Search Results

Search found 2176 results on 88 pages for 'wide'.

Page 74/88 | < Previous Page | 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81  | Next Page >

• Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India

  - by Damodhar

  If you have never heard of Groupon recently, you probably are not working in the tech industry because it is all over the blogosphere. After all, growing from zero to US$1.35 billion valuation in 18 months is pretty AMAZING. Inspired by this, the following bunch of Groupon clone’s are already rising in India. Definitely this business model is emerging and changes the way online shopping happens in India. SnapDeal SnapDeal features a Best deals Coupons at an unbeatable price on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in our city. It provides vouchers and discounts in all the major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. KhojGuru Exclusive Discount coupons from hundreds of brands and retailers. These discounts can be easily downloaded as an SMS on to the mobile phone or their print out can be taken. MyDala A platform which gets us great deals in our city.Leveraging the “power of group buying”. Group buying happens when like minded people come together to get deals that we can never get on our own as individuals. SoSasta Great place which would not only tell us about the hidden treasures of our city — but also made them affordable to us at the end of the month. DealsAndYou Deals and You is a group buying portal that features a daily deal on the best stuff in some of India’s leading cities. AajKaCatch Its concept is to provide you the most unique, useful and qualitative product at a very low price. So you can now shop without the hassles of clustered products. BindassBargain Bindaas Bargain offers a new deal every day! Great stuff ranging from cool gadgets, home theatres, luxury watches, smash games. MasthiDeals It get you a great deal on a great stuff to do, eat, buy or see in your city. They have a team of about 25 wonderful people working in Chennai office working side by side with folks in MasthiDeal’s other cities. Koovs Founded by a team of IIT alumni who have brought in their expertise from the internet industry. Koovs is a Bangalore based start up and one point solution for all your desires. Taggle It brings you a variety of offers from some of the most respected brands in the country.This website uses collective buying to create a win-win for local businesses and their customers. BuzzInTown Buzzintown.com is a portal owned by Wortal Inc. There are a US headquartered company, with a presence pan-India through their India subsidiary, managed by a vastly experienced set of global leaders from the media, entertainment and technology industries. BuyThePrice It lines up the best win – win deals for both consumers and vendors and also ensures that each of the orders are dispatched in the shortest time possible. 24HoursLoot 24hoursLoot is an online store for selling a new t-shirt (sometime other products) everyday at deep discounted price in limited quantity/stock. DealMagic Customers get exposure to the best their city has to offer, at unbeatable prices (50-90% off).  We never feature more than one business on our website on any given day, so we have to be very very selective on who gets featured. Dealivore ICUMI Technologies Pvt Ltd is the company operating the Dealivore service. Founded in December 2009, ICUMI is privately owned and funded. LootMore An online store that exclusively focuses on selling cool quality stuff at cheap prices. Here you’ll always find the latest and greatest brands at prices you can afford. Foodome The deals features the best coupons at an unbeatable price on restaurants, fine dining on where to spend your birthday party.They provide coupon only in Chennai as of now. Top Online Shopping Sites- Nation Wide ebay.in eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. FutureBazzar Future Group, led by its founder and Group CEO, Mr. Kishore Biyani, is one of India’s leading business houses with multiple businesses spanning across the consumption space. TradeUs Launched in July 2009 and in a short span of time it has turned into one of India’s foremost shopping portals setting the Indian e-commerce abode aflame. BigShoeBazzar (BSB) is the largest online authorized shoe store in South Asia. Croma Promoted by Infiniti Retail Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons.One of the world’s leading retailers, ensuring that you buy nothing but the best. This article titled,Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

  Read the article

• Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources.  Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites.  Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article).  You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET.  A very useful link to bookmark.  Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3.  This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter.  You can watch all of the talks online.  More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight).  Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework.  Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

  Read the article

• Associating File Types with AutoVue Desktop Deployment

  - by [email protected]

  Windows users take for granted that when they double click on a document or design, that it will open up in its application automatically. One of the questions I'm commonly asked is "How can I get the same behavior with AutoVue Desktop Deployment?". It's pretty easy, but there are a few tricks to doing it. Step 1: Download new jvue_direct.bat and icon The first thing you'll need to do is download a slightly modified version of jvue_direct.bat. You can find it here (Document 1075784.1) on Oracle's Support Portal. You also want to download the AV.ico file. This is the icon that will be used for all file types associated with AutoVue. Place both of these files in your <AutoVueInstallDirectory>\bin directory. Step 2: Associate File Types With AutoVue There are two ways to do this. You can do this through the Windows user interface, or you can set up a batch file to do this. Associating File Types Through Windows The way most people associate file types to an application is using the Windows user interface. You've probably tried to open a file type that Windows doesn't recognize and seen this window pop up: Although you can use this dialog to associate that file type with AutoVue, I don't recommend it. I much prefer using a batch file to associate file types with AutoVue. Associating File Types Using A Batch File There are a few good reasons to associate file types using a batch file instead of using the pop-up dialog method: If you have several file types to associate with AutoVue, it's much easier to use a batch file to do them all at once. Doing it through the Windows user interface requires having files of each type available. Using a batch file doesn't require having the files you're associating. Associating file types through the dialog may work well for one person, but what if you're an administrator doing an enterprise wide deployment of AutoVue Desktop Deployment for several hundred users? You don't want to do this manually for each user. You can have one simple batch file that's run on each user's PC to set up all the file types. You can easily associate an icon with the file types you're opening with AutoVue. To use the batch file method follow these steps: Create a file called filetype.bat using a text editor and copy and paste the following into it: @assoc .dwg=AVFile @assoc .jpg=AVFile @assoc .doc=AVFile @ftype AVFile="%~dp0jvue_direct.bat" "%%1" @reg add HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AVFile\DefaultIcon /v "" /f /d "%~dp0AV.ico" Change the lines starting with @assoc. Each of these lines associates a file extension with AutoVue. You can have as many @assoc lines as you want. Save this file in your <AutoVueInstallDirectory>\bin directory. Double click this file, or run it from a command prompt. Restart Windows to get the icons to show up. How Does This Work? The first three lines are creating a file type called AVFile. We are associating the extensions .dwg, .jpg, and .doc with this file type. You will want to change these lines when creating your own batch file. For example, to associate Microstation designs, which have extension .dgn, you should delete the @assoc lines above and add the line: @assoc .dgn=AVfile The line beginning with @ftype tells Windows that all AVFile type files should be opened using AutoVue Desktop Deployment. The final line associates the AutoVue icon with these file types. You may need to restart Windows to see the new icons. Warning: One Size Doesn't Fit All When deciding which file types should be associated with AutoVue, remember that there are different types of users using it. Your engineers may be pretty surprised to find that after installing AutoVue, double clicking their .dwg file opens up AutoVue instead of AutoCAD. If you have more than one type of AutoVue user, make sure you've considered what file types each user group will and will not want to be associated with AutoVue. If necessary, create a separate file association batch file for each user type. So that's it. In two simple steps you can double click your favorite designs and have them open automatically in AutoVue Desktop Deployment. I'd love to hear how are you using AutoVue Desktop Deployment. What other deployment tips would you be interested in learning about?

  Read the article

• New Product: Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 – Small, Smart, Connected

  - by terrencebarr

  The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming. And, with todays launch of the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product, Java is going to play an even greater role in it. Java in the Internet of Things By all accounts, intelligent embedded devices are penetrating the world around us – driving industrial processes, monitoring environmental conditions, providing better health care, analyzing and processing data, and much more. And these devices are becoming increasingly connected, adding another dimension of utility. Welcome to the Internet of Things. As I blogged yesterday, this is a huge opportunity for the Java technology and ecosystem. To enable and utilize these billions of devices effectively you need a programming model, tools, and protocols which provide a feature-rich, consistent, scalable, manageable, and interoperable platform.  Java technology is ideally suited to address these technical and business problems, enabling you eliminate many of the typical challenges in designing embedded solutions. By using Java you can focus on building smarter, more valuable embedded solutions faster. To wit, Java technology is already powering around 10 billion devices worldwide. Delivering on this vision and accelerating the growth of embedded Java solutions, Oracle is today announcing a brand-new product: Oracle Java Micro Edition (ME) Embedded 3.2, accompanied by an update release of the Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) to version 3.2. What is Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is a complete Java runtime client, optimized for ARM architecture connected microcontrollers and other resource-constrained systems. The product provides dedicated embedded functionality and is targeted for low-power, limited memory devices requiring support for a range of network services and I/O interfaces.  What features and APIs are provided by Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is a Java ME runtime based on CLDC 1.1 (JSR-139) and IMP-NG (JSR-228). The runtime and virtual machine (VM) are highly optimized for embedded use. Also included in the product are the following optional JSRs and Oracle APIs: File I/O API’s (JSR-75)  Wireless Messaging API’s (JSR-120) Web Services (JSR-172) Security and Trust Services subset (JSR-177) Location API’s (JSR-179) XML API’s (JSR-280)  Device Access API Application Management System (AMS) API AccessPoint API Logging API Additional embedded features are: Remote application management system Support for continuous 24×7 operation Application monitoring, auto-start, and system recovery Application access to peripheral interfaces such as GPIO, I2C, SPIO, memory mapped I/O Application level logging framework, including option for remote logging Headless on-device debugging – source level Java application debugging over IP Connection Remote configuration of the Java VM What type of platforms are targeted by Oracle Java ME 3.2 Embedded? The product is designed for embedded, always-on, resource-constrained, headless (no graphics/no UI), connected (wired or wireless) devices with a variety of peripheral I/O.  The high-level system requirements are as follows: System based on ARM architecture SOCs Memory footprint (approximate) from 130 KB RAM/350KB ROM (for a minimal, customized configuration) to 700 KB RAM/1500 KB ROM (for the full, standard configuration)  Very simple embedded kernel, or a more capable embedded OS/RTOS At least one type of network connection (wired or wireless) The initial release of the product is delivered as a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).  What types of applications can I develop with Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? The Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product is a full-featured embedded Java runtime supporting applications based on the IMP-NG application model, which is derived from the well-known MIDP 2 application model. The runtime supports execution of multiple concurrent applications, remote application management, versatile connectivity, and a rich set of APIs and features relevant for embedded use cases, including the ability to interact with peripheral I/O directly from Java applications. This rich feature set, coupled with familiar and best-in class software development tools, allows developers to quickly build and deploy sophisticated embedded solutions for a wide range of use cases. Target markets well supported by Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 include wireless modules for M2M, industrial and building control, smart grid infrastructure, home automation, and environmental sensors and tracking. What tools are available for embedded application development for Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2? Along with the release of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2, Oracle is also making available an updated version of the Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK), together with plug-ins for the NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs, to deliver a complete development environment for embedded application development.  OK – sounds great! Where can I find out more? And how do I get started? There is a complete set of information, data sheet, API documentation, “Getting Started Guide”, FAQ, and download links available: For an overview of Oracle Embeddable Java, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 press release, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 data sheet, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 landing page, see here. For the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 documentation page, including a “Getting Started Guide” and FAQ, see here. For the Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 landing and download page, see here. Finally, to ask more questions, please see the OTN “Java ME Embedded” forum To get started, grab the “Getting Started Guide” and download the Java ME SDK 3.2, which includes the Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 device emulation.  Can I learn more about Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 at JavaOne and/or Java Embedded @ JavaOne? Glad you asked Both conferences, JavaOne and Java Embedded @ JavaOne, will feature a host of content and information around the new Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 product, from technical and business sessions, to hands-on tutorials, and demos. Stay tuned, I will post details shortly. Cheers, – Terrence Filed under: Mobile & Embedded Tagged: "Oracle Java ME Embedded", Connected, embedded, Embedded Java, Java Embedded @ JavaOne, JavaOne, Smart

  Read the article

• Change the User Interface Language in Ubuntu

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to use your Ubuntu computer in another language?  Here’s how you can easily change your interface language in Ubuntu. Ubuntu’s default install only includes a couple languages, but it makes it easy to find and add a new interface language to your computer.  To get started, open the System menu, select Administration, and then click Language Support. Ubuntu may ask if you want to update or add components to your current default language when you first open the dialog.  Click Install to go ahead and install the additional components, or you can click Remind Me Later to wait as these will be installed automatically when you add a new language. Now we’re ready to find and add an interface language to Ubuntu.  Click Install / Remove Languages to add the language you want. Find the language you want in the list, and click the check box to install it.  Ubuntu will show you all the components it will install for the language; this often includes spellchecking files for OpenOffice as well.  Once you’ve made your selection, click Apply Changes to install your new language.  Make sure you’re connected to the internet, as Ubuntu will have to download the additional components you’ve selected. Enter your system password when prompted, and then Ubuntu will download the needed languages files and install them.   Back in the main Language & Text dialog, we’re now ready to set our new language as default.  Find your new language in the list, and then click and drag it to the top of the list. Notice that Thai is the first language listed, and English is the second.  This will make Thai the default language for menus and windows in this account.  The tooltip reminds us that this setting does not effect system settings like currency or date formats. To change these, select the Text Tab and pick your new language from the drop-down menu.  You can preview the changes in the bottom Example box. The changes we just made will only affect this user account; the login screen and startup will not be affected.  If you wish to change the language in the startup and login screens also, click Apply System-Wide in both dialogs.  Other user accounts will still retain their original language settings; if you wish to change them, you must do it from those accounts. Once you have your new language settings all set, you’ll need to log out of your account and log back in to see your new interface language.  When you re-login, Ubuntu may ask you if you want to update your user folders’ names to your new language.  For example, here Ubuntu is asking if we want to change our folders to their Thai equivalents.  If you wish to do so, click Update or its equivalents in your language. Now your interface will be almost completely translated into your new language.  As you can see here, applications with generic names are translated to Thai but ones with specific names like Shutter keep their original name. Even the help dialogs are translated, which makes it easy for users around to world to get started with Ubuntu.  Once again, you may notice some things that are still in English, but almost everything is translated. Adding a new interface language doesn’t add the new language to your keyboard, so you’ll still need to set that up.  Check out our article on adding languages to your keyboard to get this setup. If you wish to revert to your original language or switch to another new language, simply repeat the above steps, this time dragging your original or new language to the top instead of the one you chose previously. Conclusion Ubuntu has a large number of supported interface languages to make it user-friendly to people around the globe.  And since you can set the language for each user account, it’s easy for multi-lingual individuals to share the same computer. Or, if you’re using Windows, check out our article on how you can Change the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7, too! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyChange the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7Create a Samba User on UbuntuInstall Samba Server on UbuntuSee Which Groups Your Linux User Belongs To 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

  Read the article

• Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  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: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;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone.  The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

  Read the article

• Commercial Drupal Modules & Themes

  - by Ravish

  A discussion at Drupal.org forums prompted me to give my input about commercial ecosystem around Open Source Content Management Systems. WordPress and Joomla have been growing rapidly since past few years. But, growth rate of Drupal seems to be almost flat. Despite being the most powerful CMS around, Drupal is still not being adopted by masses. Many people will argue that Drupal is not targeted towards masses, but developers. I agree, Drupal is more of a development platform than a consumer CMS. Drupal is ‘many things to many people’, and I can build almost any type of website with it. Drupal is being used for building blogs, corporate websites, Intranet portals, social networking and even a project management system. Looking at the wide array of Drupal implementations, it deserves to be the most widely adopted CMS. I believe there are few challenges that Drupal community needs to overcome. To understand these challenges, I surveyed some webmasters who use Joomla or WordPress but not Drupal. I asked them why they don’t want to use Drupal, following are the responses I got from them: Drupal is too complicated, takes time to learn. Drupal is great, but its admin panel is overwhelming. I couldn’t find any nice themes for Drupal. There is no WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. Most Drupal modules do not work out of the box. There aren’t enough modules like Ubercart which provides any out of the box functionality. I tried modules like CCK, Views and Panels. After wasting several hours struggling with them, I decided to give up on Drupal. I don’t use Drupal because of pushbutton and Garland theme. I had hard time trying to customize Garland and it messed up the whole layout. There are no premium modules and themes for Drupal. Joomla has tons of awesome themes and modules. I don’t want a million hacks like CCK, Views, Tokens, Pathauto, ImageCache and CTools just to run a simple website. Most of the complaints from users are related to the learning and development curve involved with Drupal, and the lack of ecosystem. While most of the problems will be gone in Drupal 7, ecosystem is something that needs to be built by the Drupal community. Drupal distributions are a great step forward. There are few awesome Drupal distributions available like Open Publish, Open Atrium and Drupal Commons. I predict, there will be a wave of many powerful Drupal distributions after Drupal 7 release. Many of them will be user-friendly and commercial supported. Following is my post at Drupal.org forums: Quote from: http://drupal.org/node/863776#comment-3313836 Brian Gardner (StudioPress) and Woo Themes launched premium WordPress themes in 2007, the developer community did not accept it at first. Moreover, they were not even GPL licensed. There was an outcry in WordPress community against them. Following that, most premium theme providers switched to GPL licensing. Despite controversies, users voted for premium theme and plugins by buying them. Inspired by their success, hundreds of other developers started to sell premium themes and plugins. It is now the acceptable and in fact most popular business model among WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg once told me, they would not support premium themes. If he supported, developers would no more give out free GPL themes & plugins. He pointed me towards Joomla, there were hardly any nice free themes & modules available. Now two years forward, premium products are not just accepted but embraced by the WordPress community – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ The quality and number of themes & modules has increased, even the free ones. This also helped to boost the adoption and ecosystem of WordPress. Today, state of Drupal is like WordPress was in 2007. There are hardly any out of the box solutions available for Drupal. Ubercart, Open Publish and Open Atrium are the only ones I can think of. Many of the popular Drupal modules are patches and hole-fillers. Thankfully, these hole-filler modules are going to be in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 7 and distributions will spawn a new array of solutions built upon Drupal. Soon, we will have more like Ubercarts and Open Atriums. If commercial solutions can help fuel this ecosystem and growth, Drupal community will accept them eventually. This debate will not stop your customers from buying your product. If your product is awesome, they will vote for you by buying your product.

  Read the article

• Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

  - by david.talamelli

  A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

  Read the article

• Multitask Like a Pro with AquaSnap

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of shuffling back and forth between windows?  Here’s a handy app that can help you keep all of your windows organized and accessible. AquaSnap is a great free utility that helps you use multiple windows at the same time easily and efficiently.  One of Windows 7’s greatest new features is Aero Snap, which lets you easily view windows side by side by simply dragging windows to side of your screen.  After using Windows 7 for the past year, Aero Snap is one of the features we really miss when using older versions of Windows. With AquaSnap, you now have all of the features of Aero Snap and more in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and of course Windows 7.  Not only does it give you Aero Snap features, but AquaSnap also gives you more control over your windows to make you more productive. Getting Started AquaSnap is a a free download for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7.  Download the small installer (link below) and install it with the default settings. AquaSnap automatically runs as soon as it is installed, and you will notice a new icon in your system tray. Now you can go ahead and put it to use.  Drag a window to any edge or corner of your desktop, and you will see an icon showing what part of the screen the window will cover. Dragging it to the side of the screen expanded the window to fill the right half of the screen, just like the default Aero Snap in Windows 7.  You can drag the window away to restore it to its former size. AquaSnap works on any corner of the screen too, so you can have 4 windows side-by-side.  We already have 3 windows snapped to the corners, and notice that we’re dragging a fourth window to the bottom right corner. You can also snap windows to the bottom and top of the screen.  Here we have Word snapped to the bottom half of the screen, and we’re dragging Chrome to the top. You can even snap internal windows in Multiple Document Interface (MDI) programs such as Excel.  Here we are snapping a workbook in Excel to the left to view 2 workbooks side-by-side.   Additionally, AquaSnap lets you keep any window always on top.  Simply shake any window, and it will turn semi-transparent and stay on top of all other windows.  Notice the transparent calculator here on top of Excel. All of AquaSnap’s features work great in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista too.  Here we are snapping IE6 to the left of the screen in XP. Here are 3 windows snapped to the sides in XP.  You can mix the snap modes, and have, for instance, two windows on the right side and one window on the left.  This is a great way to maximize productivity if you need more space in one of the windows. Even AquaShake works to keep a window transparent and on top in XP. Settings AquaSnap has a detailed settings dialog where you can tweak it to work exactly like you want.  Simply right-click on its icon in the taskbar, and select Settings. From the first screen, you can choose if you want AquaSnap to start with Windows, and if you want it to show an icon in the system tray.  If you turn off the system tray icon, you can access the AquaSnap settings from Start > All Programs > AquaSnap > Configuration (or simply search for Configuration in Vista or Windows 7). The second tab in settings lets you choose what you want each snapping region to do.  You can also choose two other presets, including AeroSnap (which works just like the default Aero Snap in Windows 7) and AquaSnap simple (which only snaps at the edges of the screen, not the corners). The third tab lets you increase or decrease the opacity of pinned windows when using AquaShake, and also lets you increase or decrease the shaking sensitivity.  Additionally, if you prefer the standard AeroShake functionality, which minimizes all other open windows when you shake a window, you can choose that too. The fourth tab lets you activate an optional feature, AquaGlass.  If you activate this, it will make windows turn transparent when you drag them across the screen.   Finally, the last tab lets you change the color and opacity of the preview rectangle, or simply turn it off. Or, if you want to temporarily turn AquaSnap off, simply right-click on its icon and select Off.  In Windows 7, turning off AquaSnap will restore your standard Windows Aero Snap functionality, and in other version of Windows it will stop letting you snap windows at all.  You can then repeat the steps and select On when you want to use AquaSnap again. Conclusion AquaSnap is a handy tool to make you more productive at your computer.  With a wide variety of useful features, there’s something here for everyone.  Download AquaSnap Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Get Virtual Desktops on Windows XP 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) If it were only this easy Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook

  Read the article

• Rob Blackwell on interoperability and Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, but architects and developers should look at this again. The Interoperability Bridges site (http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ ) shows a wide range of projects that allow interoperability from Java, Ruby and PHP for example. The Windows Azure platform has been architected with interoperable APIs in mind. It's straightforward to access the various storage facilities from just about any language or platform. Azure compute is capable of running more than just C# applications! Why is interoperability important to you? My company provides consultancy and bespoke development services. We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but we live in the real world where companies have a mix of technologies provided by a variety of vendors. When developing an enterprise software solution, you rarely have a completely blank canvas. We often see integration scenarios where we need to exchange data with legacy systems. It's not unusual to see modern Silverlight applications being built on top of Java or Mainframe based back ends. Could you give us some examples of where interoperability has been important for your projects? We developed an innovative Sea Safety system for the RNLI Lifeboats here in the UK. Commercial Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions and we helped developed the MOB Guardian System which uses satellite technology and man overboard devices to raise the alarm when a fisherman gets into trouble. The solution is implemented in .NET running on Windows, but without interoperable standards, it would have been impossible to communicate with the satellite gateway technology. For more information, please see the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005892 More recently, we were asked to build a web site to accompany the QCon 2010 conference in London to help demonstrate and promote interoperability. We built the site using Java and Restlet and hosted it in Windows Azure Compute. The site accepts feedback from visitors and all the data is stored in Windows Azure Storage. We also ported the application to Ruby on Rails for demonstration purposes. Visitors to the stand were surprised that this was even possible. Why should Java developers be interested in Windows Azure? Windows Azure Storage consists of Blobs, Queues and Tables. The storage is scalable, durable, secure and cost-effective. Using the WindowsAzure4j library, it's easy to use, and takes just a few lines of code. If you are writing an application with large data storage requirements, or you want an offsite backup, it makes a lot of sense. Running Java applications in Azure Compute is straightforward with tools like the Tomcat Solution Accelerator (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat )and AzureRunMe (http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/ ). The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus can also be used to connect heterogeneous systems running on different networks and in different data centres. How can The Service Bus be considered an interoperability solution? I think that the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. Think of it as “a globally scalable application plumbing kit in the sky”. If you have used Enterprise Service Buses before, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Applications can connect to the service bus to securely exchange data – these can be point to point or multicast links. With the AppFabric Service Bus, the applications can exist anywhere that has access to the Internet and the connections can traverse firewalls. This makes it easy to extend or scale your application or reach out to other networks and technologies. For example, let’s say you have a SQL Server database running on premises and you want to expose the data to a Java application running in the cloud. You could set up a point to point Service Bus connection and use JDBC. Traditionally this would have been difficult or impossible without punching holes in firewalls and compromising security. Rob Blackwell is R&D Director at Active Web Solutions, www.aws.net , a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in leading edge software solutions. He is an occasional writer and conference speaker and blogs at www.robblackwell.org.uk Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

  Read the article

• Add Hotmail & Live Email Accounts to Outlook 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Microsoft has recently been promoting upcoming updates to their Hotmail service, promising to make it an even better webmail service. But Microsoft’s revamped Outlook 2010 is already here. Here’s how to integrate Hotmail with Outlook. Outlook 2010 works with a wide variety of email accounts, including POP3, IMAP, and Exchange accounts.  The only problem with POP3 and IMAP accounts is that they only sync email, but not your calendar and contacts like Exchange does.  Hotmail, however, lets you sync your email, contacts, and calendar with Outlook with the Hotmail Connector.  This lets you keep all of your PIM data accessible from everywhere.  Let’s look at how we can set this up on our account. Getting Started The easiest way to add Hotmail to Outlook is to first install the Outlook Hotmail Connector (link below).  Make sure Outlook is closed first, and then proceed with the installation as usual. If you enter your Hotmail account into the New Account setup in Outlook before installing the Hotmail Connector, Outlook will prompt you to download the Hotmail Connector.  However, you’ll have to exit Outlook before you can install the Connector, and then will have to re-enter your information when you restart Outlook, so it’s easier to just install it first. Add Your Hotmail Account to Outlook Now you’re ready to add your Hotmail account to Outlook.  If this is the first time you’ve run Outlook 2010, you’ll be greeted with the following screen.  Click Next to proceed with setup. Then select Yes and click Next again. If you’ve already got an email account setup in Outlook, you can add a new account by clicking File and then selecting Add account. Now, enter your Hotmail account information, and click Next. Outlook will search for your account settings and automatically setup your account with the Hotmail connector we previously installed. If you entered your password incorrectly previously, you may see the following popup.  Re-enter your password and click OK, and Outlook will re-verify your settings. Once everything’s finished and setup, you’ll see the following completion screen.  Click Finish to complete the setup and check out your Hotmail in Outlook. Welcome to your Hotmail account in Outlook 2010.  You’ll notice a small notification at the bottom of the window notifying you that you’re connected to Windows Live Hotmail.  Now your email will synchronize with your Hotmail account, and your Outlook calendar and contacts will be synced with your Live calendar and contacts, respectively.  This is the closest you can get to full Exchange without an Exchange account, and in our experience it works great.  In fact, Hotmail Sync seems to work faster than IMAP sync for us. Setup Hotmail With POP3 Access If you need to access your Hotmail email account but don’t want to install the Outlook Connector, then you can add it with POP3 sync.  We recommend going with the Outlook Connector for the best experience, but if you can’t install it (eg. you’re not allowed to install applications on your work PC) then this is a good alternative. To do this, follow our tutorial on setting up a Gmail POP3 account in Outlook. Although the article concentrates on Gmail, the settings are essentially the same. The only thing you’ll want to change is the Incoming and Outgoing mail server. Incoming mail server – pop3.live.com Outgoing mail server – smtp.live.com User name – your Hotmail or Live email address Incoming Server (POP3) – 995 Outgoing Server (SMTP) – 587 Also, check This server requires and encrypted connection Just as in the Gmail example, select TLS for the type of encrypted connection.  Then, on the bottom, make sure to uncheck the box to Remove messages from the server after a number of days.  This way your messages will still be accessible from your Hotmail account online. Conclusion Even though Hotmail is generally not as popular as Gmail, it works great with Outlook integration.  If you’re a heavy user of Windows Live services, or want to try them out, Outlook Connector is the easiest way to keep your desktop activity synced with the cloud.  If you’re just one of the millions of Hotmail users who want to access their old Hotmail account alongside their other accounts, this method works great for you too. If you’re using Outlook 2003 or 2007, check out our article on using Hotmail from Microsoft Outlook. Links Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit Download Outlook Hotmail Connector 64-bit – note, only for users of Office 2010 x64 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Hotmail from Microsoft OutlookHow to add any POP3 Email Account to HotmailHow to Send and Receive Hotmail from Your Gmail AccountAdd Your Gmail To Windows Live MailManage Your Windows Live Account in Google Chrome 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes

  Read the article

• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Change Comes from Within

  - by John K. Hines

  I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

  Read the article

• Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

  Read the article

• SQLAuthority News – Technology and Online Learning – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  This is the fourth post in my series about Personal Technology Tips and Tricks, and I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.  But at first I was conflicted.   Is online learning really a personal tip?  Is it really a trick that no one knows?  However, I have decided to stick with my original idea because online learning is everywhere.  It’s a trick that we can’t – and shouldn’t – overlook.  Here are ten of my ideas about how we should be taking advantage of online learning. 1) Get ahead in the work place.  We all know that a good way to become better at your job, and to become more competitive for promotions and raises.  Many people overlook online learning as a way to get job training, though, thinking it is a path for people still seeking their high school or college diplomas.  But take a look at what companies like Pluralsight offer, and you might be pleasantly surprised. 2) Flexibility.  Some of us remember the heady days of college with nostalgia, others remember it with loathing.  A lot of bad memories come from remembering the strict scheduling and deadlines of college.  But with online learning, the classes fit into your free time – you don’t have to schedule your life around classes.  Even better, there are usually no homework or test deadlines, only one final deadline where all work must be completed.  This allows students to work at their own pace – my next point. 3) Learn at your own pace.  One thing traditional classes suffer from is that they are highly structured.  If you work more quickly than the rest of the class, or especially if you work more slowly, traditional classes do not work for you.  Online courses let you move as quickly or as slowly as you find necessary. 4) Fill gaps in your knowledge.  I’m sure I am not the only one who has thought to myself “I would love to take a course on X, Y, or Z.”  The problem is that it can be very hard to find the perfect class that teaches exactly what you’re interested in, at a time and a price that’s right.  But online courses are far easier to tailor exactly to your tastes. 5) Fits into your schedule.  Even harder to find than a class you’re interested in is one that fits into your schedule.  If you hold down a job – even a part time job – you know it’s next to impossible to find class times that work for you.  Online classes can be taken anytime, anywhere.  On your lunch break, in your car, or in your pajamas at the end of the day. 6) Student centered.  Online learning has to stay competitive.  There are hundreds, even thousands of options for students, and every provider has to find a way to lure in students and provide them with a good education.  The best kind of online classes know that they need to provide great classes, flexible scheduling, and high quality to attract students – and the student benefit from this kind of attention. 7) You can save money.  The average cost for a college diploma in the US is over $20,000.  I don’t know about you, but that is not the kind of money I just have lying around for a rainy day.  Sometimes I think I’d love to go back to school, but not for that price tag.  Online courses are much, much more affordable.  And even better, you can pick and choose what courses you’d like to take, and avoid all the “electives” in college. 8) Get access to the best minds in the business.  One of the perks of being the best in your field is that you are one person who knows the most about something.  If students are lucky, you will choose to share that knowledge with them on a college campus.  For the hundreds of other students who don’t live in your area and don’t attend your school, they are out of luck.  But luckily for them, more and more online courses is attracting the best minds in the business, and if you enroll online, you can take advantage of these minds, too. 9) Save your time.  Getting a four year degree is a great decision, and I encourage everyone to pursue their Bachelor’s – and beyond.  But if you have already tried to go to school, or already have a degree but are thinking of switching fields, four years of your life is a long time to go back and redo things.  Getting your online degree will save you time by allowing you to work at your own pace, set your own schedule, and take only the classes you’re interested in. 10) Variety of degrees and programs.  If you’re not sure what you’re interested in, or if you only need a few classes here and there to finish a program, online classes are perfect for you.  You can pick and choose what you’d like, and sample a wide variety without spending too much money. I hope I’ve outlined for everyone just a few ways that they could benefit from online learning.  If you’re still unconvinced, just check out a few of my other articles that expand more on these topics. Here are the blog posts relevent to developer trainings: 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 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 Tagged: Developer Training

  Read the article

• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

  - by me

  @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

  Read the article

• NET Math Libraries

  - by JoshReuben

  NET Mathematical Libraries   .NET Builder for Matlab The MathWorks Inc. - http://www.mathworks.com/products/netbuilder/ MATLAB Builder NE generates MATLAB based .NET and COM components royalty-free deployment creates the components by encrypting MATLAB functions and generating either a .NET or COM wrapper around them. .NET/Link for Mathematica www.wolfram.com a product that 2-way integrates Mathematica and Microsoft's .NET platform call .NET from Mathematica - use arbitrary .NET types directly from the Mathematica language. use and control the Mathematica kernel from a .NET program. turns Mathematica into a scripting shell to leverage the computational services of Mathematica. write custom front ends for Mathematica or use Mathematica as a computational engine for another program comes with full source code. Leverages MathLink - a Wolfram Research's protocol for sending data and commands back and forth between Mathematica and other programs. .NET/Link abstracts the low-level details of the MathLink C API. Extreme Optimization http://www.extremeoptimization.com/ a collection of general-purpose mathematical and statistical classes built for the.NET framework. It combines a math library, a vector and matrix library, and a statistics library in one package. download the trial of version 4.0 to try it out. Multi-core ready - Full support for Task Parallel Library features including cancellation. Broad base of algorithms covering a wide range of numerical techniques, including: linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK routines), numerical analysis (integration and differentiation), equation solvers. Mathematics leverages parallelism using .NET 4.0's Task Parallel Library. Basic math: Complex numbers, 'special functions' like Gamma and Bessel functions, numerical differentiation. Solving equations: Solve equations in one variable, or solve systems of linear or nonlinear equations. Curve fitting: Linear and nonlinear curve fitting, cubic splines, polynomials, orthogonal polynomials. Optimization: find the minimum or maximum of a function in one or more variables, linear programming and mixed integer programming. Numerical integration: Compute integrals over finite or infinite intervals, over 2D and higher dimensional regions. Integrate systems of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). Fast Fourier Transforms: 1D and 2D FFT's using managed or fast native code (32 and 64 bit) BigInteger, BigRational, and BigFloat: Perform operations with arbitrary precision. Vector and Matrix Library Real and complex vectors and matrices. Single and double precision for elements. Structured matrix types: including triangular, symmetrical and band matrices. Sparse matrices. Matrix factorizations: LU decomposition, QR decomposition, singular value decomposition, Cholesky decomposition, eigenvalue decomposition. Portability and performance: Calculations can be done in 100% managed code, or in hand-optimized processor-specific native code (32 and 64 bit). Statistics Data manipulation: Sort and filter data, process missing values, remove outliers, etc. Supports .NET data binding. Statistical Models: Simple, multiple, nonlinear, logistic, Poisson regression. Generalized Linear Models. One and two-way ANOVA. Hypothesis Tests: 12 14 hypothesis tests, including the z-test, t-test, F-test, runs test, and more advanced tests, such as the Anderson-Darling test for normality, one and two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and Levene's test for homogeneity of variances. Multivariate Statistics: K-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), multivariate probability distributions. Statistical Distributions: 25 29 continuous and discrete statistical distributions, including uniform, Poisson, normal, lognormal, Weibull and Gumbel (extreme value) distributions. Random numbers: Random variates from any distribution, 4 high-quality random number generators, low discrepancy sequences, shufflers. New in version 4.0 (November, 2010) Support for .NET Framework Version 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 TPL Parallellized – multicore ready sparse linear program solver - can solve problems with more than 1 million variables. Mixed integer linear programming using a branch and bound algorithm. special functions: hypergeometric, Riemann zeta, elliptic integrals, Frensel functions, Dawson's integral. Full set of window functions for FFT's. Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $999  $399  Team License (3 developers) $1999  $799  Department License (8 developers) $3999  $1599  Site License (Unlimited developers in one physical location) $7999  $3199    NMath http://www.centerspace.net .NET math and statistics libraries matrix and vector classes random number generators Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) numerical integration linear programming linear regression curve and surface fitting optimization hypothesis tests analysis of variance (ANOVA) probability distributions principal component analysis cluster analysis built on the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL), which contains highly-optimized, extensively-threaded versions of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage). Product  Price Update subscription Single Developer License $1295 $388 Team License (5 developers) $5180 $1554   DotNumerics http://www.dotnumerics.com/NumericalLibraries/Default.aspx free DotNumerics is a website dedicated to numerical computing for .NET that includes a C# Numerical Library for .NET containing algorithms for Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Optimization problems. The Linear Algebra library includes CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack, ports from Fortran to C# of LAPACK, BLAS and EISPACK, respectively. Linear Algebra (CSLapack, CSBlas and CSEispack). Systems of linear equations, eigenvalue problems, least-squares solutions of linear systems and singular value problems. Differential Equations. Initial-value problem for nonstiff and stiff ordinary differential equations ODEs (explicit Runge-Kutta, implicit Runge-Kutta, Gear's BDF and Adams-Moulton). Optimization. Unconstrained and bounded constrained optimization of multivariate functions (L-BFGS-B, Truncated Newton and Simplex methods).   Math.NET Numerics http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/ free an open source numerical library - includes special functions, linear algebra, probability models, random numbers, interpolation, integral transforms. A merger of dnAnalytics with Math.NET Iridium in addition to a purely managed implementation will also support native hardware optimization. constants & special functions complex type support real and complex, dense and sparse linear algebra (with LU, QR, eigenvalues, ... decompositions) non-uniform probability distributions, multivariate distributions, sample generation alternative uniform random number generators descriptive statistics, including order statistics various interpolation methods, including barycentric approaches and splines numerical function integration (quadrature) routines integral transforms, like fourier transform (FFT) with arbitrary lengths support, and hartley spectral-space aware sequence manipulation (signal processing) combinatorics, polynomials, quaternions, basic number theory. parallelized where appropriate, to leverage multi-core and multi-processor systems fully managed or (if available) using native libraries (Intel MKL, ACMS, CUDA, FFTW) provides a native facade for F# developers

  Read the article

• And the Winners of Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards in Data Integration are…

  - by Irem Radzik

  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-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;} At OpenWorld, we announced the winners of Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012. Raymond James and Morrison Supermarkets were selected for the data integration category for their innovative use of Oracle’s data integration products and the great results they have achieved. In this blog I would like to briefly introduce you to these award winning projects. Raymond James is a diversified financial services company, which provides financial planning, wealth management, investment banking, and asset management. They are using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to feed their operational data store (ODS), which supports application services across the enterprise. A major requirement for their project was low data latency, as key decisions are made based on the data in the ODS. They were able to fulfill this requirement due to the Oracle Data Integrator’s integrated solution with Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate captures changed data from different systems including Oracle Database, HP NonStop and Microsoft SQL Server into a single data store on SQL Server 2008. Oracle Data Integrator provides data transformations for the ODS. Leveraging ODI’s integration with GoldenGate, Raymond James now sees a 9 second median latency (from source commit to ODS target commit). The ODS solution delivers high quality, accurate data for consuming applications such as Raymond James’ next generation client and portfolio management systems as well as real-time operational reporting. It enables timely information for making better decisions. There are more benefits Raymond James achieved with this implementation of Oracle’s data integration solution. The software developers and architects of this solution, Tim Garrod and Ryan Fonnett, have told us during their presentation at OpenWorld that they also reduced application complexity significantly while improving developer productivity through trusted operational services. They were able to utilize CDC to generate alerts for business users, and for applications (for example for cache hydration mechanisms). One cool innovation example among many in this project is that using ODI's flexible architecture, Tim and Ryan could build 24/7 self-healing processes. And these processes have hardly failed. Integration processes fixes the errors itself. Pretty amazing; and a great solution for environments that need such reliability and availability. (You can see Tim and Ryan’s photo with the Innovation Award above.) The other winner of this year in the data integration category, Morrison Supermarkets, is the UK’s 4th largest grocery retailer. The company has been migrating all their legacy applications on to a new-world application set based on Oracle and consolidating all BI on to a single Oracle platform. The company recently implemented Oracle Exadata as the data warehouse engine and uses Oracle Business Intelligence EE. Their goal with deploying GoldenGate and ODI was to provide BI data to the enterprise in a way that it also supports operational decision making requirements from a wide range of Oracle based ERP applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail Suite. They use GoldenGate’s log-based change data capture capabilities and Oracle Data Integrator to populate the Oracle Retail Data Model. The electronic point of sale (EPOS) integration solution they built processes over 80 million transactions/day at busy periods in near real time (15 mins). It provides valuable insight to Retail and Commercial teams for both intra-day and historical trend analysis. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, the right data integration platform can transform the business. Here is another example: The point-of-sale integration enabled the grocery chain to optimize its stock management, leading to another award: Morrisons won the Grocer 33 award in 2012 - beating all other major UK supermarkets in product availability. Congratulations, Morrisons,on another award! Celebrating the innovation and the success of our customers with Oracle’s data integration products was definitely a highlight of Oracle OpenWorld for me. I look forward to hearing more from Raymond James, Morrisons, and the other customers that presented their data integration projects at OpenWorld, on how they are creating more value for their organizations.

  Read the article

• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

  Read the article

• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Martijn Verburg

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His “Diabolical Developer” session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people’s attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group “Adopt a JSR” and “Adopt OpenJDK” programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs’ “Adopt” Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study—Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? “I've seen a wide gamut of reasons,” said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. “With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends,” he remarked. “One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!”I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. “You need to have a ‘Why,’” he observed. “Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the ‘Why,’ which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. “I cannot wait for Lambdas,” he enthused. “Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling.”Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne.

  Read the article

• How to Convert a PFX Certificate into a JKS Certificate to configure it on WebLogic

  - by adejuanc

  To convert a pfx cert file to a jks file, please follow these instructions: 1. Set up the environment for the domain, by executing the setDomainEnv.sh script, typically located at $DOMAIN_HOME/bin. $ . ./setDomainEnv.sh 2. Use OpenSSL to check the pfx certificate's content. $ openssl pkcs12 -in <certificate.pfx> -out KEYSTORE.pem -nodesAt this point, a password for the pfx file will be requested. Expected output: $ openssl pkcs12 -in <certificate.pfx> -out KEYSTORE.pem -nodesEnter Import Password:MAC verified OK3. Open KEYSTORE.pem file, from step 2. This should look similar to this:You will find three certificates on it and the private key: Bag Attributes Microsoft Local Key set: <No Values> localKeyID: 01 00 00 00 friendlyName: le-36c42c6e-ec49-413c-891e-591f7e3dd306 Microsoft CSP Name: Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic ProviderKey Attributes X509v3 Key Usage: 10-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----MIIEpQIBAAKCAQEAtPwoO3eOwSyOapzZgcDnQOH27cOaaejHtNh921Pd+U4N+dlm...EDITING...R5rsB00Yk1/2W9UqD9Nn7cDuMdilS8g9CUqnnSlDkSG0AX67auKUAcI=-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----Bag Attributes localKeyID: 01 00 00 00 friendlyName: *.something.comsubject=/serialNumber=sj6QjpTjKcpQGZ9QqWO-pFvsakS1t8MV/C=US/ST=Missouri/L=CHESTERFIELD/O=Oracle_Corp, Inc./OU=Oracle/CN=*.something.comissuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CA-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----MIIErzCCA5egAwIBAgIDAIH6MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMEAxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVT...EDITING...wA5JxaU55teoWkuiAaYRQpuLepJfzw+qMk5i5FpMRbVMMfkcBusGtdW5OrAoYDL94rgR-----END CERTIFICATE-----Bag Attributes friendlyName: GeoTrust Global CAsubject=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CAissuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----MIIDVDCCAjygAwIBAgIDAjRWMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMEIxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVT...EDITING...5fEWCRE11azbJHFwLJhWC9kXtNHjUStedejV0NxPNO3CBWaAocvmMw==-----END CERTIFICATE-----Bag Attributes: <Empty Attributes>subject=/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CAissuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----MIID2TCCAsGgAwIBAgIDAjbQMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMEIxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVT...EDITING...TpnKXKBuervdo5AaRTPvvz7SBMS24CqFZUE+ENQ=-----END CERTIFICATE-----4. Identify and store contents from KEYSTORE.pem certificate, to proceed and create jks files:At this point, you will find three certificates on KEYSTORE.pem and the private key. 4.1 Private Key.To identify the private key, look for the following headings: -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----------END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----Both above mentioned tags will be surrounded the private key. Go ahead and save the content of it into a file called: my_key_pk.pem. This has to include the headings. Expected file: -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----MIIEpQIBAAKCAQEAtPwoO3eOwSyOapzZgcDnQOH27cOaaejHtNh921Pd+U4N+dlm...EDIT...Y4ZrW12PRa9/EOBGTG5teKAEada/K4yKReTyQQAGq6j5RjErmuuKkKgPGMSCjvMSR5rsB00Yk1/2W9UqD9Nn7cDuMdilS8g9CUqnnSlDkSG0AX67auKUAcI=-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----4.2 Root Certificate.To identify the Root Certificate, look for the following headings: subject=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA issuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA Subject and issuer must be the same. Go ahead and save the content of it into a file called: my_key_root.pem. Include all the content from BEGIN CERTIFICATE TO END CERTIFICATE, both included.4.3 Intermediate Certificate.To identify an Intermediate Certificate, look for the following heading: subject=/C=US/O=GeoTrust, Inc./CN=GeoTrust SSL CAissuer=/C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA Subject and issuer are different only on the CN. Go ahead and save the content of it into a file called: my_key_intermediate.pem. Include all the content from BEGIN CERTIFICATE TO END CERTIFICATE, both included. NOTE: This certificate is optional and there are some cases where it'll not be present. If this is the case, go ahead and skip this step. In any other case, this needs to be added to the identity keystore jks file. 4.4 Server Certificate. To identify a Server Certificate, look for the following heading: friendlyName: some.thing.comsubject=/serialNumber=sj6QjpTjKcpQGZ9QqWO-pFvsakS1t8MV/C=US/ST=Missouri/L=CHESTERFIELD/O=Oracle_Corp, Inc./OU=Oracle/CN=some.thing.com        A server certificate includes a heading called Friendly Name. Go ahead and save the content of it into a file called: my_key_crt.pem. Include all the content from BEGIN CERTIFICATE TO END CERTIFICATE, both included.5. Create a Trust Keystore and import the Root certificate into it. $ keytool -import -trustcacerts -file my_key_root.pem -alias my_key_root -keystore my_key_trust.jks -storepass <store_pass> -keypass <key_pass>Expected Output: Certificate already exists in system-wide CA keystore under alias <geotrustglobalca> Do you still want to add it to your own keystore? [no]: yes Certificate was added to keystore6. Generate an Identity Keystore and import Server into it. $java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore my_key_identity.jks -storepass <store_pass> -storetype JKS -keypass <key_pass> -alias server_identity -certfile my_key_crt.pem -keyfile my_key_pk.pem -keyfilepass <pfx_password> With these instructions, two jks files will be produced: my_key_identity.jks my_key_trust.jks With both files, the next step is to configure Custom Identity and Custom Trust on WebLogic Server.

  Read the article

• Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

  Read the article

• Messaging Systems – Handshaking, Reconciliation and Tracking for Data Transparency

  - by Ahsan Alam

  As many corporations build business partnerships with other organizations, the need to share information becomes necessary. Large amount of data sharing using snail mail, email and/or fax are quickly becoming a thing of the past. More and more organizations are relying heavily on Ftp and/or Web Service to exchange data. Corporations apply wide range of technologies and techniques based on available resources and data transfer needs. Sometimes, it involves simple home-grown applications. Other times, large investments are made on products like BizTalk, TIBCO etc. Complexity of information management also varies significantly from one organizations to another. Some may deal with handful of simple steps to process and manage shared data; whereas others may rely on fairly complex processes with heavy interaction with internal and external systems in order to serve the business needs. It is not surprising that many of these systems end up becoming black boxes over a period of time. Consequently, people and business start to rely more and more on developers and support personnel just to extract simple information adding to the loss of productivity. One of the most important factor in any business is transparency to data irrespective of technology preferences and the complexity of business processes. Not knowing the state of data could become very costly to the business. Being involved in messaging systems for some time now, I have heard the same type of questions over and over again. Did we transmit messages successfully? Did we get responses back? What is the expected turn-around-time? Did the system experience any errors? When one company transmits data to one or more company, it may invoke a set of processes that could complete in matter of seconds, or it could days. As data travels from one organizations to another, the uncertainty grows, and the longer it takes to track uncertain state of the data the costlier it gets for the business, So, in every business scenario, it's extremely important to be aware of the state of the data.   Architects of messaging systems can take several steps to aid with data transparency. Some forms of data handshaking and reconciliation mechanism as well as extensive data tracking can be incorporated into the system to provide clear visibility to the data. What do I mean by handshaking and reconciliation? Some might consider these to be a single concept; however, I like to consider them in two unique categories. Handshaking serves as message receipts or acknowledgment. When one transmits messages to another, the receiver must acknowledge each message by sending immediate responses for each transaction. Whenever we use Web Services, handshaking is often achieved utilizing request/reply pattern. Similarly, if Ftp is used, a receiver can acknowledge by dropping messages for the sender as soon as the files are picked up. These forms of handshaking or acknowledgment informs the message sender and receiver that a successful transaction has occurred. I have mentioned earlier that it could take anywhere from a few seconds to a number of days before shared data is completely processed. In addition, whenever a batched transaction is used, processing time for each data element inside the batch could also vary significantly. So, in order to successfully manage data processing, reconciliation becomes extremely important; otherwise it may result into data loss or in some cases hefty penalty. Reconciliation can be done in many ways. Partner organizations can share and compare ad hoc reports to achieve reconciliation. On the other hand, partners can agree on some type of systematic reconciliation messages. Systems within responsible parties can trigger messages to partners as soon as the data process completes.   Next step in the data transparency is extensive data tracking. Some products such as BizTalk and TIBCO provide built-in functionality for data tracking; however, built-in functionality may not always be adequate. Sometimes additional tracking system (or databases) needs to be built in order monitor all types of data flow including, message transactions, handshaking, reconciliation, system errors and many more. If these types of data are captured, then these can be presented to business users in any forms or fashion. When business users are empowered with such information, then the reliance on developers and support teams decreases dramatically.   In today's collaborative world of information sharing, data transparency is key to the success of every business. The state of business data will constantly change. However, when people have easier access to various states of data, it allows them to make better and quicker decisions. Therefore, I feel that data handshaking, reconciliation and tracking is very important aspect of messaging systems.

  Read the article

• Using real fonts in HTML 5 & CSS 3 pages

  - by nikolaosk

  This is going to be the fifth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here, here , here and here.In this post I will provide a hands-on example on how to use real fonts in HTML 5 pages with the use of CSS 3.Font issues have been appearing in all websites and caused all sorts of problems for web designers.The real problem with fonts for web developers until now was that they were forced to use only a handful of fonts.CSS 3 allows web designers not to use only web-safe fonts.These fonts are in wide use in most user's operating systems.Some designers (when they wanted to make their site stand out) resorted in various techniques like using images instead of fonts. That solution is not very accessible-friendly and definitely less SEO friendly.CSS (through CSS3's Fonts module) 3 allows web developers to embed fonts directly on a web page.First we need to define the font and then attach the font to elements.Obviously we have various formats for fonts. Some are supported by all modern browsers and some are not.The most common formats are, Embedded OpenType (EOT),TrueType(TTF),OpenType(OTF). I will use the @font-face declaration to define the font used in this page.  Before you download fonts (in any format) make sure you have understood all the licensing issues. Please note that all these real fonts will be downloaded in the client's computer.A great resource on the web (maybe the best) is http://www.typekit.com/.They have an abundance of web fonts for use. Please note that they sell those fonts.Another free (best things in life a free, aren't they?) resource is the http://www.google.com/webfonts website. I have visited the website and downloaded the Aladin webfont.When you download any font you like make sure you read the license first. Aladin webfont is released under the Open Font License (OFL) license. Before I go on with the actual demo I will use the (http://www.caniuse.com) to see the support for web fonts from the latest versions of modern browsers.Please have a look at the picture below. We see that all the latest versions of modern browsers support this feature. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.I create a simple HTML 5 page. The markup follows and it is very easy to use and understand<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>HTML 5, CSS3 and JQuery</title>    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">       </head>  <body>      <div id="header">      <h1>Learn cutting edge technologies</h1>      <p>HTML 5, JQuery, CSS3</p>    </div>        <div id="main">          <h2>HTML 5</h2>                        <p>            HTML5 is the latest version of HTML and XHTML. The HTML standard defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML. It attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML.          </p>      </div>             </body>  </html> Then I create the style.css file.<style type="text/css">@font-face{font-family:Aladin;src: url('Aladin-Regular.ttf')}h1{font-family:Aladin,Georgia,serif;}</style> As you can see we want to style the h1 tag in our HTML 5 markup.I just use the @font-face property,specifying the font-family and the source of the web font. Then I just use the name in the font-family property to style the h1 tag.Have a look below to see my page in IE10. Make sure you open this page in all your browsers installed in your machine. Make sure you have downloaded the latest versions. Now we can make our site stand out with web fonts and give it a really unique look and feel. Hope it helps!!!  

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81  | Next Page >