have a immediate backup. Any idead? NOTE 1: I forget to add that this server is on the EC2 Amazon Cloud. NOTE 2: The main situation we have is recreating the configuration settings like IIS, FTP Server, SQL Server, SVN Server. NOTE 3: So far I have been giving three options as answers for my original question: AppAssurance -- After talking to their sales team they do not support Amazon as cloud provider. Basically there is a technical need to be able to reboot from a disk or similar media. So ESX Virtual machine environment will work, but not the EC2. Acronis -- which works as a backup in ghost style. This will work for other type of scenarios. Use the Amazon EC2 API -- This option is ideal, but only works if you are developing a cloud application rather than hosting a regular application in a cloud scenario. This means that I am still looking for the answer. Any other ideas.

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• Splunk is fantastically expensive: What are the alternatives?

  - by samsmith

  This has been discussed, but it has been several months, so it may be time to revisit it: Earlier discussion RE Splunk alternatives For the record, Splunk rocks. But the pricing is simply beyond what we can consider (When I spoke with Splunk today, the cost for a system to index 5gb/day of data is over $30,000.) That is more than we spend on SQL Server (by a large multiple), more than we spend on a rack of servers (by a multiple), etc. etc. The splunk sales team is correct (that for $30K we get more value and functionality than if we spend the same building our own system), but it doesn't matter. The splunk cost is simply too high (by a multiple). Soooooo, we are looking around! Is anyone out there building a splunk like system? Our basic need: Able to listen for syslog messages on multiple udp ports Able to index the incoming data in an async way Some kind of search engine Some kind of UI An API to the search engine (to embed in our console) We currently need to index 3-5gb/day, but need to be able to scale to 10gb/day or more. We do not need a lot of history (30 days is fine). We use Windows 2008 and 2003 servers. Thanks for your thoughts!

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• postfix not sending domain mail to mx

  - by orlandoresorts

  I'm trying to get postfix to forward email to my domain which is hosted by gmail. As I don't have any users on my server nor do I want to. Here's how I have things set up.. LEt's say you and I have a domain called mcdonalds.com the registrar has mcdonalds.com MX records pointing to gmail. (everything works for like a year) Now we set up a server to host a website. Then we create a mail account called [email protected] and send mail locally from the server using roundcube. This works. We can send mail to cnn.com we can send mail to serverfault.com we can email any/everyone. BUT we cannot send mail to our own domain mcdonalds.com So I cannot email [email protected] I cannot email [email protected] I cannot email [email protected] It gives the error: SMTP Error (450): Failed to add recipient "[email protected]" (4.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table). I'm guessing because it is looking at the local server to find the mailbox and it doesn't exist. So how to I tell the server for any mail going to mcdonalds.com for [email protected] to send to my external mail server and NOT to lookup on the local www box we set up with zpanel. Any ideas?

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• Connecting a laptop to a TV via HDMI

  - by Madmartigan

  I just bought a new Dell XPS17 laptop (Win7) that only has HDMI output. My last 2 laptops had VGA, which I used to connect to my Sony Bravia 32" TV with no issues, but with the HDMI it's been quite a headache. Drivers for display adapters have been updated to the latest versions: Intel(R) HD Graphics Family NVIDIA GeForce GT 550M I went to a store and plugged in to 4 different TVs from different manufacturers. A sales rep and I spent about 30 minutes being baffled by the results (which are the same as my current TV): Extreme buggy behavior in the Nvidia and Windows display/resolution control panel Can not extend or duplicate displays, can only select one Third and fourth output devices "randomly" detected by the Windows control panel Could not get the screen to fit the output (edges cut off on all sides by about a half inch) Resolution and colors less than perfect. Artifacts around text. Display "randomly" cuts out Defaults to TV output only when plugged in Can not change resolution on either device when connected No audio from the TV Plugged in to 3 monitors from different manufacturers: Defaults to duplicated displays when plugged in Everything works perfectly So far, four people have gone through all the settings in the latop with no luck. I had similar, but not exactly matching results with a different laptop. I'm using the Sony Bravia currently at home, but in order to get it to work I have to turn on the laptop, wait until the display shows up on it, close the lid, then cycle through each output channel on the TV until I come back around to the HDMI port again, but still I have the symptoms described above. However: Once in a while, it just works. Sometimes, seemingly randomly, the output fits the screen perfectly. Sometimes the audio comes through the speakers too, but not always. Usually my screen saver "Mystify" will come up with a message that it cannot be displayed due to a limitation of the video card, but then sometimes it works fine. These 3 things seem to be independent of each other and don't always happen together. So, is there any way to get the laptop to output correctly to a TV, or is it just not meant to be?

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• How can I stop Excel from eating my delicious CSV files and excreting useless data?

  - by atroon

  I have a database which tracks sales of widgets by serial number. Users enter purchaser data and quantity, and scan each widget into a custom client program. They then finalize the order. This all works flawlessly. Some customers want an Excel-compatible spreadsheet of the widgets they have purchased. We generate this with a PHP script which queries the database and outputs the result as a CSV with the store name and associated data. This works perfectly well too. When opened in a text editor such as Notepad or vi, the file looks like this: "Account Number","Store Name","S1","S2","S3","Widget Type","Date" "4173","SpeedyCorp","268435459705526269","","268435459705526269","848 Model Widget","2011-01-17" As you can see, the serial numbers are present (in this case twice, not all secondary serials are the same) and are long strings of numbers. When this file is opened in Excel, the result becomes: Account Number Store Name S1 S2 S3 Widget Type Date 4173 SpeedyCorp 2.68435E+17 2.68435E+17 848 Model Widget 2011-01-17 As you may have observed, the serial numbers are enclosed by double quotes. Excel does not seem to respect text qualifiers in .csv files. When importing these files into Access, we have zero difficulty. When opening them as text, no trouble at all. But Excel, without fail, converts these files into useless garbage. Trying to instruct end users in the art of opening a CSV file with a non-default application is becoming, shall we say, tiresome. Is there hope? Is there a setting I've been unable to find? This seems to be the case with Excel 2003, 2007, and 2010.

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• Google Apps Domain Level Shared Contacts?

  - by dkirk

  My firm just switched to Google Apps Premiere addition 2 weeks ago and aside from the way Google handles shared contacts, things are going quite well. Previously, on our Exchange server we had numerous shared contact lists set up in the shared folders. We had a separate list for vendors, sales agents, etc.. Is there not a way to set up lists or groups such as this on the domain level in Google Apps? I have found a ton of forums with users asking the same question but no good answers unless you purchase some third party app in the marketplace. I have toyed around with the "google-shared-contacts-client" here: http://code.google.com/p/google-shared-contacts-client/ and this almost does it but it falls short when trying to group contacts on the domain level or when trying to search for a contact by company name. Are either of these things possible? I am now looking to create a Google Doc spreadsheet to share with the domain just to have a separated defined list of contacts that is search-able by various fields... Anyone who could shed some light on domain level contact sharing relating to the points above, I would be most grateful...

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• NDR for meeting requests

  - by Adam

  We've got a mailbox for each department (e.g [email protected] and [email protected]) and everyone in that department has access to it, access is granted using Exchange Management Console. If I send a calendar invite to [email protected], I get a Undeliverable report: Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups: User_A The e-mail address you entered couldn't be found. Check the address and try resending the message. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk. User_B The e-mail address you entered couldn't be found. Check the address and try resending the message. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk. User_C The e-mail address you entered couldn't be found. Check the address and try resending the message. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk. The users are no longer in AD or Exchange but we cannot find any mention of them within any deligates or permissions anywhere. We only started to get this problem AFTER we upgraded our DCs from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 and Exchange server from Windows Server 2003, with Exchange 2005 to Windows Server 2008, with exchange 2010.

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• How is the extra mSATA SSD disk used/configured in a Dell XPS laptop?

  - by Mark

  Some machines in the new XPS laptop range from Dell come with a regular, large (500GB+) HDD and an additional 32GB m-SATA SSD. The only detail I can find about this extra drive on the Dell site is this: Store your important files, multimedia and photos with XPS 15’s large hard drive options. To get instant access to your media, choose an optional mSATA solid-state drive (SSD) that can boot up to twice as fast as a regular hard drive and resumes in less than 1 second. I'd like to know more about how this extra drive is set up and used, specifically: Is anything installed on it (e.g. OS files or a boot loader) or is it just used as swap space? Is the m-SATA drive visible as a lettered drive in Windows? (I'd guess not if it's used for swap file only.) Is this unusual configuration likely to cause any problems later down the line - e.g. when upgrading to Windows 8? As usual, Dell's sales team haven't been able to help. If anyone's actually got a Dell machine with this or a similar hard drive set-up and can give a definitive answer rather than speculation I'll accept the answer.

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• Scripted redirection for Outlook 2003

  - by John Gardeniers

  We have a staff member in sales who has gone onto a 4 day week (getting ready for retirement), so each Thursday afternoon her email needs to be forwarded to another user and each Friday afternoon it needs to be set back. I'm using the VBS script below to do this, run via the Task Scheduler. Although the script appears to do it's job, based on what I see when I view the user's Exchange settings, Exchange doesn't always recognise that the setting has changed. e.g. Last Thursday the forwarding was a enabled and worked correctly. On Friday the script did it's thing to clear the forwarding but Exchange continued to forward messages all weekend. I found that I can force Exchange to honour the changed setting be merely opening and closing the user's properties in ADUC. Of course I don't want to have to do that. Is there a non-manual way I can have Exchange read and honour the setting? The script (VBS): ' Call this script with the following parameters: ' ' SrcUser - The logon ID of the suer who's account is to be modified ' DstUser - The logon account of the person to who mail is to be forwarded ' Use "reset" to clear the email forwarding SrcUser = WScript.Arguments.Item(0) DstUser = WScript.Arguments.Item(1) SourceUser = SearchDistinguishedName(SrcUser) 'The user login name Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & SourceUser) If DstUser = "reset" then objUser.PutEx 1, "altRecipient", "" Else ForwardTo = SearchDistinguishedName(DstUser)' The contact common name objUser.Put "AltRecipient", ForwardTo End If objUser.SetInfo Public Function SearchDistinguishedName(ByVal vSAN) Dim oRootDSE, oConnection, oCommand, oRecordSet Set oRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://rootDSE") Set oConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConnection.Open "Provider=ADsDSOObject;" Set oCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") oCommand.ActiveConnection = oConnection oCommand.CommandText = "<LDAP://" & oRootDSE.get("defaultNamingContext") & ">;(&(objectCategory=User)(samAccountName=" & vSAN & "));distinguishedName;subtree" Set oRecordSet = oCommand.Execute On Error Resume Next SearchDistinguishedName = oRecordSet.Fields("DistinguishedName") On Error GoTo 0 oConnection.Close Set oRecordSet = Nothing Set oCommand = Nothing Set oConnection = Nothing Set oRootDSE = Nothing End Function

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• How to deploy new instances of the same application (on 1 server) automatically?

  - by Intru

  I'm working on a SaaS application where each customer runs its own version of the application. All the application instances currently run on a single server. This works quite well for us (we need less resources in total). The application doesn't use a lot of resources, so even a small VPS would be overkill (and more expensive). Adding a new customer is currently quite a bit of work: Create a user that is allowed to ssh Create a new MySQL database and user Create a virtual host for the application Log in with the new user, do a git checkout of the application (in the right location) Create tables in the new database, and add some init data Add some cron jobs Create a first user that can log in Add this new instance to capistrano What would be the best way to automate these tasks? Are the applications that can (given proper configuration) do this? Ideally this should be usable for a sales-person (so something web-based). I could write a (bash) script that does most of these tasks, and then maybe add a small web-based wrapper where someone could provider the domain/default user information. Of course, this would also require a delete-script, since some customers will eventually leave, which means that you need a list of all existing customers/instances.

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• Reporting SQL Vulnerability [migrated]

  - by Ciaran87Bel

  My first post here so i'll hopefully keep it simple. I have just finished building a CMS targeted at a certain industry and built a test site to see how everything works. Anyway I wrote a program to check for sql injection vulnerabilities and the program followed a blog link to an external website. The program discovered that the external site had a massive vulnerability that left it open to practically anyone who could then access every bit of data on their MYSQL Server and run queries etc. The thing is this external site is the brand leader in their industry and do millions upon millions of sales per annum. I have tried contacting them to let them know and even went as far as contacting the company that built their platform but I was pretty much brushed off and haven't heard back from them. Their database would contain the details of hundreds of thousands of customers and all their data. I could easily make myself site admin etc in a few seconds but they won't listen to me even though I have offered to share the vulnerability with them and help in anyway I can. Is there anything else I can do because it is one of the biggest security risks I have ever personally come across. Is there any other steps I should take to report this? Thanks

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• Right-Time Retail Part 3

  - by David Dorf

  This is part three of the three-part series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• reading Twitter API with JSON framework

  - by iPixFolio

  Hi, I'm building a twitter reader into an app. I'm using this JSON library to parse the twitter API. I'm seeing some odd results on certain messages. I know that the Twitter API returns results in UTF8 format. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong when reading the JSON parsed fields. My code is spread out across multiple classes so it's hard to give a concise code drop with the symptoms, but here's what I've got: I am using ASIHTTP for async HTTP processing. Here is processing a response from ASIHTTP: ... NSMutableString* tempString = [[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:[request responseString]]; NSError *error; SBJSON *json = [[SBJSON alloc] init]; id JSONresponse = [json objectWithString:tempString error:&error]; [tempString release]; [json release]; if (JSONresponse) { self.response = JSONresponse; ... self.response holds the JSON representation of the result from the Twitter call. Now, I will take the JSON response and write each tweet into a container object (Tweet). in the following code, the response from above is referenced as request.response: ... // save list of albums to local cache for (NSDictionary* response in request.response) { Tweet* tweet = [[Tweet alloc] init]; tweet.text = [response objectForKey:@"text"]; tweet.id = [response objectForKey:@"id"]; tweet.created = [response objectForKey:@"created_at"]; [Tweet addTweet:tweet]; [tweet release]; } ... at this point, I have a container holding the tweets. I'm only keeping 3 fields from the tweet: "id", "text", and "created_at". the "text" field is the problem field. To display the tweets, I build an HTML page from the container of tweets, like this: ... Tweet* tweet = nil; for (int i = 0; i < [Tweet tweetCount]; i++) { tweet = [Tweet tweetAtIndex:i]; [html appendString:@"<div class='tweet'>"]; [html appendFormat:@"<div class='tweet-date'>%@</div>", tweet.created ]; [html appendFormat:@"<div class='tweet-text'>%@</div>", tweet.text ]; [html appendString:@"</div>"]; } ... In another routine, I save the HTML page to a temp file. if (html && [html length] > 0 ) { NSString* uniqueString = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] globallyUniqueString]; NSString* filename = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@.html", uniqueString ]; filename = [tempDir stringByAppendingPathComponent:filename]; NSError* error = nil; [html writeToFile:filename atomically:NO encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&error]; ... I then create a URLRequest from the file and load it into an UIWebview: NSURL* url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:filename]; NSURLRequest* request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url]; [self.webView loadRequest:request]; ... At this point, I can see the tweets in a browser window. some of the tweets will show invalid characters like this: iPhone 4 ad spoofed with Glee’s Jane Lynch ... Glee’s should be Glee's Can anybody shed any light on what I'm doing wrong and offer suggestions on how to fix? basically, to summarize: I'm reading a UTF8 feed with JSON I write the UTF8 strings into an HTML file I display the HTML file with UIWebview. some of the UTF8 strings are not properly decoded. I need to know where to decode them and how to do it. thanks! Mark

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to Extended Events – Finding Long Running Queries

  - by pinaldave

  The job of an SQL Consultant is very interesting as always. The month before, I was busy doing query optimization and performance tuning projects for our clients, and this month, I am busy delivering my performance in Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Query Optimization and & Performance Tuning Course. I recently read white paper about Extended Event by SQL Server MVP Jonathan Kehayias. You can read the white paper here: Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events. I also read another appealing chapter by Jonathan in the book, SQLAuthority Book Review – Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. After reading these excellent notes by Jonathan, I decided to upgrade my course and include Extended Event as one of the modules. This week, I have delivered Extended Events session two times and attendees really liked the said course. They really think Extended Events is one of the most powerful tools available. Extended Events can do many things. I suggest that you read the white paper I mentioned to learn more about this tool. Instead of writing a long theory, I am going to write a very quick script for Extended Events. This event session captures all the longest running queries ever since the event session was started. One of the many advantages of the Extended Events is that it can be configured very easily and it is a robust method to collect necessary information in terms of troubleshooting. There are many targets where you can store the information, which include XML file target, which I really like. In the following Events, we are writing the details of the event at two locations: 1) Ringer Buffer; and 2) XML file. It is not necessary to write at both places, either of the two will do. -- Extended Event for finding *long running query* IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sys.server_event_sessions WHERE name='LongRunningQuery') DROP EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER GO -- Create Event CREATE EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER -- Add event to capture event ADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed ( -- Add action - event property ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text, sqlserver.tsql_stack) -- Predicate - time 1000 milisecond WHERE sqlserver.sql_statement_completed.duration > 1000 ) -- Add target for capturing the data - XML File ADD TARGET package0.asynchronous_file_target( SET filename='c:\LongRunningQuery.xet', metadatafile='c:\LongRunningQuery.xem'), -- Add target for capturing the data - Ring Bugger ADD TARGET package0.ring_buffer (SET max_memory = 4096) WITH (max_dispatch_latency = 1 seconds) GO -- Enable Event ALTER EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER STATE=START GO -- Run long query (longer than 1000 ms) SELECT * FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY UnitPriceDiscount DESC GO -- Stop the event ALTER EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER STATE=STOP GO -- Read the data from Ring Buffer SELECT CAST(dt.target_data AS XML) AS xmlLockData FROM sys.dm_xe_session_targets dt JOIN sys.dm_xe_sessions ds ON ds.Address = dt.event_session_address JOIN sys.server_event_sessions ss ON ds.Name = ss.Name WHERE dt.target_name = 'ring_buffer' AND ds.Name = 'LongRunningQuery' GO -- Read the data from XML File SELECT event_data_XML.value('(event/data[1])[1]','VARCHAR(100)') AS Database_ID, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[2])[1]','INT') AS OBJECT_ID, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[3])[1]','INT') AS object_type, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[4])[1]','INT') AS cpu, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[5])[1]','INT') AS duration, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[6])[1]','INT') AS reads, event_data_XML.value('(event/data[7])[1]','INT') AS writes, event_data_XML.value('(event/action[1])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS sql_text, event_data_XML.value('(event/action[2])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS tsql_stack, CAST(event_data_XML.value('(event/action[2])[1]','VARCHAR(512)') AS XML).value('(frame/@handle)[1]','VARCHAR(50)') AS handle FROM ( SELECT CAST(event_data AS XML) event_data_XML, * FROM sys.fn_xe_file_target_read_file ('c:\LongRunningQuery*.xet', 'c:\LongRunningQuery*.xem', NULL, NULL)) T GO -- Clean up. Drop the event DROP EVENT SESSION LongRunningQuery ON SERVER GO Just run the above query, afterwards you will find following result set. This result set contains the query that was running over 1000 ms. In our example, I used the XML file, and it does not reset when SQL services or computers restarts (if you are using DMV, it will reset when SQL services restarts). This event session can be very helpful for troubleshooting. Let me know if you want me to write more about Extended Events. I am totally fascinated with this feature, so I’m planning to acquire more knowledge about it so I can determine its other usages. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Extended Events

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• Catch Oracle Today and Tomorrow at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2012 East

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Continuing our coverage of the customer experience revolution this week, don’t miss a chance to catch up with Oracle at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2012 East today and tomorrow in New York City. The theme for this year’s Forum is “Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business” and will take a look at important questions surrounding how to transform your company in order to take best advantage of the customer experience revolution: Why is customer experience the greatest untapped source of cost savings and increased revenue today? What is the key to understanding and taking control of your customer experience ecosystem? What are the six essential customer experience disciplines? Which companies have adopted best-in-class customer experience practices? How do customer experience strategies drive differentiating activities and processes at top companies? Which organizations appoint a chief customer officer to lead their customer experience efforts? What is the future of customer experience? How can you design an enterprise wide customer experience? How can you measure the results of your customer experience efforts? As a gold sponsor of the event, there will be a numbers of ways to interact with Oracle while you’re attending the Forum.  Here are some of the highlights:Oracle Speaking SessionTuesday, June 26, 2:10pm – 2:40pmThe Customer And YOU — Today’s Winners Are Defined By Customer ExperienceAnthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Customer Relationship Management, OracleCome hear Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Customer Relationship Management at Oracle, explain how leading companies are investing in customer experience solutions to enrich all interactions between a customer and their company. He will discuss Oracle's vision for transforming your customer engagement, insight, and execution into a connected, personalized, and rewarding experience across all touchpoints and interactions. He will demonstrate how great customer experiences generate real business results by attracting more customers, retaining more customers, and generating more sales while improving operational efficiency.Solution ShowcaseTuesday, June 26th9:45am - 10:30am - Morning Networking Break in the Solutions Showcase11:45am – 1:15pm - Networking Lunch an Dessert in the Solutions Showcase2:40pm – 3:25pm - Afternoon Break in the Solutions Showcase5:30pm – 7:00pm - Networking Reception in the Solutions ShowcaseWednesday, June 27th9:45am - 10:30am - Morning Networking Break in the Solutions Showcase12:20pm -1:20pm - Networking Lunch and Dessert in the Solutions ShowcaseWe hope to see you there! Webcast: Learn How Ancestry.com Delivers Exceptional Online Customer Experience with Oracle WebCenterDate: Thursday, June 28, 2012Time: 10:00 AM PDT/ 1:00 PM EDT Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history resource, providing an engaging customer experience to more than 1.7 million members. With a wealth of learning resources and a worldwide community of family history enthusiasts, Ancestry.com helps people discover their roots and tell their family stories. Key to Ancestry.com’s success has been the delivery of an online customer experience that converts site visitors into paying subscribers and keeps them coming back. Register now to learn how Ancestry.com delivers an exception customer experience using Oracle WebCenter Sites. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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