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• Vodacom Call Center Management on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  If you live in South Africa, you know about Vodacom. Vodacom is one of the dominant mobile communication companies in South Africa, and beyond, providing voice, messaging, data, and similar mobile services. Inside Vodacom there's an application named Helios, which is a call centre application that had its inception in 2009 and consists of two parts. Firstly, a web-based front-end that allows a call centre agent to service subscribers using a Google-like search on a knowledge base structured as a collection of FAQs. The web-based front-end uses plain-old HTML + CSS + a good helping of JQuery and JQueryUI. This is delivered via JSR-168 portlets running on a cluster of IBM Portal 6 servers. In turn, the portlets communicate via RMI with several back-end EJB's containing the business logic. These EJB's are deployed on a cluster of Weblogic Application Servers, version 10.3.6. The second part is a NetBeans Platform application used for maintaining and constructing the knowledge base, i.e., the back-end of the web-based front-end. Helios is also used for a number of other maintenance functions, such as access permissions, user maintenance, and news bulletins. Below, in the web-based front-end, call centre agents can enter search terms and are presented with a number of FAQs from the knowledge base. Upon selecting a FAQ article, the agent is presented with the article text, the process to guide the subscriber, system checks that display information specific to the subscriber, and links to related applications and articles: Below, you can see that applications are searchable and can be accessed using the same web-based front-end as shown above. And, as can be seen below, knowledge base FAQs are maintained using the Helios Maintenance Application, which is the Vodacom application built on the NetBeans Platform: Several thousand call centre agent user accounts are administered using the Helios Maintenance Application. Below the main FAQ page is shown, together with the About dialog: Vodacom is happy with the back-end NetBeans Platform application. However, the front-end stack runs on quite old technology. Ideally Vodacom would like to migrate the portlets to Oracle Weblogic Portal or Oracle WebCenter, but this hasn't been accomplished yet. Migrating makes sense as the rest of the application server environment consists entirely of Oracle products.

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• Good Scoop: The PeopleSoft/IBM Backstory

  - by Brian Dayton

  Sometimes you're searching for something online and you find an unrelated, bonus nugget. Last week I stumbled across an interesting blog post from Chris Heller of a PeopleSoft consulting shop in San Ramon, CA called Grey Sparling. I don't know these guys. But Chris, who apparently used to work on the PeopleTools team, wrote a great article on a pre-acquisition, would-be deal between IBM and PeopleSoft that would have standardized PeopleSoft on IBM technology. The behind-the-scenes perspective is interesting. His commentary on the challenges that the company and PeopleSoft customers would have encountered if the deal had gone through was also interesting: ·         "No common ownership. It's hard enough to get large groups of people to work together when they work for the same company, but with two separate companies it is much, much harder. Even within Oracle, progress on Fusion applications was slow until Thomas Kurian took over Fusion applications in addition to Fusion middleware." ·         "No customer buy-in. PeopleSoft customers weren't asking for a conversion to WebSphere, so the fact that doing that could have helped PeopleSoft stay independent wouldn't have meant much to them, especially since the cost of moving to whatever a "PeopleSoft built on WebSphere" would have been significant." ·         "No executive buy-in. This is related to the previous point, but it's worth calling out separately. If Oracle had walked away and the deal with IBM had gone through, and PeopleSoft customers got put through the wringer as part of WebSphere move, all of the PeopleSoft project teams would be put in the awkward position of explaining to their management why these additional costs and headaches were happening. Essentially they would need to "sell" the partnership internally to their own management team. That's not a fun conversation to have." I'm not surprised that something like this was in the works. But I did find the inside scoop and Heller's perspective on the challenges particularly interesting. Especially the advantages of aligning development of applications and infrastructure development under one roof. Here's a link to the whole blog entry.  

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• Raymond James at Oracle OpenWorld: Showcasing Real Time Data Integration.

  - by Christophe Dupupet

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} In today’s always-on, always connected world, integrating data in real-time is a necessity for most companies and most industries. The experts at Raymond James Financials, using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator, have designed a real-time data integration solution for their operational data store and services that support applications throughout the enterprise . They boast an amazing number of daily executions, while dramatically reducing data latency,  increasing data service performance, and speeding time to market. 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-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} To know more on how they have achieved such results, come listen to Ryan Fonnett and Tim Garrod: they will explain how they implemented their solution, and also illustrate their explanations with a live demonstration of their work. A presentation not to be missed! Real-Time Data Integrationwith Oracle Data Integratorat Raymond James October 1st 2012 at 4:45pm Moscone West, room 3005

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• Perfect Your MySQL Database Administrators Skills

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  With its proven ease-of-use, performance, and scalability, MySQL has become the leading database choice for web-based applications, used by high profile web properties including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and thousands of mid-sized companies. Many organizations deploy both Oracle Database and MySQL side by side to serve different needs, and as a database professional you can find training courses on both topics at Oracle University! Check out the upcoming Oracle Database training courses and MySQL training courses. Even if you're only managing Oracle Databases at this point of time, getting familiar with MySQL Database will broaden your career path with growing job demand. Hone your skills as a MySQL Database Administrator by taking the MySQL for Database Administrators course which teaches you how to secure privileges, set resource limitations, access controls and describe backup and recovery basics. You also learn how to create and use stored procedures, triggers and views. You can take this 5 day course through three delivery methods: Training-on-Demand: Take this course at your own pace and at a time that suits you through this high-quality streaming video delivery. You also get to schedule time on a classroom environment to perform the hands-on exercises. Live-Virtual: Attend a live instructor led event from your own desk. 100s of events already of the calendar in many timezones. In-Class: Travel to an education center to attend this class. A sample of events is shown below:  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Budapest, Hungary  26 November 2012  Hungarian  Prague, Czech Republic  19 November 2012  Czech  Warsaw, Poland  10 December 2012  Polish  Belfast, Northern Ireland  26 November, 2012  English  London, England  26 November, 2012  English  Rome, Italy  19 November, 2012  Italian  Lisbon, Portugal  12 November, 2012  European Portugese  Porto, Portugal  21 January, 2013  European Portugese  Amsterdam, Netherlands  19 November, 2012  Dutch  Nieuwegein, Netherlands  8 April, 2013  Dutch  Barcelona, Spain  4 February, 2013  Spanish  Madrid, Spain  19 November, 2012  Spanish  Mechelen, Belgium  25 February, 2013  English  Windhof, Luxembourg  19 November, 2012  English  Johannesburg, South Africa  9 December, 2012  English  Cairo, Egypt  20 October, 2012  English  Nairobi, Kenya  26 November, 2012  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  29 October, 2012  English  Auckland, New Zealand  5 November, 2012  English  Wellington, New Zealand  23 October, 2012  English  Brisbane, Australia  19 November, 2012  English  Edmonton, Canada  7 January, 2013  English  Vancouver, Canada  7 January, 2013  English  Ottawa, Canada  22 October, 2012  English  Toronto, Canada  22 October, 2012  English  Montreal, Canada  22 October, 2012  English  Mexico City, Mexico  10 December, 2012  Spanish  Sao Paulo, Brazil  10 December, 2012  Brazilian Portugese For more information on this course or any aspect of the MySQL curriculum, visit http://oracle.com/education/mysql.

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• How to Code Faster (Without Sacrificing Quality)

  - by ashes999

  I've been a professional coder for a several years. The comments about my code have generally been the same: writes great code, well-tested, but could be faster. So how do I become a faster coder, without sacrificing quality? For the sake of this question, I'm going to limit the scope to C#, since that's primarily what I code (for fun) -- or Java, which is similar enough in many ways that matter. Things that I'm already doing: Write the minimal solution that will get the job done Write a slew of automated tests (prevents regressions) Write (and use) reusable libraries for all kinds of things Use well-known technologies where they work well (eg. Hibernate) Use design patterns where they fit into place (eg. Singleton) These are all great, but I don't feel like my speed is increasing over time. I do care, because if I can do something to increase my productivity (even by 10%), that's 10% faster than my competitors. (Not that I have any.) Besides which, I've consistently gotten this feeback from my managers -- whether it was small-scale Flash development or enterprise Java/C++ development. Edit: There seem to be a lot of questions about what I mean by fast, and how I know I'm slow. Let me clarify with some more details. I worked in small and medium-sized teams (5-50 people) in various companies over various projects and various technologies (Flash, ASP.NET, Java, C++). The observation of my managers (which they told me directly) is that I'm "slow." Part of this is because a significant number of my peers sacrificed quality for speed; they wrote code that was buggy, hard to read, hard to maintain, and difficult to write automated tests for. My code generally is well-documented, readable, and testable. At Oracle, I would consistently solve bugs slower than other team-members. I know this, because I would get comments to that effect; this means that other (yes, more senior and experienced) developers could do my work in less time than it took me, at nearly the same quality (readability, maintainability, and testability). Why? What am I missing? How can I get better at this? My end goal is simple: if I can make product X in 40 hours today, and I can improve myself somehow so that I can create the same product at 20, 30, or even 38 hours tomorrow, that's what I want to know -- how do I get there? What process can I use to continually improve? I had thought it was about reusing code, but that's not enough, it seems.

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• What was missing from the Content Strategy Forum?

  - by Roger Hart

  In April, Paris hosted the first ever Content Strategy Forum. The event's website proudly proclaims: 170 attendees, 18 nationalities, 17 speakers, 1 volcano... Content Strategy Forum 2010 rocked the world! The volcano was in Iceland, and the closest we came to rocking the world was a cursory mention in the Huffington Post, but I'll grant the event was awesome. One thing missing from that list, however, is "94 companies" (Plus a couple of universities and freelancers, and what have you). A glance through the attendees directory reveals a fairly wide organisational turnout - 24 students from two Parisian universities, countless design and marketing agencies, a series of tech firms, small and large. Two delegates from IBM, two from ARM, an appearance from RIM, Skype, and Facebook; twelve from the various bits of eBay. Oh, and, err, nobody from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Play, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, the BBC, no banks I noticed, and I didn't spot a newspaper. You get the idea. Facebook notwithstanding, you have to scroll through a few pages to Alexa rankings to find company names from the attendee list. I find this interesting, and I'm not wholly sure what to make of it. Of the large, web-centric, content-rich organizations conspicuously absent, at least one of two things is true: They didn't know about the event They didn't care about the event Maybe these guys all have content strategy completely sorted, and it's an utterly naturalised part of their business process. Maybe nobody at say, Apple or Play.com ever publishes a single piece of content that isn't neatly tailored to their (clearly defined, of course) user and business goals. Wouldn't that be lovely? The thing is, in that rosy and beatific world, there's still a case for those folks to join the community. There are bound to be other perspectives, and things to learn. You see, the other thing achingly conspicuous by its absence was case studies. In her keynote address, Kristina Halvorson made the point that what content strategy really needs is some big, loud success stories. A point I'd firmly second as a content strategist working within an organisation. Sarah Cancilla's presentation on content strategy at Facebook included some very neat, specific examples, and was richer for it. It didn't hurt that the example was Facebook - you're getting impressively big numbers off base. What about the other big boys? Is there anybody out there with a perspective? Do we all just look very silly to you, fretting away over text and images and users and purposes? Is content validation and maintenance so accustomed a part of your business that calling attention to it is like sniffing the air and saying "Hmm, a lot of nitrogen about today."? And if it is, do you have any wisdom to share?

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• Oracle AIM, Oracle ABF, and Siebel Results Roadmap Officially Retired as of January 31, 2011

  - by tom.spitz

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} It seems somehow appropriate that the first entry of the Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) blog is about the retirement of several of our legacy methods, most notably AIM Foundation.If you're reading this, you're probably aware that Oracle has been developing OUM to support the entire Enterprise IT lifecycle, including support for the successful implementation of every Oracle product. As Oracle has continued to acquire new companies and technologies, it has become essential that we also create a single, unified language and approach for implementation - across the Oracle ecosystem.With the release of OUM 5.1 in 2009, OUM provided full support for all enterprise application implementation projects including Oracle E-Business Suite R12, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne projects. In 2010, we released OUM training that supports the use of OUM on these types of projects.That support represented a major milestone in the evolution of OUM and enabled implementers to transition to OUM. Consequently, we announced a staggered retirement schedule for Oracle's legacy methods. On January 31, 2011 we announced the retirement of:Oracle Application Implementation Method (AIM)Oracle AIM for Business Flows (ABF)Siebel Results RoadmapLater this year, we will announce the retirement of Compass - the legacy PeopleSoft method - and Data Warehouse Method Fast Track.OUM is available free of charge to Oracle Gold, Platinum, and Diamond partners through the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) [OUM on OPN]. The OUM Customer Program allows customers to obtain copies of the method for their internal use by contracting with Oracle for an engagement of two weeks or longer meeting some additional minimum criteria.There be more retirement announcements in the coming months. For now it's "Adios AIM." Thanks for the memories...

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• Exceptional DBA Awards 2011

  - by Rebecca Amos

  From today, we’re accepting nominations for the 2011 Exceptional DBA Awards. DBAs make a vital contribution to the running of the companies they work for, and the Exceptional DBA Awards aim to acknowledge this and make this contribution more widely known. Check out our new website for all the info: www.exceptionaldba.com  Being an exceptional DBA doesn’t mean you have to sleep at the office, or know everything there is to know about SQL Server; who ever could? It means that you make an effort to make your servers secure and reliable, and to make your users’ lives easier. Maybe you’ve helped a junior colleague learn something new about server backups? Or cancelled your coffee break to get a database back online? Or contributed to a forum post on performance monitoring? All of these actions show that you might be an exceptional DBA. So have a think about the tasks you do every day that already make you exceptional – and then get started on your entry! You just need to answer a few questions on our website about your experience as a DBA, some of your biggest achievements, and any other activities you participate in within the SQL Server community. Anyone who is currently working as a SQL Server database administrator can enter, or be nominated by someone else. We’ve got four fantastic judges for the Awards, who you’ll be familiar with already: Brent Ozar, Brad McGehee, Rodney Landrum and Steve Jones. They’ll pick five finalists, and then we’ll ask the SQL Server community to vote for their winner. Not only could you win the respect and recognition of peers and colleagues, but the prizes also include full conference registration for the 2011 PASS Summit in Seattle (where the awards ceremony will take place), four nights' hotel accommodation, and $300 towards travel expenses. The winner will get a copy of Red Gate’s SQL DBA Bundle – and they’ll also be featured here, on Simple-Talk. So what are you waiting for? Chances are you’ve already made a small effort for someone today that means you might be an exceptional DBA. Visit the website now, and start writing your entry – or nominate your favourite DBA to enter: www.exceptionaldba.com

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• A Plea for Plain English

  - by Tony Davis

  The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous 'international language' of scientific, political and technical communication. On the one hand, learning a single, common language, International English, has made it much easier to participate in and adopt new technologies; on the other hand it must be exasperating to have to use English at international conferences, or on community sites, when your own language has a long tradition of scientific and technical usage. It is also hard to master the subtleties of using a foreign language to explain advanced ideas. This requires English speakers to be more considerate in their writing. Even if you’re used to speaking English, you may be brought up short by this sort of verbiage… "Business Intelligence delivering actionable insights is becoming more critical in the enterprise, and these insights require large data volumes for trending and forecasting" It takes some imagination to appreciate the added hassle in working out what it means, when English is a language you only use at work. Try, just to get a vague feel for it, using Google Translate to translate it from English to Chinese and back again. "Providing actionable business intelligence point of view is becoming more and more and more business critical, and requires that these insights and projected trends in large amounts of data" Not easy eh? If you normally use a different language, you will need to pause for thought before finally working out that it really means … "Every Business Intelligence solution must be able to help companies to make decisions. In order to detect current trends, and accurately predict future ones, we need to analyze large volumes of data" Surely, it is simple politeness for English speakers to stop peppering their writing with a twisted vocabulary that renders it inaccessible to everyone else. It isn’t just the problem of writers who use long words to give added dignity to their prose. It is the use of Colloquial English. This changes and evolves at a dizzying rate, adding new terms and idioms almost daily; it is almost a new and separate language. By contrast, ‘International English', is gradually evolving separately, at its own, more sedate, pace. As such, all native English speakers need to make an effort to learn, and use it, switching from casual colloquial patter into a simpler form of communication that can be widely understood by different cultures, even if it gives you less credibility on the street. Simple-Talk is based, at least in part, on the idea that technical articles can be written simply and clearly in a form of English that can be easily understood internationally, and that they can be written, with a little editorial help, by anyone, and read by anyone, regardless of their native language. Cheers, Tony.

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• Invitation: WebCenter Implementation Specialist Exam Preparation Webcasts

  - by rituchhibber

  Oracle Partner Network would like to invite you to Refresh Courses for WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal, to help partners to prepare for the WebCenter Implementation Specialist EXAMS.This is a 3 hours intensive refresher partner-only training session, providing attendees with an overview of WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal functions and related topics. After the refresher part you will be able to take the relevant Implementation Specialist EXAM depending on your personal focus. NOTE: This is only suitable for experienced WebCenter Content or WebCenter Portal practitioners Who should attend?Partner Consultants who want to become an Oracle WebCenter Content or a WebCenter Portal Certified Implementation Specialist or both, that will help them to differentiate themselves in front of customers and support their Companies to become Specialized. Webcast Details: Date Topic Speaker  Web Call Details  Intercall Details  December 14th WebCenter Content RefreshCourse Markus Neubauer, SilburyWebCenter Content Specialized Partner Join Webcast Dial-in numbers:CC/SP: 1579222/9221 Time: 12:00 -15:00 CET Break around 13:30 Conference ID/Key: 9249533/1412 Date Topic Speaker Web Call Details Intercall Details January 10th                  WebCenter Portal    Refresh Course                   Yannick Ongena, InfoMentumWebCenter Portal Specialized Partner                     Join Webcast Dial-in numbers:CC/SP: 1579222/9221 Time: 12:00 -15:00 CET Break around 13:30 Conference ID/Key: 9249375/1001 Date Topic Speaker Web Call Details Intercall Details February 22nd                WebCenter Content  RefreshCourse Markus Neubauer, SilburyWebCenter Content Specialized Partner    Join Webcast Dial-in numbers:CC/SP: 1579222/9221 Time: 12:00 -15:00 CET Break around13:30 Conference ID/Key: 9249541/2202 Date Topic Speaker Web Call Details Intercall Details  March 13th                WebCenter Portal   Refresh     Course      Yannick Ongena, InfoMentumWebCenter Portal Specialized Partner    Join Webcast Dial-in numbers:CC/SP: 1579222/9221 Time: 12:00 -15:00 CET Break around 13:30 Conference ID/Key: 9249549/1303 Local dial-in numbers can be found here . Next Steps:After the Webcast you will receive the Training material and FREE Vouchers to book and take the: Oracle ECM 11g Certified Implementation Specialist EXAM Oracle WebCenter 11g Essentials EXAM Booking with Voucher can be done on www.pearsonvue.com. Note: FREE Vouchers will be send after attending the webcast.

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• Oracle Customer Hub - Directions, Roadmap and Customer Success

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

   By Gurinder Bahl With less than a week from OOW 2012, I would like to introduce you all to the core Oracle Customer MDM Strategy sessions. Fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prohibits companies from achieving a complete and accurate view of their customers. Oracle Customer Hub provide a comprehensive set of services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted master customer system of record across the enterprise. Customer Hub centralizes customer data from disparate systems across your enterprise into a master repository. Existing systems are integrated in real-time or via batch with the Hub, allowing you to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity. Don’t miss out on two sessions geared towards Oracle Customer Hub:   1) Attend session CON9747 - Turn Customer Data into an Enterprise Asset with Oracle Fusion Customer Hub Applications at Oracle Open World 2012 on Monday, Oct 1st, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM @ Moscone West – 2008. Manouj Tahiliani, Sr. Director MDM Product Management will provide insight into the vision of Oracle Fusion Customer Hub solutions, and review the roadmap. You will discover how Fusion Customer MDM can help your enterprise improve data quality, create accurate and complete customer information,  manage governance and help create great customer experiences. You will also understand how to leverage data quality capabilities and create a sophisticated customer foundation within Oracle Fusion Applications. You will also hear Danette Patterson, Group Lead, Church Pension Group talk about how Oracle Fusion Customer Hub applications provide a modern, next-generation, multi-domain foundation for managing customer information in a private cloud. 2)  Don't miss session  CON9692 - Customer MDM is key to Strategic Business Success and Customer Experience Management at Oracle Open World 2012 on Wednesday, October 3rd 2012 from 3:30-4:30pm @ Westin San Francisco Metropolitan 1. JP Hurtado, Director, Customer Systems, will provide insight on how RCCL overcame challenges of data quality, guest recognition & centralized customer view to provide consolidated customer view to multiple reservation, CRM, marketing, service, sales, data warehouse and loyalty systems. You will learn how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), which has over 30 million customer and maintain multiple brands, leveraged Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) as backbone to customer data management strategy for past 5 years. Gurinder Bahl from MDM Product Management will provide an update on Oracle Customer Hub strategy, what we have achieved since last Open World and our future plans for the Oracle Customer Hub. You will learn about Customer Hub Data Quality capabilities around data analysis, cleansing, matching, address validation as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, and Conference sessions. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  Looking forward to see you at Open World, the perfect opportunity to learn about cutting edge Oracle technologies. 

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• Book review: Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed

  - by BuckWoody

  I know, I know – what’s a database guy doing reading a book on System Center? Well, I need it from time to time. System Center is actually a collection of about 7 different products that you can use to manage and monitor your software and hardware, from drive space through Microsoft Office, UNIX systems, and yes, SQL Server. It’s that last part I care about the most, and so I’ve dealt with Data Protection Manager and System Center Operations Manager (I call it SCOM) in SQL Server. But I wasn’t familiar with the rest of the suite nor was I as familiar as I needed to be with the “Essentials” release – a separate product that groups together the main features of System Center into a single offering for smaller organizations. These companies usually run with a smaller IT shop, so they sometimes opt for this product to help them monitor everything, including SQL Server. So I picked up “Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed” by Chris Amaris and a cast of others. I don’t normally like to get a technical book by multiple authors – I just find that most of the time it’s quite jarring to switch from author to author, but I think this group did pretty well here.  The first chapter on introducing System Center has helped me talk with others about what the product does, and which pieces fit well together with SQL Server. The writing is well done, and I didn’t find a jump from author to author as I went along. The information is sequential, meaning that they lead you from install to configuration and then use. It’s very much a concepts-and-how-to book, and a big one at that – over 950 pages of learning! It was a pretty quick read, though, since I skipped the installation parts and there are lots of screenshots. While I’m not sure you’d be an expert on the product when you finish reading this book, but I would say you’re more than halfway there. I would say it suits someone that learns through examples the best, since they have a lot of step-by-step examples I do recommend that you take a look if you have to interact with this product, or even if you are a smaller shop and you’re the primary IT resource. The last few chapters deal with System Center Essentials, and honestly it was the best part of the book for me. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Exploding maps in Reporting Services 2008 R2

  - by Rob Farley

  Kaboom! Well, that was the imagery that secretly appeared in my mind when I saw “USA By State Exploded” in the list of installed maps in Report Builder 3.0 – part of the spatial offering of SQL Server Reporting Server 2008 R2. Alas, it just means that the borders are bigger. Clicking on it showed me. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in maps of the US. None of my clients are there (at least, not yet – feel free to get in touch if you want to change this ‘feature’ of my company). So instead, I’ve recently been getting hold of some data for Australian areas. I’ve just bought some PostCode shapes for South Australia, and will use this in demos for conferences and for showing clients how this kind of report can really impact their reporting. One of the companies I was talking about getting shape files sent me a sample. So I chose the “ESRI shapefile” option you see above, and browsed to my file. It appeared in the window like this: Australians will immediately recognise this as the area around Wollongong, just south of Sydney. Well, apart from me. I didn’t. I had to put a Bing Maps layer behind it to work that out, but that’s not for this post. The thing that I discovered was that if I selected the Exploded USA option (but without clicking Next), and then chose my shape file, then my area around Wollongong would be exploded too! Huh! I think this is actually a bug, but a potentially useful one! Some further investigation (involving creating two identical reports, one with this exploded view, one without), showed that the Exploded View is done by reducing the ScaleFactor property of the PolygonLayer in the map control. The Exploded version has it below 1. If you set to above one, your shapes overlap. I discovered this by accident… I guess I hadn’t looked through all the PolygonLayer options to work out what they all do. And because this post is about Reporting, it can qualify for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Aaron Nelson (@sqlvariant). Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Vodacom Call Center Management on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  If you live in South Africa, you know about Vodacom. Vodacom is one of the dominant mobile communication companies in South Africa, and beyond, providing voice, messaging, data, and similar mobile services. Inside Vodacom there's an application named Helios, which is a call centre application that had its inception in 2009 and consists of two parts. Firstly, a web-based front-end that allows a call centre agent to service subscribers using a Google-like search on a knowledge base structured as a collection of FAQs. The web-based front-end uses plain-old HTML + CSS + a good helping of JQuery and JQueryUI. This is delivered via JSR-168 portlets running on a cluster of IBM Portal 6 servers. In turn, the portlets communicate via RMI with several back-end EJB's containing the business logic. These EJB's are deployed on a cluster of Weblogic Application Servers, version 10.3.6. The second part is a NetBeans Platform application used for maintaining and constructing the knowledge base, i.e., the back-end of the web-based front-end. Helios is also used for a number of other maintenance functions, such as access permissions, user maintenance, and news bulletins. Below, in the web-based front-end, call centre agents can enter search terms and are presented with a number of FAQs from the knowledge base. Upon selecting a FAQ article, the agent is presented with the article text, the process to guide the subscriber, system checks that display information specific to the subscriber, and links to related applications and articles: Below, you can see that applications are searchable and can be accessed using the same web-based front-end as shown above. And, as can be seen below, knowledge base FAQs are maintained using the Helios Maintenance Application, which is the Vodacom application built on the NetBeans Platform: Several thousand call centre agent user accounts are administered using the Helios Maintenance Application. Below the main FAQ page is shown, together with the About dialog: Vodacom is happy with the back-end NetBeans Platform application. However, the front-end stack runs on quite old technology. Ideally Vodacom would like to migrate the portlets to Oracle Weblogic Portal or Oracle WebCenter, but this hasn't been accomplished yet. Migrating makes sense as the rest of the application server environment consists entirely of Oracle products.

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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• Spotlight on a career path: Paul, Business Development Consultant

  - by Maria Sandu

  I came to work for Oracle in November 2012 as a Customer Intelligence Representative and since then I was promoted to a Business Development Consultant, for Commercial Industries in the UK, based in Dublin. My background was primarily in Logistics, working for such companies as Indaver Ireland, Wincanton and P&O. I spent 10 years working in this industry and gained experience in negotiating with customers and suppliers in order to meet the needs of both, monitoring the quality and quantity of goods as well as the efficiency and organisation of the movement and storage of products. I decided to move from my logistics career in 2009 to study Information Technology in D.I.T. This was a challenge for me to move my career path; however the lectures at the college helped me significantly with the ability to understand how IT can have an effect on how businesses operate. Following on from college I came to work for Oracle. This also presented challenges but the training I received and the encouragement from management helped me understand that the same business rules apply no matter what background you come from. I have also learnt that using my past experience in working with customers and suppliers in Logistics has helped me understand how to meet customer’s needs. Oracle has offered me excellent training such as Sandler Sales Techniques and John Costigan. I continue to get all the training that I need to develop my career. If you’re interested in joining the Business Development Group visit http://bit.ly/oracledirectcareers or follow our CareersatOracle Facebook Community! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• CISDI Cloud - Industrial Cloud Computing Platform based on Oracle Products

  - by Wenyu Duan

  In today's era, Cloud Computing is becoming integral to the vision and corporate strategy of leading organizations and is often seen as a key business driver to achieve growth and innovation. Headquartered in Chongqing, China, CISDI Engineering Co., Ltd. is a large state-owned engineering company, offering consulting, engineering design, EPC contracting, and equipment integration services to steel producers all over the world. With over 50 years of experience, CISDI offers quality services for every aspect of production for projects in the metal industry and the company has evolved into a leading international engineering service group with 18 subsidiaries providing complete lifecycle for E&C projects. CISDI group delegation led by Mr. Zhaohui Yu, CEO of CISDI Group, Mr. Zhiyou Li, CEO of CISDI Info, Mr. Qing Peng, CTO of CISDI Info and Mr. Xin Xiao, Head of CISDI Info's R&D joined Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and presented a very impressive cloud initiative case in their session titled “E&C Industry Solution in CISDI Cloud - An Industrial Cloud Computing Platform Based on Oracle Products”. CISDI group plans to expand through three phases in the construction of its cloud computing platform: first, it will relocate its existing technologies to Oracle systems, along with establishing private cloud for CISDI; secondly, it will gradually provide mixed cloud services for its subsidiaries and partners; and finally it plans to launch an industrial cloud with a highly mature, secure and scalable environment providing cloud services for customers in the engineering construction and steel industries, among others. “CISDI Cloud” will become the growth engine for the organization to expand its global reach through online services and achieving the strategic objective of being the preferred choice of E&C companies worldwide. The new cloud computing platform is designed to provide access to the shared computing resources pool in a self-service, dynamic, elastic and measurable way. It’s flexible and scalable grid structure can support elastic expansion and sustainable growth, and can bring significant benefits in speed, agility and efficiency. Further, the platform can greatly cut down deployment and maintenance costs. CISDI delegation highlighted these points as the key reasons why the group decided to have a strategic collaboration with Oracle for building this world class industrial cloud - - Oracle’s strategy: Open, Complete and Integrated - Oracle as the only company who can provide engineered system, with complete product chain of hardware and software - Exadata, Exalogic, EM 12c to provide solid foundation for "CISDI Cloud" The cloud blueprint and advanced architecture for industrial cloud computing platform presented in the session shows how Oracle products and technologies together with industrial applications from CISDI can provide end-end portfolio of E&C industry services in cloud. CISDI group was recognized for business leadership and innovative solutions and was presented with Engineering and Construction Industry Excellence Award during Oracle OpenWorld.

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• Computer / Software Engineering vs Other Engineering Disciplines [closed]

  - by Mohammad Yaseen

  Since this was a rather specific question, I have tried my best to present this question in a format which fits the style of this site. Please comment if it can be improved further. I have to choose the Engineering discipline on 6th Nov. My interest is in Robotics, hardware-level programming, Artificial Intelligence and back-end programming. I am currently working as a freelance developer using mainly PHP and occasionally working with GWT.I am somewhat familiar with C# and Python too. I am not super good at programming but I do like it. I am thinking to choose Computer and Information Systems Engineering as this is what I love but all the eggheads of my city are going to Mechanical Engineering and when I ask one of them Why are you choosing this? They say It's my interest and for job and the money. Basically I am confused between CIS and Mechanical Engineering, specifically the job market for both. Since this is a programmers' site I think following questions will be relevant . I am asking this because I want to take advice from professionals in this field before diving too deep . Are you happy with your job / work and pay. Are you satisfied with the work environment and career growth Do you feel OK (or great?) about the near and/or distant future of your industry. Why should a person choose Computer if he has other choices i.e what this industry has to offer in particular which other fields of work don't This industry is subject to rapid changes and you have to learn continuously throughout your entire career. Does this learning and constant hard work pay off ? In my country there is no hardware manufacturing. So most of CIS graduates (like Software Engineers) work in Software Houses. What is the scenario in your country. Is a degree titled 'Software' necessary or companies will take Computer Engineers too if they have relevant experience. I am asking this because I plan to move abroad for work. This is going to be something which I'll do for the rest of my life so I am a bit confused about the right choice. You can view the course outline for both programmes below. Computer and Information Systems Engineering. Mechanical Engineering

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• AIIM, Oracle and Keste - Talking Social Business in LA

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great event today in Los Angeles - AIIM, Oracle and Keste presented on how organizations are making social business work. Atle Skjekkeland of AIIM presented How Social Business Is Driving Innovation. Atle talked about a number of fascinating points, such as how answers to questions come from unexpected sources. Atle cited the fact that 38% of organizations get half or more of answers from unexpected sources, which speaks to the wisdom of the crowds and how people are benefiting from open communications tools to get answers to their questions. He also had a number of hilarious examples of companies that don't get it. If Comcast were to go to YouTube and search Comcast, they would see the number one hit after their paid ad is a video of one of their technicians asleep on a customer's couch. Seems when he called the office for support he was put on hold so long he fell asleep. Dan O'Leary and Atle Skjekkeland After Atle's presentation I presented on Solving the Innovation Challenge with Oracle WebCenter. Atle had talked about McKinsey's research titled The Rise Of The Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday. I brought in some new McKinsey research that built on that article. The new article is How Social Technologies Are Extending The Organization. A survey of 4,200 Global Executives brought three conclusions for the future: Boundaries among employees, vendors and customers will blur Employee teams will self-organize Data-driven decisions will rise These three items were themes that repeated through the day as we went through examples of what customers are doing today.  Next up was Vince Casarez of Keste. Vince was scheduled to profile one customer, but in an incredible 3 for 1 deal, Vince profiled Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, and NetApp. Each of these implementations had content consolidation elements, as well as user engagement requirements that Keste was able to address with Oracle WebCenter. Vince Casarez of Keste And we had a couple of good tweets worth reprinting here. danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Learning about user engagement and social platforms from @bdirking #AIIM LA and @oracle event pic.twitter.com/1aNcLEUs danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Users want to be able to share data and activity streams, work at organizations that embrace social via @bdirking skjekkeland Atle Skjekkeland RT @danieloleary: Learning about user engagement and social platforms from @bdirking #AIIM LA and @oracle event pic.twitter.com/EWRYpvJa danieloleary Daniel O'Leary Thanks again to @bdirking for an amazing event in LA today, really impressed with the completeness of web center JimLundy Jim Lundy @ @danieloleary @bdirking yes, it is looking good - Web Center shadrachwhite Shadrach White @ @bdirking @heybenito I heard the #AIIM event in LA was a hit We had some great conversations through they day, many thanks to everyone who joined in. We look forward to continuing the conversation - thanks again to everyone who attended!

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• Develop DBA skills with MySQL for Database Administrators course

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  MySQL is the world's number one open source database and the number one database for the Web. Join top companies by developing your MySQL Database Administrator skills. The MySQL for Database Administrators course is for DBAs and other database professionals who want to install the MySQL Server, set up replication and security, perform database backups and performance tuning, and protect MySQL databases. You can take this 5 day course as Training on Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registration. You will follow the lecture material via streaming video and perform hands-on activities at a date and time that suits you. Live-Virtual Event:  Take this instructor-led course from your own desk. Choose from the 19 events currently on the schedule and find an event that suits you in terms of timezone and date. In-Class Event: Travel to an education center. Here is a sample of events on the schedule:    Location  Date  Delivery Language  Mechelen, Belgium  25 February 2013  English  London, England  26 November 2012  English  Nice, France  3 December 2012  French  Paris, France  11 February 2013  French  Budapest, Hungary  26 November 2012  Hungarian  Belfast, Ireland  24 June 2013  English  Milan, Italy  14 January 2013  Japanese  Rome, Italy  18 February 2013  Japanese  Amsterdam, Netherlands  24 June 2013  Dutch  Nieuwegein, Netherlands  8 April 2013  Dutch  Warsaw, Poland  10 December 2012  Polish  Lisbon, Portugal  21 January 2013  European Portugese  Porto, Portugal  21 January 2013  European Portugese  Barcelona, Spain  4 February 2013  Spanish  Madrid, Spain  21 January 2013  Spanish  Nairobi, Kenya  26 November 2012  English  Johannesburg, South Africa  9 December 2013  English  Tokyo, Japan  10 December 2012  Japanese  Singapore  28 January 2013  English  Brisbane, Australia  10 December 2012  English  Edmonton, Canada  7 January 2013  English  Montreal, Canada  28 January 2013  English  Ottawa, Canada  28 January 2013  English  Toronto, Canada  28 January 2013  English  Vancouver, Canada  7 January 2013  English  Mexico City, Mexico  10 December 2012  Spanish  Sao Paolo, Brazil  10 December 2012  Brazilian Portugese For more information on this course or on other courses on the authentic MySQL Curriculum, go to http://oracle.com/education/mysql. Note, many organizations deploy both Oracle Database and MySQL side by side to serve different needs, and as a database professional you can find training courses on both topics at Oracle University! Check out the upcoming Oracle Database training courses and MySQL training courses. Even if you're only managing Oracle Databases at this point of time, getting familiar with MySQL will broaden your career path with growing job demand.

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• Reasons to Use a VM For Development

  - by George Stocker

  Background: I work at a start-up company, where one team uses Virtual Machines to connect to a remote server to do their development, and another team (the team I'm on) uses local IIS/SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio installations to conduct work. Team VM is located about 1000 miles from Team Non-VM, and the servers the VMs run off of are located near Team VM (Latency, for those that are wondering, is about 50ms). A person high in the company is pushing for Team Non-VM to use virtual machines for programming, development, and testing. The latter point we agree on -- we want Virtual Machines to test configurations and various aspects of the web application in a 'clean' state. The Problem: What we don't agree on is having developers using RDP to connect to a desktop remotely that contains Visual Studio, SQL Server, and IIS to do the same development we could do locally on our laptops. I've tried the VM set-up, and besides the color issue, there is a latency issue that is rather noticeable, not to mention that since we're a start-up, a good number of employees work from home on occasion with our work laptops, and this move would cut off the laptops. They'd be turned in. Reasons to Use Remote VMs for Development (Not Testing!): Here are the stated reasons that this person wants us to use VMs: They work for TeamVM. They keep the source code "safe". If we want to work from home, we could just use our home PCs. Licenses (I don't know what the argument is, only that it's been used). Reasons not to use Remote VMs for Development: Here are the stated reasons why we don't want to use VMs: We like working from home. We get a lot done on our own time. We're not going to use our Home PCs to do work related stuff. The Latency is noticeable. Support for the VMs (if they go down, or if we need a new VM) takes a while. We don't have administrative privileges on the VM, and are unable to change settings as needed. What I'm looking for from the community is this: What reasons would you give for not using VMs for development? Keep in mind these are remote VMs -- this isn't a VM running on a local desktop. It's using the laptop (or a desktop) as a thin client for a remote VM. Also, on the other side of the coin: Is there something we're missing that makes VMs more palatable for development? Edit: I think 'safe' is used in term of corporate espionage, or more correctly if the Laptop gets stolen, the person who stole would have access to our source code. The former (as we've pointed out, is always going to be a possibility -- companies stop that with litigation, there isn't a technical solution (so far as I can see)). The latter point is ( though I don't know its usefulness in a corporate scenario) mitigated by Truecrypt'ing the entire volume.

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• Why You Should Attend MySQL Connect, and Register Now

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  MySQL Connect is taking place on September 29 and 30 in San Francisco. The early bird discount enabling you to save US$ 500 is only running for a few more days, until July 13. Are you still wondering if you should sign up? Here are 10 reasons why you definitely should: Learn from other companies how they tackled similar challenges to the ones you’re facing. Find out what they learned along the way, and how you can save time, money and a lot of troubles by avoiding repeating the same mistakes and applying the best practices they’ve developed. You’ll get the chance to hear from organizations including PayPal, Verizon, Twitter, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Ning, Mozilla, CERN, Yahoo! and more! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to meet the engineers developing and supporting the MySQL products in a single location. You’ll be able to ask them all your questions, which can represent a huge time and money saver. Acquire detailed knowledge about InnoDB, the MySQL Optimizer, High Availability strategies, improving performance and scalability, enhancing security and numerous other topics. You’ll hear it straight "from the horse’s mouth" as well as from other MySQL experts in the ecosystem. Get a better understanding about Oracle’s MySQL strategy and about the MySQL roadmap, so you can better plan where to use the MySQL database and MySQL Cluster for your next web, cloud-based and other applications. Get hands-on experience about improving performance with the MySQL Performance Schema, about using MySQL Utilities, MySQL Cluster and a lot more with eight different Hands-On Labs. Express your ideas, engage into discussions and help influence the MySQL roadmap during Birds-of-a-feather sessions about replication, backup, query optimizations and other topics. Meet partners and learn about third party tools that could be useful in your architecture. Immerse yourself into the MySQL universe and hang out with MySQL experts for two days. The discussions as well as the relationships you will create can be priceless and help you execute on your next projects in a much better and faster way. Register Now to save US$500 by taking advantage of the Early bird discount running until July 13. We’ll have parallel tracks so you should consider sending a few team members to make the most of the event. Are you attending or planning to attend Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne? You can add MySQL Connect to your registration for only US$100! Finally, it’s always a lot of fun to attend a MySQL conference. The passion and the energy are contagious…and you’ll likely get plenty of new ideas. You will find all information about the program in the MySQL Connect Content Catalog. We look forward to seeing you there! You can also read interviews with Tomas Ulin and Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect. Sponsorship and exhibit opportunities are still available for the conference. You will find more information here.

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• Too Few Women in IT!

  - by Yolande

  Last year, only 1% of attendees at Devoxx were women . This year, Devoxx addressed the issue in a panel entitled "Why We Should Target Women." On the panel were Kim Ross, Régina ten Bruggencate, Trisha Gee, Antonio Goncalves and Claude Falguiére. The moderator was Martijn Verburg. The discussion focused on how to attract women to programming and how to get current women programmers to be more active in the community. The panelists agreed that the IT field should not just attract more women but also men of different ethnic backgrounds. The lack of women in programming is in part a cultural issue that differs from region to region. In developed countries, very few women work as programmers whereas in Brazil and India a lot of women pursue careers in IT.  Women in developed countries perceive the field as isolating and very few young women graduate in computer science.  This perception of isolation was based in reality decades ago, but that is no longer the case today. Main ideas discussed by the panel: - Parents should encourage their daughters to play with Lego and learn programming - More organizations should target girls in high schools and young women in university to expose them to programming.  Duchess organization is planning on being more involved with young girl events and mentoring. - Women tend to be more self-critical about their skills and are intimidated by high skill requirements in job advertisements. Companies should change job advertisements to get more women to interviews. - Panelists don't recommend affirmative action because women feel favored and lose credibility. They want to be judged for their skills. - Panelists recommend acting the same way when dealing with either female or male co-workers and managers - Women need mentors (men or women) to learn to become speakers at conferences and to promote themselves better - Men should be sensitive to the fact that women are alone at work to respond to men teasing. The balance of power at work is different from a social setting. - Men also experience discrimination on the job. It is more difficult for men to take time off when their children are sick, for example. Equal valuing of parental obligations could result in equal pay for women. See also: Trisha Gee Blog - http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/ Duchess Organization - http://www.jduchess.org/

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• Renault under threat from industrial espionage, intellectual property the target

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Last year we saw news of both General Motors and Ford losing a significant amount of valuable information to competitors overseas. Within weeks of the turn of 2011 we see the European car manufacturer, Renault, also suffering. In a recent news report, French Industry Minister Eric Besson warned the country was facing "economic war" and referenced a serious case of espionage which concerns information pertaining to the development of electric cars. Renault senior vice president Christian Husson told the AFP news agency that the people concerned were in a "particularly strategic position" in the company. An investigation had uncovered a "body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company's assets", Mr Husson said. A source told Reuters on Wednesday the company is worried its flagship electric vehicle program, in which Renault with its partner Nissan is investing 4 billion euros ($5.3 billion), might be threatened. This casts a shadow over the estimated losses of Ford ($50 million) and General Motors ($40 million). One executive in the corporate intelligence-gathering industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "It's really difficult to say it's a case of corporate espionage ... It can be carelessness." He cited a hypothetical example of an enthusiastic employee giving away too much information about his job on an online forum. While information has always been passed and leaked, inadvertently or on purpose, the rise of the Internet and social media means corporate spies or careless employees are now more likely to be found out, he added. We are seeing more and more examples of where companies like these need to invest in technologies such as Oracle IRM to ensure such important information can be kept under control. It isn't just the recent release of information into the public domain via the Wikileaks website that is of concern, but also the increasing threats of industrial espionage in cases such as these. Information rights management doesn't totally remove the threat, but abilities to control documents no matter where they exist certainly increases the capabilities significantly. Every single time someone opens a sealed document the IRM system audits the activity. This makes identifying a potential source for a leak much easier when you have an absolute record of every person who's had access to the documents. Oracle IRM can also help with accidental or careless loss. Often people use very sensitive information all the time and forget the importance of handling it correctly. With the ability to protect the information from screen shots and prevent people copy and pasting document information into social networks and other, unsecured documents, Oracle IRM brings a totally new level of information security that would have a significant impact on reducing the risk these organizations face of losing their most valuable information.

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• New SQL Code Deployment Book and Damn I Need to Blog More

  - by Rodney

  Select datediff(d,'02/19/2009',getdate()) This value returned from the above SELECT statement  is 398 and that is the number of days since my last blog post.  As I was formulating my apology for this hiatus from blogging, it dawned on me that I also do not twitter (sorry tweet) and as apologies beget apologies, I then realized that instead of catching up on the backlog of blogs, I should write a book about what I have been most focused on in the past year, one month and 3 days.  That focus is my day job, which of course, most of us have. And that day job we share is why most of us read blogs, tweets, articles and even books in the first place. So my focus for the past year has been SQL code deployments and all of that entails. I am fortunate that Redgate has agreed to entertain my crazy notion of writing an entire book about this subject, which I have tentatively titled, "The Sound and the Fury". Wait..that is not right. Oh yes, a title more befiting a techical tome but with as much profundity, "Standardizing SQL Server Code Deployements - A Redgate Guide". The great American novel must wait a few more years. As I begin this journey, I am inviting you to assist me in the discovery process and even be interviewed and included in the book itself. How do you do deployments in your company? Do you have a documented process or no process? Do you do code review or cross your fingers? Do you work for a small company or a Fortune 100 company? Government regulations or  garage? It does not  matter to me. I am not here to judge. I worked for both companies myself and have seen many things that you can relate to.  If you would like to participate and are one of the 3 people still reading this blog after 398 days, please fill out my survey and let's get started.  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RRG86RH  

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