customer - Page 95 - Developer IT

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

- by Intru

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

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ASP.NET, IS7 and IE8 caching?

- by jdege

We're suddenly having problems with some of our sites having old versions of .css and .js files show up in the browser. Generally, these problems go away, when the user clears cache in the browser. Is there something we can do either in the code or in IIS7, to convince the browser to not used the cached files? In our weirdest case, we have one customer whose users hit our site, and get an old version of a js file. They clear cache, load the page, get the current version, and the page runs fine. Then they load the file again, and suddenly have the old version, again. Any ideas as to how that might be happening? I can think of three: The browser is somehow holding on to the old version, when we clear cache, and is putting it back in the cache, before the second page load. One of our servers has an old version of the file, and while the first page load after a clear cache pulls it from one of the servers with the current version, second and subsequent page loads pull it from the server that has the old version. The first load after a clear cache goes straight to our servers, while subsequent loads pull the file from the cache on the customer's web proxy. I have to say, all three of those scenarios seem outlandishly unlikely, but it's a repeatable behavior. Any ideas?

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Map Subdomains to Folders Owned/Run by Other Apache/PHP/Cpanel Users

- by kristofferR

I run a small service for Norwegian customers where they get automatically installed and configured Wordpress blogs on their own domains ready immediately after payment is finished. It's quite similar to Page.ly and WPEngine, just aimed at Norwegian customers with Norwegian Wordpress, support, billing etc. The backend is WHM/CPanel (Apache, PHP, mySQL), with a script running immediately after payment that installs and configures Wordpress and sends the customer an email with their username and password. Newly registered domains takes some time to propagate though, so for a day or two my customers unfortunately have to use a temporary URL before I can switch them over to their own domains. Right now my system uses mod_userdir ("serverIP/~cpanelusername"). However, it's not an optimal solution. It looks unprofessional, is confusing, and is quite problematic for both my customers and me. I'd rather prefer the temporary URL for their blogs to be "theirdomainwithoutextension.host.no", with "host.no" being a domain I own and served from the same server as the customer sites. I can easily modify the script to create the subdomains on my "host.no"-domain, but how can I seamlessly map the subdomains to folders owned/ran on/by different CPanel/Apache/PHP users?

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Reading data in from file

- by user667430

Hi Here is link if you want to download application: Simple banking app Text file with data to read I am trying to create a simple banking application that reads in data from a text file. So far i have managed to read in all the customers which there are 20 of them. However when reading in the accounts and transactions stuff it only reads in 20 but there is alot more in the text file. Here is what i have so far. I think it has something to do with the nested for loop in the getNextCustomer method. using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace e_SOFT_Banking { public partial class Form1 : Form { public static ArrayList bankDetails = new ArrayList(); public static ArrayList accDetails = new ArrayList(); public static ArrayList tranDetails = new ArrayList(); string inputDataFile = @"C:\e-SOFT_v1.txt"; const int numCustItems = 14; const int numAccItems = 7; const int numTransItems = 5; public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); setUpBank(); } private void btnShowData_Click_1(object sender, EventArgs e) { showListsOfCust(); } private void setUpBank() { readData(); } private void showListsOfCust() { listBox1.Items.Clear(); foreach (Customer c in bankDetails) listBox1.Items.Add(c.getCustomerNumber() + " " + c.getCustomerTitle() + " " + c.getFirstName() + " " + c.getInitials() + " " + c.getSurname() + " " + c.getDateOfBirth() + " " + c.getHouseNameNumber() + " " + c.getStreetName() + " " + c.getArea() + " " + c.getCityTown() + " " + c.getCounty() + " " + c.getPostcode() + " " + c.getPassword() + " " + c.getNumberAccounts()); foreach (Account a in accDetails) listBox1.Items.Add(a.getAccSort() + " " + a.getAccNumber() + " " + a.getAccNick() + " " + a.getAccDate() + " " + a.getAccCurBal() + " " + a.getAccOverDraft() + " " + a.getAccNumTrans()); foreach (Transaction t in tranDetails) listBox1.Items.Add(t.getDate() + " " + t.getType() + " " + t.getDescription() + " " + t.getAmount() + " " + t.getBalAfter()); } private void readData() { StreamReader readerIn = null; Transaction curTrans; Account curAcc; Customer curCust; bool anyMoreData; string[] customerData = new string[numCustItems]; string[] accountData = new string[numAccItems]; string[] transactionData = new string[numTransItems]; if (readOK(inputDataFile, ref readerIn)) { anyMoreData = getNextCustomer(readerIn, customerData, accountData, transactionData); while (anyMoreData == true) { curCust = new Customer(customerData[0], customerData[1], customerData[2], customerData[3], customerData[4], customerData[5], customerData[6], customerData[7], customerData[8], customerData[9], customerData[10], customerData[11], customerData[12], customerData[13]); curAcc = new Account(accountData[0], accountData[1], accountData[2], accountData[3], accountData[4], accountData[5], accountData[6]); curTrans = new Transaction(transactionData[0], transactionData[1], transactionData[2], transactionData[3], transactionData[4]); bankDetails.Add(curCust); accDetails.Add(curAcc); tranDetails.Add(curTrans); anyMoreData = getNextCustomer(readerIn, customerData, accountData, transactionData); } if (readerIn != null) readerIn.Close(); } } private bool getNextCustomer(StreamReader inNext, string[] nextCustomerData, string[] nextAccountData, string[] nextTransactionData) { string nextLine; int numCItems = nextCustomerData.Count(); int numAItems = nextAccountData.Count(); int numTItems = nextTransactionData.Count(); for (int i = 0; i < numCItems; i++) { nextLine = inNext.ReadLine(); if (nextLine != null) { nextCustomerData[i] = nextLine; if (i == 13) { int cItems = Convert.ToInt32(nextCustomerData[13]); for (int q = 0; q < cItems; q++) { for (int a = 0; a < numAItems; a++) { nextLine = inNext.ReadLine(); nextAccountData[a] = nextLine; if (a == 6) { int aItems = Convert.ToInt32(nextAccountData[6]); for (int w = 0; w < aItems; w++) { for (int t = 0; t < numTItems; t++) { nextLine = inNext.ReadLine(); nextTransactionData[t] = nextLine; } } } } } } } else return false; } return true; } private bool readOK(string readFile, ref StreamReader readerIn) { try { readerIn = new StreamReader(readFile); return true; } catch (FileNotFoundException notFound) { MessageBox.Show("ERROR Opening file (when reading data in)" + " - File could not be found.\n" + notFound.Message); return false; } catch (Exception e) { MessageBox.Show("ERROR Opening File (when reading data in)" + "- Operation failed.\n" + e.Message); return false; } } } } I also have three classes one for customers, one for accounts and one for transactions, which follow in that order. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace e_SOFT_Banking { class Customer { private string customerNumber; private string customerTitle; private string firstName; private string initials; //not required - defaults to null private string surname; private string dateOfBirth; private string houseNameNumber; private string streetName; private string area; //not required - defaults to null private string cityTown; private string county; private string postcode; private string password; private int numberAccounts; public Customer(string theCustomerNumber, string theCustomerTitle, string theFirstName, string theInitials, string theSurname, string theDateOfBirth, string theHouseNameNumber, string theStreetName, string theArea, string theCityTown, string theCounty, string thePostcode, string thePassword, string theNumberAccounts) { customerNumber = theCustomerNumber; customerTitle = theCustomerTitle; firstName = theFirstName; initials = theInitials; surname = theSurname; dateOfBirth = theDateOfBirth; houseNameNumber = theHouseNameNumber; streetName = theStreetName; area = theArea; cityTown = theCityTown; county = theCounty; postcode = thePostcode; password = thePassword; setNumberAccounts(theNumberAccounts); } public string getCustomerNumber() { return customerNumber; } public string getCustomerTitle() { return customerTitle; } public string getFirstName() { return firstName; } public string getInitials() { return initials; } public string getSurname() { return surname; } public string getDateOfBirth() { return dateOfBirth; } public string getHouseNameNumber() { return houseNameNumber; } public string getStreetName() { return streetName; } public string getArea() { return area; } public string getCityTown() { return cityTown; } public string getCounty() { return county; } public string getPostcode() { return postcode; } public string getPassword() { return password; } public int getNumberAccounts() { return numberAccounts; } public void setCustomerNumber(string inCustomerNumber) { customerNumber = inCustomerNumber; } public void setCustomerTitle(string inCustomerTitle) { customerTitle = inCustomerTitle; } public void setFirstName(string inFirstName) { firstName = inFirstName; } public void setInitials(string inInitials) { initials = inInitials; } public void setSurname(string inSurname) { surname = inSurname; } public void setDateOfBirth(string inDateOfBirth) { dateOfBirth = inDateOfBirth; } public void setHouseNameNumber(string inHouseNameNumber) { houseNameNumber = inHouseNameNumber; } public void setStreetName(string inStreetName) { streetName = inStreetName; } public void setArea(string inArea) { area = inArea; } public void setCityTown(string inCityTown) { cityTown = inCityTown; } public void setCounty(string inCounty) { county = inCounty; } public void setPostcode(string inPostcode) { postcode = inPostcode; } public void setPassword(string inPassword) { password = inPassword; } public void setNumberAccounts(string inNumberAccounts) { try { numberAccounts = Convert.ToInt32(inNumberAccounts); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } } } Accounts: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace e_SOFT_Banking { class Account { private string accSort; private Int64 accNumber; private string accNick; private string accDate; //not required - defaults to null private double accCurBal; private double accOverDraft; private int accNumTrans; public Account(string theAccSort, string theAccNumber, string theAccNick, string theAccDate, string theAccCurBal, string theAccOverDraft, string theAccNumTrans) { accSort = theAccSort; setAccNumber(theAccNumber); accNick = theAccNick; accDate = theAccDate; setAccCurBal(theAccCurBal); setAccOverDraft(theAccOverDraft); setAccNumTrans(theAccNumTrans); } public string getAccSort() { return accSort; } public long getAccNumber() { return accNumber; } public string getAccNick() { return accNick; } public string getAccDate() { return accDate; } public double getAccCurBal() { return accCurBal; } public double getAccOverDraft() { return accOverDraft; } public int getAccNumTrans() { return accNumTrans; } public void setAccSort(string inAccSort) { accSort = inAccSort; } public void setAccNumber(string inAccNumber) { try { accNumber = Convert.ToInt64(inAccNumber); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } public void setAccNick(string inAccNick) { accNick = inAccNick; } public void setAccDate(string inAccDate) { accDate = inAccDate; } public void setAccCurBal(string inAccCurBal) { try { accCurBal = Convert.ToDouble(inAccCurBal); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } public void setAccOverDraft(string inAccOverDraft) { try { accOverDraft = Convert.ToDouble(inAccOverDraft); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } public void setAccNumTrans(string inAccNumTrans) { try { accNumTrans = Convert.ToInt32(inAccNumTrans); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } } } Transactions: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace e_SOFT_Banking { class Transaction { private string date; private string type; private string description; private double amount; //not required - defaults to null private double balAfter; public Transaction(string theDate, string theType, string theDescription, string theAmount, string theBalAfter) { date = theDate; type = theType; description = theDescription; setAmount(theAmount); setBalAfter(theBalAfter); } public string getDate() { return date; } public string getType() { return type; } public string getDescription() { return description; } public double getAmount() { return amount; } public double getBalAfter() { return balAfter; } public void setDate(string inDate) { date = inDate; } public void setType(string inType) { type = inType; } public void setDescription(string inDescription) { description = inDescription; } public void setAmount(string inAmount) { try { amount = Convert.ToDouble(inAmount); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } public void setBalAfter(string inBalAfter) { try { balAfter = Convert.ToDouble(inBalAfter); } catch (FormatException invalidInput) { System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("ERROR" + invalidInput.Message + "Please enter a valid number"); } } } } Any help greatly appreciated.

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Why is this PHP loop rendering every row twice?

- by Christopher

I'm working on a real frankensite here not of my own design. There's a rudimentary CMS and one of the pages shows customer records from a MySQL DB. For some reason, it has no probs picking up the data from the DB - there's no duplicate records - but it renders each row twice. <?php $limit = 500; $area = 'customers_list'; $prc = 'customer_list.php'; if($_GET['page']) { include('inc/functions.php'); $page = $_GET['page']; } else { $page = 1; } $limitvalue = $page * $limit - ($limit); $customers_check = get_customers(); $customers = get_customers($limitvalue, $limit); $totalrows = count($customers_check); ?>  <table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="float: left; margin-bottom: 20px;"> <tr> <td class="col_title" width="200">Name</td> <td></td> <td class="col_title" width="200">Town/City</td> <td></td> <td class="col_title">Telephone</td> <td></td> </tr> <?php for ($i = 0; $i < count($customers); $i++) { ?> <tr> <td colspan="2" class="cus_col_1"><a href="customer_details.php?id=<?php echo $customers[$i]['customer_id']; ?>"><?php echo $customers[$i]['surname'].', '.$customers[$i]['first_name']; ?></a></td> <td colspan="2" class="cus_col_2"><?php echo $customers[$i]['town']; ?></td> <td class="cus_col_1"><?php echo $customers[$i]['telephone']; ?></td> <td class="cus_col_2"> <a href="javascript: single_execute('prc/customers.prc.php?delete=yes&id=<?php echo $customers[$i]['customer_id']; ?>')" onClick="return confirmdel();" class="btn_maroon_small" style="margin: 0px; float: right; margin-right: 10px;"><div class="btn_maroon_small_left"> <div class="btn_maroon_small_right">Delete Account</div> </div></a> <a href="customer_edit.php?id=<?php echo $customers[$i]['customer_id']; ?>" class="btn_black" style="margin: 0px; float: right; margin-right: 10px;"><div class="btn_black_left"> <div class="btn_black_right">Edit Account</div> </div></a> <a href="mailto: <?php echo $customers[$i]['email']; ?>" class="btn_black" style="margin: 0px; float: right; margin-right: 10px;"><div class="btn_black_left"> <div class="btn_black_right">Email Customer</div> </div></a> </td> </tr> <tr><td class="col_divider" colspan="6"></td></tr> <?php }; ?> </table>    <div class="pagination_holder"> <?php if($page != 1) { $pageprev = $page-1; ?> <a href="javascript: change('<?php echo $area; ?>', '<?php echo $prc; ?>?page=<?php echo $pageprev; ?>');" class="pagination_left">Previous</a> <?php } else { ?> <div class="pagination_left, page_grey">Previous</div> <?php } ?> <div class="pagination_middle"> <?php $numofpages = $totalrows / $limit; for($i = 1; $i <= $numofpages; $i++) { if($i == $page) { ?> <div class="page_number_selected"><?php echo $i; ?></div> <?php } else { ?> <a href="javascript: change('<?php echo $area; ?>', '<?php echo $prc; ?>?page=<?php echo $i; ?>');" class="page_number"><?php echo $i; ?></a> <?php } } if(($totalrows % $limit) != 0) { if($i == $page) { ?> <div class="page_number_selected"><?php echo $i; ?></div> <?php } else { ?> <a href="javascript: change('<?php echo $area; ?>', '<?php echo $prc; ?>?page=<?php echo $i; ?>');" class="page_number"><?php echo $i; ?></a> <?php } } ?> </div> <?php if(($totalrows - ($limit * $page)) > 0) { $pagenext = $page+1; ?> <a href="javascript: change('<?php echo $area; ?>', '<?php echo $prc; ?>?page=<?php echo $pagenext; ?>');" class="pagination_right">Next</a> <?php } else { ?> <div class="pagination_right, page_grey">Next</div> <?php } ?> </div>    I'm not the world's best PHP expert but I think I can see an error in a for loop when there is one... But everything looks ok to me. You'll notice that the customer name is clickable; clicking takes you to another page where you can view their full info as held in the DB - and for both rows, the customer ID is identical, and manually checking the DB shows there's no duplicate entries. The code is definitely rendering each row twice, but for what reason I have no idea. All pointers / advice appreciated.

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How can I use Perl regular expressions to parse XML data?

- by Luke

I have a pretty long piece of XML that I want to parse. I want to remove everything except for the subclass-code and city. So that I am left with something like the example below. EXAMPLE TEST SUBCLASS|MIAMI CODE <?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?> <web-export> <run-date>06/01/2010 <pub-code>TEST <ad-type>TEST <cat-code>Real Estate</cat-code> <class-code>TEST</class-code> <subclass-code>TEST SUBCLASS</subclass-code> <placement-description></placement-description> <position-description>Town House</position-description> <subclass3-code></subclass3-code> <subclass4-code></subclass4-code> <ad-number>0000284708-01</ad-number> <start-date>05/28/2010</start-date> <end-date>06/09/2010</end-date> <line-count>6</line-count> <run-count>13</run-count> <customer-type>Private Party</customer-type> <account-number>100099237</account-number> <account-name>DOE, JOHN</account-name> <addr-1>207 CLARENCE STREET</addr-1> <addr-2> </addr-2> <city>MIAMI</city> <state>FL</state> <postal-code>02910</postal-code> <country>USA</country> <phone-number>4014612880</phone-number> <fax-number></fax-number> <url-addr> </url-addr> <email-addr>[email protected]</email-addr> <pay-flag>N</pay-flag> <ad-description>DEANESTATES2BEDS2BATHSAPPLIANCED</ad-description> <order-source>Import</order-source> <order-status>Live</order-status> <payor-acct>100099237</payor-acct> <agency-flag>N</agency-flag> <rate-note></rate-note> <ad-content> MIAMI/Dean Estates: 2 beds, 2 baths. Applianced. Central air. Carpets. Laundry. 2 decks. Pool. Parking. Close to everything.No smoking. No utilities. $1275 mo. 401-578-1501. </ad-content> </ad-type> </pub-code> </run-date> </web-export> PERL So what I want to do is open an existing file read the contents then use regular expressions to eliminate the unnecessary XML tags. open(READFILE, "FILENAME"); while(<READFILE>) { $_ =~ s/<\?xml version="(.*)" standalone="(.*)"\?>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<subclass-code>//g; $_ =~ s/<\/subclass-code>\n.*/|/g; $_ =~ s/(.*)PJ RER Houses /PJ RER Houses/g; $_ =~ s/\G //g; $_ =~ s/<city>//g; $_ =~ s/<\/city>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)web-export>(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)run-date>(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)pub-code>(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)ad-type>(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)cat-code>(.*)<(\/?)cat-code>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)class-code>(.*)<(\/?)class-code>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)placement-description>(.*)<(\/?)placement-description>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)position-description>(.*)<(\/?)position-description>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)subclass3-code>(.*)<(\/?)subclass3-code>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)subclass4-code>(.*)<(\/?)subclass4-code>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)ad-number>(.*)<(\/?)ad-number>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)start-date>(.*)<(\/?)start-date>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)end-date>(.*)<(\/?)end-date>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)line-count>(.*)<(\/?)line-count>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)run-count>(.*)<(\/?)run-count>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)customer-type>(.*)<(\/?)customer-type>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)account-number>(.*)<(\/?)account-number>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)account-name>(.*)<(\/?)account-name>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)addr-1>(.*)<(\/?)addr-1>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)addr-2>(.*)<(\/?)addr-2>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)state>(.*)<(\/?)state>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)postal-code>(.*)<(\/?)postal-code>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)country>(.*)<(\/?)country>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)phone-number>(.*)<(\/?)phone-number>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)fax-number>(.*)<(\/?)fax-number>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)url-addr>(.*)<(\/?)url-addr>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)email-addr>(.*)<(\/?)email-addr>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)pay-flag>(.*)<(\/?)pay-flag>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)ad-description>(.*)<(\/?)ad-description>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)order-source>(.*)<(\/?)order-source>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)order-status>(.*)<(\/?)order-status>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)payor-acct>(.*)<(\/?)payor-acct>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)agency-flag>(.*)<(\/?)agency-flag>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<(\/?)rate-note>(.*)<(\/?)rate-note>\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<ad-content>(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/\t(.*)\n.*//g; $_ =~ s/<\/ad-content>(.*)\n.*//g; } close( READFILE1 ); Is there an easier way of doing this? I don't want to use any modules. I know that it might make this easier but the file I am reading has a lot of data in it.

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What would cause ANY .NET application to crash immediately... except a project I create and Debug in

- by blak3r

My software recently got deployed to a customer who said that the application was crashing immediately after it started. After some initial debugging, the customer provided me remote access to one of the computers which was unable to run the application. I found that the crash wasn't specific to my application. Any application which depended on the .NET framework crashed immediately. Conveniently, Visual Studio 2008 was installed so I created a quick hello world application on it and clicked Debug. The application worked fine. But, then when I tried to execute the generated binaries in the /bin/Debug/HelloWorld.exe directory outside of visual studio it crashed. List of things i've tried (UPDATED): I checked that "Everyone" has Read&Execute permissions for c:\Windows. To test that the problem was with the .NET Framework (and not my application), I attempted to download Paint .NET on to the computers. The setup frontend crashed in the same manner. Performed a repair of the .NET framework as outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908077 (Boy was this fun and time consuming). No luck. Installed .NET 3.5 SP1 (before it just had .NET 3.5) Note: my application targets 2.0 so I did this more as a long shot... but i learned in the process that .NET 3.5 SP1 also updates the underlying frameworks. Ran Aaron Stebner's .NET Setup Verification Tool. This tool indicated that .NET was successfully installed. (I forget if i checked all the versions but at least 2.0 worked). Tested some mini hello world applications which were targeted for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 and both crashed in the same way. Tried launching .NET apps via windbg cmd line. Doing this did allow me invoke my simple hello world applications. So, simple .NET hello world works when invoked by windbg or by launching via debug in visual studio... but doesn't if i try to execute it standalone. I created a dump file using WinDbg. It wasn't all that revealing to me. FAULTING_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h EXCEPTION_RECORD: 0012f710 -- (.exr 0x12f710) ExceptionAddress: 79f4ff9d (mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x00000021) ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 00000000 Parameter[1]: 00000010 Attempt to read from address 00000010 FAULTING_THREAD: 00000b44 PROCESS_NAME: MyProcess.exe ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0x80000003 - {EXCEPTION} Breakpoint A breakpoint has been reached. EXCEPTION_CODE: (HRESULT) 0x80000003 (2147483651) - One or more arguments are invalid DETOURED_IMAGE: 1 NTGLOBALFLAG: 0 APPLICATION_VERIFIER_FLAGS: 0 MANAGED_STACK: !dumpstack -EE OS Thread Id: 0xb44 (0) Current frame: ChildEBP RetAddr Caller,Callee EXCEPTION_OBJECT: !pe cb10b4 Exception object: 00cb10b4 Exception type: System.ExecutionEngineException Message: <none> InnerException: <none> StackTrace (generated): <none> StackTraceString: <none> HResult: 80131506 MANAGED_OBJECT_NAME: System.ExecutionEngineException CONTEXT: 0012f72c -- (.cxr 0x12f72c) eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000000 edx=0000000e esi=001a1490 edi=00000001 eip=79f4ff9d esp=0012f9f8 ebp=0012fa1c iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010246 mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21: 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h ds:0023:00000010=?? Resetting default scope READ_ADDRESS: 00000010 FOLLOWUP_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h BUGCHECK_STR: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN PRIMARY_PROBLEM_CLASS: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 79ef02b5 to 79f4ff9d STACK_TEXT: 79f4ff9d mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21 79ef02b5 mscorwks!PEFile::GetEntryPointToken+0xa0 79eefeaf mscorwks!SystemDomain::ExecuteMainMethod+0xd4 79fb9793 mscorwks!ExecuteEXE+0x59 79fb96df mscorwks!_CorExeMain+0x15c 7900b1b3 mscoree!_CorExeMain+0x2c 7c817077 kernel32!BaseProcessStart+0x23 SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: mscorwks IMAGE_NAME: mscorwks.dll DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 471ef729 STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0012F72C ; kb ; dds 12f9f8 ; kb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_80000003_mscorwks.dll!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken BUCKET_ID: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_DETOURED_mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 WATSON_STAGEONE_URL: http://watson.microsoft.com/StageOne/MyProcess_exe/2_4_4_39/4a8a192c/unknown/0_0_0_0/bbbbbbb4/80000003/00000000.htm?Retriage=1 Followup: MachineOwner Edit 1:The event log details for this error say it's a .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A097706)(80131506). Edit 2 (10-7-09): This issue is still active. Edit 3 (3-29-10): This update is to let everyone know that I never did successfully solve the problem. The customer who's machine this was on lost interest in solving it and just reimaged the machine :(. Thanks for all the contributions though.

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NHibernate unmapped class exception

- by John Prideaux

I am trying to implement a one-to-many relationship using NHibernate 2.1.2 but keep getting "Association references unmapped class" exceptions. I have verified that my hbm.xml files are embedded resource. Here are my classes and mappings. Any ideas? public class OrderStatus { public virtual decimal MainCommit { get; set; } public virtual decimal CommitNumber { get; set; } public virtual string InvoiceNumber { get; set; } public virtual string ShipTo { get; set; } public virtual string CustomerOrderNumber { get; set; } public virtual string Station { get; set; } public virtual DateTime RequestedShipDate { get; set; } public virtual decimal EstimatedValue { get; set; } public virtual decimal EstimatedWeight { get; set; } public virtual string Customer { get; set; } public virtual DateTime InvoiceDate { get; set; } public virtual ICollection<Promise> Promises { get; set; } } <class name="AladdinDb.Models.OrderStatus, AladdinDb" table="vorder_status"> <id name="CommitNumber" type="decimal" column="commit_no"> <generator class="assigned"> <param name="property"> Plan </param> </generator> </id> <property name="MainCommit" column="main_commit" type="decimal" /> <property name="InvoiceNumber" column="invoice_no" type="string" /> <property name="ShipTo" column="ship_to" type ="string"/> <property name="CustomerOrderNumber" column="cust_order_no" type="string" /> <property name="Station" column="station" type="string" /> <property name="RequestedShipDate" column="req_ship_date" type="DateTime" /> <property name="EstimatedValue" column="estimated_value" type="decimal"/> <property name="EstimatedWeight" column="estimated_weight" type="decimal" /> <property name="Customer" column="customer" type="string" /> <property name="InvoiceDate" column="invoice_date" /> <set name="Promises"> <key column="commit_no"></key> <one-to-many class="Promise" /> </set> </class> public class Promise { public virtual decimal CommitNumber { get; set; } public virtual DateTime PromiseDate { get; set; } public virtual string WhoAsked { get; set; } public virtual string WhoGave { get; set; } public virtual string Iffy { get; set; } } <class name="AladdinDb.Models.Promise, AladdinDb" table="promise"> <id name="CommitNumber" type="decimal" column="commit_no"> <generator class="assigned" /> </id> <property name="PromiseDate" column="promise_date" /> <property name="WhoAsked" column="who_asked" /> <property name="WhoGave" column="who_gave" /> <property name="Iffy" column="iffy" /> </class>

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Magento Onepage Success Conversion Tracking Design Pattern

- by user1734954

My intent is to track conversions through multiple channels by inserting third party javascript (for example google analytics, optimizely, pricegrabber etc.) into the footer of onepage success . I've accomplished this by adding a block to the footer reference inside of the checkout success node within local.xml and everything works appropriately. My questions are more about efficiency and extensibility. It occurred to me that it would be better to combine all of the blocks into a single block reference and then use a various methods acting on a single call to the various related models to provide the data needed for insertion into the javascript for each of the conversion tracking scripts. Some examples of the common data that conversion tracking may rely on(pseudo): Order ID , Order Total, Order.LineItem.Name(foreach) and so on Currently for each of the scripts I've made a call to the appropriate model passing the customers last order id as the load value and the calling a get() assigning the return value to a variable and then iterating through the data to match the values with the expectations of the given third party service. All of the data should be pulled once when checkout is complete each third party services may expect different data in different formats Here is an example of one of the conversion tracking template files which loads at the footer of checkout success. $order = Mage::getModel('sales/order')->loadByIncrementId(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLastRealOrderId()); $amount = number_format($order->getGrandTotal(),2); $customer = Mage::helper('customer')->getCustomer()->getData(); ?> <script type="text/javascript"> popup_email = '<?php echo($customer['email']);?>'; popup_order_number = '<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?>'; </script>  <script type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8" src="https://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_merchrevpopjs.php?retid=<something>"></script> <noscript><a href="http://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_merchrev.php?retid=<something>" target=_blank> <img src="https://images.pricegrabber.com/images/mr_noprize.jpg" border="0" width="272" height="238" alt="Merchant Evaluation"></a></noscript>  Having just a single piece of code like this is not that big of a deal, but we are doing similar things with a number of different third party services. Pricegrabber is one of the simpler examples. A more sophisticated tracking service expects a comma separated list of all of the product names, ids, prices, categories , order id etc. I would like to make it all more manageable so my idea to do the following: combine all of the template files into a single file Develop a helper class or library to deliver the data to the conversion template Goals Include Extensibility Minimal Model Calls Minimal Method Calls The Questions 1. Is a Mage helper the best route to take? 2. Is there any design pattern you may recommend for the "helper" class? 3. Why would this the design pattern you've chosen be best for this instance?

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When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Well, it depends…. If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control. But what if you are not… Update 9th March 2010 Michael Fourie gave me some feedback which I have integrated. Ed Blankenship via @edblankenship offered encouragement and a nice quote. Ewald Hofman gave me a couple of Cons, and maybe a few more soon. Ewald’s company, Avanade, currently uses Areas, but it looks like the manual management is getting too much and the project is getting cluttered. What if you are likely to have hundreds of projects, possibly with a multitude of internal and external projects? You might have 1 project for a customer or 10. This is the situation that most consultancies find themselves in and thus they need a more sustainable and maintainable option. What I am advocating is that we should have 1 “Team Project” per customer, and use areas to create “sub projects” within that single “Team Project”. "What you describe is what we generally do internally and what we recommend. We make very heavy use of area path to categorize the work within a larger project." - Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow & Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server "We tend to use areas to segregate multiple projects in the same team project and it works well." - Tiago Pascoal, Visual Studio ALM MVP "In general, I believe this approach provides consistency [to multi-product engagements] and lowers the administration and maintenance costs. All good." - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP “@MrHinsh BTW, I'm very much a fan of very large, if not huge, team projects in TFS. Just FYI :) Use Areas & Iterations.” Ed Blankenship, Visual Studio ALM MVP This would mean that SSW would have a single Team Project called “SSW” that contains all of our internal projects and consequently all of the Areas and Iteration move down one hierarchy to accommodate this. Where we would have had “\SSW\Sprint 1” we now have “\SSW\SqlDeploy\Sprint1” with “SqlDeploy” being our internal project. At the moment SSW has over 70 internal projects and more than 170 total projects in TFS. This method has long term benefits that help to simplify the support model for companies that often have limited internal support time and many projects. But, there are implications as TFS does not provide this model “out-of-the-box”. These implications stretch across Areas, Iterations, Queries, Project Portal and Version Control. Michael made a good comment, he said: I agree with your approach, assuming that in a multi-product engagement with a client, they are happy to adopt the same process template across all products. If they are not, then it’ll either be easy to convince them or there is a valid reason for having a different template - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP At SSW we have a standard template that we use and this is applied across the board, to all of our projects. We even apply any changes to the core process template to all of our existing projects as well. If you have multiple projects for the same clients on multiple templates and you want to keep it that way, then this approach will not work for you. However, if you want to standardise as we have at SSW then this approach may benefit you as well. Implications around Areas Areas should be used for topological classification/isolation of work items. You can think of this as architecture areas, organisational areas or even the main features of your application. In our scenario there is an additional top level item that represents the Project / Product that we want to chop our Team Project into. Figure: Creating a sub area to represent a product/project is easy. <teamproject> <teamproject>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Becomes: <teamproject> <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\ <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Implications around Iterations Iterations should be used for chronological classification/isolation of work items. This could include isolated time boxes, milestones or release timelines and really depends on the logical flow of your project or projects. Due to the new level in Area we need to add the same level to Iteration. This is primarily because it is unlikely that the sprints in each of your projects/products will start and end at the same time. This is just a reality of managing multiple projects. Figure: Adding the same Area value to Iteration as the top level item adds flexibility to Iteration. <teamproject>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Implications around Queries Queries are used to filter your work items based on a specified level of granularity. There are a number of queries that are built into a project created using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, but we now have multiple projects and it would be a pain to have to edit all of the work items every time we changed project, and that would only allow one team to work on one project at a time. Figure: The Queries that are created in a normal MSF Agile 5.0 project do not quite suit our new needs. In order for project contributors to be able to query based on their project we need a couple of things. The first thing I did was to create an “_Area Template” folder that has a copy of the project layout with all the queries setup to filter based on the “_Area Template” Area and the “_Sprint template” you can see in the Area and Iteration views. Figure: The template is currently easily drag and drop, but you then need to edit the queries to point at the right Area and Iteration. This needs a tool. I then created an “Areas” folder to hold all of the area specific queries. So, when you go to create a new TFS Sub-Project you just drag “_Area Template” while holding “Ctrl” and drop it onto “Areas”. There is a little setup here. That said I managed it in around 10 minutes which is not so bad, and I can imagine it being quite easy to build a tool to create these queries Figure: These new queries can be configured in around 10 minutes, which includes setting up the Area and Iteration as well. Version Control What about your source code? Well, that is the easiest of the lot. Just create a sub folder for each of your projects/products. Figure: Creating sub folders in source control is easy as “Right click | Create new folder”. <teamproject>\DEV\Main\ Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\DEV\Main\ Conclusion I think it is up to each company to make a call on how you want to configure your Team Projects and it depends completely on how many projects/products you are going to have for each customer including yourself. If we decide to utilise this route it will require some configuration to get our 170+ projects into this format, and I will probably be writing some tools to help. Pros You only have one project to upgrade when a process template changes – After going through an upgrade of over 170 project prior to the changes in the RC I can tell you that that many projects is no fun. Standardises your Process Template – You will always have the same Process implementation across projects/products without exception You get tighter control over the permissions – Yes, you can do this on a standard Team Project, but it gets a lot easier with practice. You can “move” work items from one “product” to another – Have we not always wanted to do that. You can rename your projects – Wahoo: everyone wants to do this, now you can. One set of Reporting Services reports to manage – You set an area and iteration to run reports anyway, so you may as well set both. Simplified Check-In Policies– There is only one set of check-in policies per client. This simplifies administration of policies. Simplified Alerts – As alerts are applied across multiple projects this simplifies your alert rules as per client. Cons All of these cons could be mitigated by a custom tool that helps automate creation of “Sub-projects” within Team Projects. This custom tool could create areas, Iteration, permissions, SharePoint and queries. It just does not exist yet :) You need to configure the Areas and Iterations You need to configure the permissions You may need to configure sub sites for SharePoint (depends on your requirement) – If you have two projects/products in the same Team Project then you will not see the burn down for each one out-of-the-box, but rather a cumulative for the Team Project. This is not really that much of a problem as you would have to configure your burndown graphs for your current iteration anyway. note: When you create a sub site to a TFS linked portal it will inherit the settings of its parent site :) This is fantastic as it means that you can easily create sub sites and then set the Area and Iteration path in each of the reports to be the correct one. Every team wants their own customization (via Ewald Hofman) - small teams of 2 persons against teams of 30 – or even outsourcing – need their own process, you cannot allow that because everybody gets the same work item types. note: Luckily at SSW this is not a problem as our template is standardised across all projects and customers. Large list of builds (via Ewald Hofman) – As the build list in Team Explorer is just a flat list it can get very cluttered. note: I would mitigate this by removing any build that has not been run in over 30 days. The build template and workflow will still be available in version control, but it will clean the list. Feedback Now that I have explained this method, what do you think? What other pros and cons can you see? What do you think of this approach? Will you be using it? What tools would you like to support you? Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,TFS Administration,TFS,Team Foundation Server,Project Planning,TFS Customisation

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Implementing a generic repository for WCF data services

- by cibrax

The repository implementation I am going to discuss here is not exactly what someone would call repository in terms of DDD, but it is an abstraction layer that becomes handy at the moment of unit testing the code around this repository. In other words, you can easily create a mock to replace the real repository implementation. The WCF Data Services update for .NET 3.5 introduced a nice feature to support two way data bindings, which is very helpful for developing WPF or Silverlight based application but also for implementing the repository I am going to talk about. As part of this feature, the WCF Data Services Client library introduced a new collection DataServiceCollection<T> that implements INotifyPropertyChanged to notify the data context (DataServiceContext) about any change in the association links. This means that it is not longer necessary to manually set or remove the links in the data context when an item is added or removed from a collection. Before having this new collection, you basically used the following code to add a new item to a collection. Order order = new Order { Name = "Foo" }; OrderItem item = new OrderItem { Name = "bar", UnitPrice = 10, Qty = 1 }; var context = new OrderContext(); context.AddToOrders(order); context.AddToOrderItems(item); context.SetLink(item, "Order", order); context.SaveChanges(); Now, thanks to this new collection, everything is much simpler and similar to what you have in other ORMs like Entity Framework or L2S. Order order = new Order { Name = "Foo" }; OrderItem item = new OrderItem { Name = "bar", UnitPrice = 10, Qty = 1 }; order.Items.Add(item); var context = new OrderContext(); context.AddToOrders(order); context.SaveChanges(); In order to use this new feature, you first need to enable V2 in the data service, and then use some specific arguments in the datasvcutil tool (You can find more information about this new feature and how to use it in this post). DataSvcUtil /uri:"http://localhost:3655/MyDataService.svc/" /out:Reference.cs /dataservicecollection /version:2.0 Once you use those two arguments, the generated proxy classes will use DataServiceCollection<T> rather than a simple ObjectCollection<T>, which was the default collection in V1. There are some aspects that you need to know to use this feature correctly. 1. All the entities retrieved directly from the data context with a query track the changes and report those to the data context automatically. 2. A entity created with “new” does not track any change in the properties or associations. In order to enable change tracking in this entity, you need to do the following trick. public Order CreateOrder() { var collection = new DataServiceCollection<Order>(this.context); var order = new Order(); collection.Add(order); return order; } You basically need to create a collection, and add the entity to that collection with the “Add” method to enable change tracking on that entity. 3. If you need to attach an existing entity (For example, if you created the entity with the “new” operator rather than retrieving it from the data context with a query) to a data context for tracking changes, you can use the “Load” method in the DataServiceCollection. var order = new Order { Id = 1 }; var collection = new DataServiceCollection<Order>(this.context); collection.Load(order); In this case, the order with Id = 1 must exist on the data source exposed by the Data service. Otherwise, you will get an error because the entity did not exist. These cool extensions methods discussed by Stuart Leeks in this post to replace all the magic strings in the “Expand” operation with Expression Trees represent another feature I am going to use to implement this generic repository. Thanks to these extension methods, you could replace the following query with magic strings by a piece of code that only uses expressions. Magic strings, var customers = dataContext.Customers .Expand("Orders") .Expand("Orders/Items") Expressions, var customers = dataContext.Customers .Expand(c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items)) That query basically returns all the customers with their orders and order items. Ok, now that we have the automatic change tracking support and the expression support for explicitly loading entity associations, we are ready to create the repository. The interface for this repository looks like this,public interface IRepository { T Create<T>() where T : new(); void Update<T>(T entity); void Delete<T>(T entity); IQueryable<T> RetrieveAll<T>(params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties); IQueryable<T> Retrieve<T>(Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties); void Attach<T>(T entity); void SaveChanges(); } The Retrieve and RetrieveAll methods are used to execute queries against the data service context. While both methods receive an array of expressions to load associations explicitly, only the Retrieve method receives a predicate representing the “where” clause. The following code represents the final implementation of this repository.public class DataServiceRepository: IRepository { ResourceRepositoryContext context; public DataServiceRepository() : this (new DataServiceContext()) { } public DataServiceRepository(DataServiceContext context) { this.context = context; } private static string ResolveEntitySet(Type type) { var entitySetAttribute = (EntitySetAttribute)type.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(EntitySetAttribute), true).FirstOrDefault(); if (entitySetAttribute != null) return entitySetAttribute.EntitySet; return null; } public T Create<T>() where T : new() { var collection = new DataServiceCollection<T>(this.context); var entity = new T(); collection.Add(entity); return entity; } public void Update<T>(T entity) { this.context.UpdateObject(entity); } public void Delete<T>(T entity) { this.context.DeleteObject(entity); } public void Attach<T>(T entity) { var collection = new DataServiceCollection<T>(this.context); collection.Load(entity); } public IQueryable<T> Retrieve<T>(Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties) { var entitySet = ResolveEntitySet(typeof(T)); var query = context.CreateQuery<T>(entitySet); foreach (var e in eagerProperties) { query = query.Expand(e); } return query.Where(predicate); } public IQueryable<T> RetrieveAll<T>(params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties) { var entitySet = ResolveEntitySet(typeof(T)); var query = context.CreateQuery<T>(entitySet); foreach (var e in eagerProperties) { query = query.Expand(e); } return query; } public void SaveChanges() { this.context.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions.Batch); } } For instance, you can use the following code to retrieve customers with First name equal to “John”, and all their orders in a single call. repository.Retrieve<Customer>( c => c.FirstName == “John”, //Where c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items)); In case, you want to have some pre-defined queries that you are going to use across several places, you can put them in an specific class. public static class CustomerQueries { public static Expression<Func<Customer, bool>> LastNameEqualsTo(string lastName) { return c => c.LastName == lastName; } } And then, use it with the repository. repository.Retrieve<Customer>( CustomerQueries.LastNameEqualsTo("foo"), c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items));

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Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

- by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

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

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Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Oracle WebCenter Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss

- by Christie Flanagan

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This week on the WebCenter blog, we’ll focus in on the sessions you definitely don’t want to miss while you’re in San Francisco next week. Monday, October 1 will be a day focused on strategy. Here are the sessions you want to add to your calendar: CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West – 3001 Start things off with Oracle WebCenter’s Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism and Roel Stalman, VP of Product Management to learn more about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and to understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage, customers, empower employees, and enable partners. This session will also feature Richard Backx, Business IT Architect/Consultant, for the Dutch telecom, KPN. Richard has played a key role in the roll-out of WebCenter products for KPN’s multibrand portals with a specific focus on creating the best customer journey platform for all the company’s digital channels. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! Dig deeper into WebCenter’s strategy for its ECM, portal, web experience management and social collaboration in the following sessions: CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West – 3001 Oracle WebCenter Content provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM - Moscone West - 3009 Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001 To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, extend the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001 One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.Attention WebCenter Customers: Last Day to RSVP for WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream invite Oracle WebCenter customers to a private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco's finest hotels. Please join us and fellow Oracle WebCenter customers for hors d'oeuvres and cocktails at this exclusive reception. Don't miss this opportunity to meet and talk with executives from Oracle WebCenter product management and product marketing, and premier Oracle WebCenter partners. We look forward to seeing you! RSVP today.

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Oracle WebCenter Partner Program

- by kellsey.ruppel

In competitive marketplaces, your company needs to quickly respond to changes and new trends, in order to open opportunities and build long-term growth. Oracle has a variety of next-generation services, solutions and resources that will leverage the differentiators in your offerings. Name your partnering needs: Oracle has the answer. This week we’d like to focus on Partners and the value your organization can gain from working with the Oracle PartnerNetwork. The Oracle PartnerNetwork will empower your company with exceptional resources to distinguish your offerings from the competition, seize opportunities, and increase your sales. We’re happy to welcome Christine Kungl, and Brian Buzzell, from Oracle’s World Wide Alliances & Channels (WWA&C) WebCenter Partner Enablement team, as today’s guests on the Oracle WebCenter blog. Q: What is the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN)?A: Christine: Oracle’s PartnerNetwork (OPN) is a collaborative partnership which allows registered companies specific added value resources to help differentiate themselves from their competition. Through OPN programs it provides companies the ability to seize and target opportunities, educate and train their teams, and leverage unparalleled opportunity given Oracle’s large market footprint. OPN’s multi-level programs are targeted at different levels allowing companies to grow and evolve with Oracle based on their business needs. As part of their OPN memberships partners are encouraged to become OPN Specialized allowing those partners additional differentiation in Oracle’s Partner Network Community. Q: What is an OPN Specialization and what resources are available for Specialized Partners?A: Brian: Oracle wanted a better way for our partners to differentiate their special skills and expertise, as well a more effective way to communicate that difference to customers. Oracle’s expanding product portfolio demanded that we be able to identify partners with significant product knowledge—those who had made an investment in Oracle and a continuing commitment to deliver Oracle solutions. And with more than 30,000 Oracle partners around the world, Oracle needed a way for our customers to choose the right partner for their business. So how did Oracle meet this need? With the new partner program: Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized. In this new program, Oracle partners are: Specialized : Differentiating themselves from the competition with expertise that set them apart Recognized: Being acknowledged for investing in becoming Oracle experts in specialized areas. Preferred : Connecting with potential customers who are seeking value-added solutions for their business OPN Specialized provides all partners with educational opportunities, training, and tools specially designed to build competency and grow business. Partners can serve their customers better through key resources:OPN Specialized Knowledge Zones – Located on the updated and enhanced OPN portal— provide a single point of entry for all education and training information for Oracle partners. Enablement 2.0 Resources —Enablement 2.0 helps Oracle partners build their competencies and skills through a variety of educational opportunities and expanded training choices. These resources include: Enablement 2.0 “Boot camps” provide three-tiered learning levels that help jump-start partner training The role-based training covers Oracle’s application and technology products and offers a combination of classroom lectures, hands-on lab exercises, and case studies. Enablement 2.0 Interactive guided learning paths (GLPs) with recommendations on how to achieve specialization Upgraded partner solution kits Enhanced, specialized business centers available 24/7 around the globe on the OPN portal OPN Competency Center—Tracking ProgressThe OPN Competency Center keeps track as a partner applies for and achieves specialization in selected areas. You start with an assessment that compares your organization’s current skills and experience with the requirements for specialization in the area you have chosen. The OPN Competency Center then provides a roadmap that itemizes the skills and the knowledge you need to earn specialized status. In summary, OPN Specialization not only includes key training resources but a way to track and show progression for your partner organization. Q: What is are the OPN Membership Levels and what are the benefits?A: Christine: The base OPN membership levels are: Remarketer: At the Remarketer level, retailers can choose to resell select Oracle products with the backing of authorized, regionally located, value-added distributors (VADs). The Remarketer level has no fees and no partner agreement with Oracle, but does offer online training and sales tools through the OPN portal.Program Details: RemarketerSilver Level: The Silver level is for Oracle partners who are focused on reselling and developing business with products ordered through the Oracle 1-Click Ordering Program. The Silver level provides a cost-effective, yet scalable way for partners to start an OPN Specialized membership and offers a substantial set of benefits that lets partners increase their competitive positioning. Program Details: SilverGold Level: Gold-level partners have the ability to specialize, helping them grow their business and create differentiation in the marketplace. Oracle partners at the Gold level can develop, sell, or implement the full stack of Oracle solutions and can apply to resell Oracle Applications.Program Details: GoldPlatinum Level: The Platinum level is for Oracle partners who want the highest level of benefits and are committed to reaching a minimum of five specializations. Platinum partners are recognized for their expertise in a broad range of products and technology, and receive dedicated support from Oracle.Program Details: PlatinumIn addition we recently introduced a new level:Diamond Level: This level is the most prestigious level of OPN Specialized. It allows companies to differentiate further because of their focused depth and breadth of their expertise. Program Details: DiamondSo as you can see there are various levels cost effective ways that Partners can get assistance, differentiation through OPN membership. Q: What role does the Oracle's World Wide Alliances & Channels (WWA&C), Partner Enablement teams and the WebCenter Community play? A: Brian: Oracle’s WWA&C teams are responsible for manage relationships, educating their teams, creating go-to-market solutions and fostering communities for Oracle partners worldwide. The WebCenter Partner Enablement Middleware Team is tasked to create, manage and distribute Specialization resources for the WebCenter Partner community. Q: What WebCenter Specializations are currently available?A: Christine: As of now here are the following WebCenter Specializations and their availability: Oracle WebCenter Portal Specialization (Oracle WebCenter Portal): Available NowThe Oracle WebCenter Specialization provides insight into the following products: WebCenter Services, WebCenter Spaces, and WebLogic Portal.Oracle WebCenter Specialized Partners can efficiently use Oracle WebCenter products to create social applications, enterprise portals, communities, composite applications, and Internet or intranet Web sites on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA). The suite combines the development of rich internet applications; a multi-channel portal framework; and a suite of horizontal WebCenter applications, which provide content, presence, and social networking capabilities to create a highly interactive user experience. Oracle WebCenter Content Specialization: Available NowThe Oracle WebCenter Content Specialization provides insight into the following products; Universal Content Management, WebCenter Records Management, WebCenter Imaging, WebCenter Distributed Capture, and WebCenter Capture.Oracle WebCenter Content Specialized Partners can efficiently build content-rich business applications, reuse content, and integrate hundreds of content services with other business applications. This allows our customers to decrease costs, automate processes, reduce resource bottlenecks, share content effectively, minimize the number of lost documents, and better manage risk. Oracle WebCenter Sites Specialization: Available Q1 2012Oracle WebCenter Sites is part of the broader Oracle WebCenter platform that provides organizations with a complete customer experience management solution. Partners that align with the new Oracle WebCenter Sites platform allow their customers organizations to: Leverage customer information from all channels and systems Manage interactions across all channels Unify commerce, merchandising, marketing, and service across all channels Provide personalized, choreographed consumer journeys across all channels Integrate order orchestration, supply chain management and order fulfillment Q: What criteria does the Partner organization need to achieve Specialization? What about individual Sales, PreSales & Implementation Specialist/Technical consultants?A: Brian: Each Oracle WebCenter Specialization has unique Business Criteria that must be met in order to achieve that Specialization. This includes a unique number of transactions (co-sell, re-sell, and referral), customer references and then unique number of specialists as part of a partner team (Sales, Pre-Sales, Implementation, and Support). Each WebCenter Specialization provides training resources (GLPs, BootCamps, Assessments and Exams for individuals on a partner’s staff to fulfill those requirements. That criterion can be found for each Specialization on the Specialize tab for each WebCenter Knowledge Zone. Here are the sample criteria, recommended courses, exams for the WebCenter Portal Specialization: WebCenter Portal Specialization Criteria Q: Do you have any suggestions on the best way for partners to get started if they would like to know more?A: Christine: The best way to start is for partners is look at their business and core Oracle team focus and then look to become specialized in one or more areas. Once you have selected the Specializations that are right for your business, you need to follow the first 3 key steps described below. The fourth step outlines the additional process to follow if you meet the criteria to be Advanced Specialized. Note that Step 4 may not be done without first following Steps 1-3.1. Join the Knowledge Zone(s) where you want to achieve Specialized status Go to the Knowledge Zone lick on the "Why Partner" tab Click on the "Join Knowledge Zone" link 2. Meet the Specialization criteria - Define and implement plans in your organization to achieve the competency and business criteria targets of the Specialization. (Note: Worldwide OPN members at the Gold, Platinum, or Diamond level and their Associates at the Gold, Platinum, or Diamond level may count their collective resources to meet the business and competency criteria required for specialization in this area.) 3. Apply for Specialization – when you have met the business and competency criteria required, inform Oracle by completing the following steps: Click on the "Specialize" tab in the Knowledge Zone Click on the "Apply Now" button Complete the online application form Oracle will validate the information provided, and once approved, you will receive notification from Oracle of your awarded Specialized status. Need more information? Access our Step by Step Guide (PDF) 4. Apply for Advanced Specialization (Optional) – If your company has on staff 50 unique Certified Implementation Specialists in your company's approved Specialization's product set, let Oracle know by following these steps: Ensure that you have 50 or more unique individuals that are Certified Implementation Specialists in the specific Specialization awarded to your company If you are pooling resources from another Associate or Worldwide entity, ensure you know that company’s name and country Have your Oracle PRM Administrator complete the online Advanced Specialization Application Oracle will validate the information provided, and once approved, you will receive notification from Oracle of your awarded Advanced Specialized status. There are additional resources on OPN as well as the broader WebCenter Community: v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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: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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Taking web sites offline for demonstration

While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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Key ATG architecture principles

- by Glen Borkowski

Overview The purpose of this article is to describe some of the important foundational concepts of ATG. This is not intended to cover all areas of the ATG platform, just the most important subset - the ones that allow ATG to be extremely flexible, configurable, high performance, etc. For more information on these topics, please see the online product manuals. Modules The first concept is called the 'ATG Module'. Simply put, you can think of modules as the building blocks for ATG applications. The ATG development team builds the out of the box product using modules (these are the 'out of the box' modules). Then, when a customer is implementing their site, they build their own modules that sit 'on top' of the out of the box ATG modules. Modules can be very simple - containing minimal definition, and perhaps a small amount of configuration. Alternatively, a module can be rather complex - containing custom logic, database schema definitions, configuration, one or more web applications, etc. Modules generally will have dependencies on other modules (the modules beneath it). For example, the Commerce Reference Store module (CRS) requires the DCS (out of the box commerce) module. Modules have a ton of value because they provide a way to decouple a customers implementation from the out of the box ATG modules. This allows for a much easier job when it comes time to upgrade the ATG platform. Modules are also a very useful way to group functionality into a single package which can be leveraged across multiple ATG applications. One very important thing to understand about modules, or more accurately, ATG as a whole, is that when you start ATG, you tell it what module(s) you want to start. One of the first things ATG does is to look through all the modules you specified, and for each one, determine a list of modules that are also required to start (based on each modules dependencies). Once this final, ordered list is determined, ATG continues to boot up. One of the outputs from the ordered list of modules is that each module can contain it's own classes and configuration. During boot, the ordered list of modules drives the unified classpath and configpath. This is what determines which classes override others, and which configuration overrides other configuration. Think of it as a layered approach. The structure of a module is well defined. It simply looks like a folder in a filesystem that has certain other folders and files within it. Here is a list of items that can appear in a module: MyModule: META-INF - this is required, along with a file called MANIFEST.MF which describes certain properties of the module. One important property is what other modules this module depends on. config - this is typically present in most modules. It defines a tree structure (folders containing properties files, XML, etc) that maps to ATG components (these are described below). lib - this contains the classes (typically in jarred format) for any code defined in this module j2ee - this is where any web-apps would be stored. src - in case you want to include the source code for this module, it's standard practice to put it here sql - if your module requires any additions to the database schema, you should place that schema here Here's a screenshots of a module: Modules can also contain sub-modules. A dot-notation is used when referring to these sub-modules (i.e. MyModule.Versioned, where Versioned is a sub-module of MyModule). Finally, it is important to completely understand how modules work if you are going to be able to leverage them effectively. There are many different ways to design modules you want to create, some approaches are better than others, especially if you plan to share functionality between multiple different ATG applications. Components A component in ATG can be thought of as a single item that performs a certain set of related tasks. An example could be a ProductViews component - used to store information about what products the current customer has viewed. Components have properties (also called attributes). The ProductViews component could have properties like lastProductViewed (stores the ID of the last product viewed) or productViewList (stores the ID's of products viewed in order of their being viewed). The previous examples of component properties would typically also offer get and set methods used to retrieve and store the property values. Components typically will also offer other types of useful methods aside from get and set. In the ProductViewed component, we might want to offer a hasViewed method which will tell you if the customer has viewed a certain product or not. Components are organized in a tree like hierarchy called 'nucleus'. Nucleus is used to locate and instantiate ATG Components. So, when you create a new ATG component, it will be able to be found 'within' nucleus. Nucleus allows ATG components to reference one another - this is how components are strung together to perform meaningful work. It's also a mechanism to prevent redundant configuration - define it once and refer to it from everywhere. Here is a screenshot of a component in nucleus: Components can be extremely simple (i.e. a single property with a get method), or can be rather complex offering many properties and methods. To be an ATG component, a few things are required: a class - you can reference an existing out of the box class or you could write your own a properties file - this is used to define your component the above items must be located 'within' nucleus by placing them in the correct spot in your module's config folder Within the properties file, you will need to point to the class you want to use: $class=com.mycompany.myclass You may also want to define the scope of the class (request, session, or global): $scope=session In summary, ATG Components live in nucleus, generally have links to other components, and provide some meaningful type of work. You can configure components as well as extend their functionality by writing code. Repositories Repositories (a.k.a. Data Anywhere Architecture) is the mechanism that ATG uses to access data primarily stored in relational databases, but also LDAP or other backend systems. ATG applications are required to be very high performance, and data access is critical in that if not handled properly, it could create a bottleneck. ATG's repository functionality has been around for a long time - it's proven to be extremely scalable. Developers new to ATG need to understand how repositories work as this is a critical aspect of the ATG architecture. Repositories essentially map relational tables to objects in ATG, as well as handle caching. ATG defines many repositories out of the box (i.e. user profile, catalog, orders, etc), and this is comprised of both the underlying database schema along with the associated repository definition files (XML). It is fully expected that implementations will extend / change the out of the box repository definitions, so there is a prescribed approach to doing this. The first thing to be sure of is to encapsulate your repository definition additions / changes within your own module (as described above). The other important best practice is to never modify the out of the box schema - in other words, don't add columns to existing ATG tables, just create your own new tables. These will help ensure you can easily upgrade your application at a later date. xml-combination As mentioned earlier, when you start ATG, the order of the modules will determine the final configpath. Files within this configpath are 'layered' such that modules on top can override configuration of modules below it. This is the same concept for repository definition files. If you want to add a few properties to the out of the box user profile, you simply need to create an XML file containing only your additions, and place it in the correct location in your module. At boot time, your definition will be combined (hence the term xml-combination) with the lower, out of the box modules, with the result being a user profile that contains everything (out of the box, plus your additions). Aside from just adding properties, there are also ways to remove and change properties. types of properties Aside from the normal 'database backed' properties, there are a few other interesting types: transient properties - these are properties that are in memory, but not backed by any database column. These are useful for temporary storage. java-backed properties - by nature, these are transient, but in addition, when you access this property (by called the get method) instead of looking up a piece of data, it performs some logic and returns the results. 'Age' is a good example - if you're storing a birth date on the profile, but your business rules are defined in terms of someones age, you could create a simple java-backed property to look at the birth date and compare it to the current date, and return the persons age. derived properties - this is what allows for inheritance within the repository structure. You could define a property at the category level, and have the product inherit it's value as well as override it. This is useful for setting defaults, with the ability to override. caching There are a number of different caching modes which are useful at different times depending on the nature of the data being cached. For example, the simple cache mode is useful for things like user profiles. This is because the user profile will typically only be used on a single instance of ATG at one time. Simple cache mode is also useful for read-only types of data such as the product catalog. Locked cache mode is useful when you need to ensure that only one ATG instance writes to a particular item at a time - an example would be a customers order. There are many options in terms of configuring caching which are outside the scope of this article - please refer to the product manuals for more details. Other important concepts - out of scope for this article There are a whole host of concepts that are very important pieces to the ATG platform, but are out of scope for this article. Here's a brief description of some of them: formhandlers - these are ATG components that handle form submissions by users. pipelines - these are configurable chains of logic that are used for things like handling a request (request pipeline) or checking out an order. special kinds of repositories (versioned, files, secure, ...) - there are a couple different types of repositories that are used in various situations. See the manuals for more information. web development - JSP/ DSP tag library - ATG provides a traditional approach to developing web applications by providing a tag library called the DSP library. This library is used throughout your JSP pages to interact with all the ATG components. messaging - a message sub-system used as another way for components to interact. personalization - ability for business users to define a personalized user experience for customers. See the other blog posts related to personalization.

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??????Oracle Service Cloud??

- by hamsun

Adriana Garjoaba,Oracle,2014?5?16? 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RightNow??????????????,????????????????????? ????????RightNow??,?????????????????????,????????????,???????

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What is the Oracle Utilities Application Framework?

- by Anthony Shorten

The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is a reusable, scalable and flexible java based framework which allows other products to be built, configured and implemented in a standard way. Note: Even though the Framework is built in java it can be integrated with COBOL based extensions for backward compatibility. When Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing was migrated from V1 to V2, it was decided that the technical aspects of that product be separated to allow for reuse and independence from technical issues. The idea was that all the technical aspects would be concentrated in this separate product (i.e. a framework) and allow all products using the framework to concentrate on delivering superior functionality. The product was named the Oracle Utilities Application Framework (oufw is the product code). The technical components are contained in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework which can be summarized as follows: Metadata - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is responsible for defining and using the metadata to define the runtime behavior of the product. All the metadata definition and management is contained within the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. UI Management - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is responsible for defining and rendering the pages and responsible for ensuring the pages are in the appropriate format for the locale. Integration - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is responsible for providing the integration points to the architecture. Refer to the Oracle Utilities Application Framework Integration Overview for more details Tools - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework provides a common set of facilities and tools that can be used across all products. Technology - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is responsible for all technology standards compliance, platform support and integration. There are a number of products from the Tax and Utilities Global Business Unit as well as from the Financial Services Global Business Unit that are built upon the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. These products require the Oracle Utilities Application Framework to be installed first and then the product itself installed onto the framework to complete the installation process. There are a number of key benefits that the Oracle Utilities Application Framework provides to these products: Common facilities - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework provides a standard set of technical facilities that mean that products can concentrate in the unique aspects of their markets rather than making technical decisions. Common methods of configuration - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework standardizes the technical configuration process for a product. Customers can effectively reuse the configuration process across products. Multi-lingual and Multi-platform - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework allows the products to be offered in more markets and across multiple platforms for maximized flexibility. Common methods of implementation - The Oracle Utilities Application Framework standardizes the technical aspects of a product implementation. Customers can effectively reuse the technical implementation process across products. Quicker adoption of new technologies - As new technologies and standards are identified as being important for the product line, they can be integrated centrally benefiting multiple products. Cross product reuse - As enhancements to the Oracle Utilities Application Framework are identified by a particular product, all products can potentially benefit from the enhancement. Note: Use of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework does not preclude the introduction of product specific technologies or facilities to satisfy market needs. The framework minimizes the need and assists in the quick integration of a new product specific piece of technology (if necessary). The Framework is not available as a product itself and is bundled with Tax and Utilities Global Business Unit prodicts. At the present time the following products are on the Framework: Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing (V2 and above) Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management (V2 and above) Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence (V2 and above) Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforice Management (V2 and above)

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A basic T4 template for generating Model Metadata in ASP.NET MVC2

- by rajbk

I have been learning about T4 templates recently by looking at the awesome ADO.NET POCO entity generator. By using the POCO entity generator template as a base, I created a T4 template which generates metadata classes for a given Entity Data Model. This speeds coding by reducing the amount of typing required when creating view specific model and its metadata. To use this template, Download the template provided at the bottom. Set two values in the template file. The first one should point to the EDM you wish to generate metadata for. The second is used to suffix the namespace and classes that get generated. string inputFile = @"Northwind.edmx"; string suffix = "AutoMetadata"; Add the template to your MVC 2 Visual Studio 2010 project. Once you add it, a number of classes will get added to your project based on the number of entities you have. One of these classes is shown below. Note that the DisplayName, Required and StringLength attributes have been added by the t4 template. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; namespace NorthwindSales.ModelsAutoMetadata { public partial class CustomerAutoMetadata { [DisplayName("Customer ID")] [Required] [StringLength(5)] public string CustomerID { get; set; } [DisplayName("Company Name")] [Required] [StringLength(40)] public string CompanyName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Name")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Title")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactTitle { get; set; } [DisplayName("Address")] [StringLength(60)] public string Address { get; set; } [DisplayName("City")] [StringLength(15)] public string City { get; set; } [DisplayName("Region")] [StringLength(15)] public string Region { get; set; } [DisplayName("Postal Code")] [StringLength(10)] public string PostalCode { get; set; } [DisplayName("Country")] [StringLength(15)] public string Country { get; set; } [DisplayName("Phone")] [StringLength(24)] public string Phone { get; set; } [DisplayName("Fax")] [StringLength(24)] public string Fax { get; set; } } } The gen’d class can be used from your project by creating a partial class with the entity name and setting the MetadataType attribute.namespace MyProject.Models{ [MetadataType(typeof(CustomerAutoMetadata))] public partial class Customer { }} You can also copy the code in the metadata class generated and create your own ViewModel class. Note that the template is super basic and does not take into account complex properties. I have tested it with the Northwind database. This is a work in progress. Feel free to modify the template to suite your requirements. Standard disclaimer follows: Use At Your Own Risk, Works on my machine running VS 2010 RTM/ASP.NET MVC 2 AutoMetaData.zip Mr. Incredible: Of course I have a secret identity. I don't know a single superhero who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?

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Romanian parter Omnilogic Delivers “No Limits” Scalability, Performance, Security, and Affordability through Next-Generation, Enterprise-Grade Engineered Systems

- by swalker

Omnilogic SRL is a leading technology and information systems provider in Romania and central and Eastern Europe. An Oracle Value-Added Distributor Partner, Omnilogic resells Oracle software, hardware, and engineered systems to Oracle Partner Network members and provides specialized training, support, and testing facilities. Independent software vendors (ISVs) also use Omnilogic’s demonstration and testing facilities to upgrade the performance and efficiency of their solutions and those of their customers by migrating them from competitor technologies to Oracle platforms. Omnilogic also has a dedicated offering for ISV solutions, based on Oracle technology in a hosting service provider model. Omnilogic wanted to help Oracle Partners and ISVs migrate solutions to Oracle Exadata and sell Oracle Exadata to end-customers. It installed Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 Quarter Rack at its data center to create a demonstration and testing environment. Demonstrations proved that Oracle Exadata achieved processing speeds up to 100 times faster than competitor systems, cut typical back-up times from 6 hours to 20 minutes, and stored 10 times more data. Oracle Partners and ISVs learned that migrating solutions to Oracle Exadata’s preconfigured, pre-integrated hardware and software can be completed rapidly, at low cost, without business disruption, and with reduced ongoing operating costs. Challenges A word from Omnilogic “Oracle Exadata is the new killer application—the smartest solution on the market. There is no competition.” – Sorin Dragomir, Chief Operating Officer, Omnilogic SRL Enable Oracle Partners in Romania and central and eastern Europe to achieve Oracle Exadata Ready status by providing facilities to test and optimize existing applications and build real-life proofs of concept (POCs) for new solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machine Provide technical support and demonstration facilities for ISVs migrating their customers’ solutions from competitor technologies to Oracle Exadata to maximize performance, scalability, and security; optimize hardware and datacenter space; cut maintenance costs; and improve return on investment Demonstrate power of Oracle Exadata’s high-performance, high-capacity engineered systems for customer-facing businesses, such as government organizations, telecommunications, banking and insurance, and utility companies, which typically require continuous availability to support very large data volumes Showcase Oracle Exadata’s unchallenged online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities that cut application run times to provide unrivalled query turnaround and user response speeds while significantly reducing back-up times and eliminating risk of unplanned outages Capitalize on providing a world-class training and demonstration environment for Oracle Exadata to accelerate sales with Oracle Partners Solutions Created a testing environment to enable Oracle Partners and ISVs to test their own solutions and those of their customers on Oracle Exadata running on Oracle Enterprise Linux or Oracle Solaris Express to benchmark performance prior to migration Leveraged expertise on Oracle Exadata to offer Oracle Exadata training, migration, support seminars and to showcase live demonstrations for Oracle Partners Proved how Oracle Exadata’s pre-engineered systems, that come assembled, configured, and ready to run, reduce deployment time and cost, minimize risk, and help customers achieve the full performance potential immediately after go live Increased processing speeds 10-fold and with zero data loss for a telecommunications provider’s client-facing customer relationship management solution Achieved performance improvements of between 6 and 100 times faster for financial and utility company applications currently running on IBM, Microsoft, or SAP HANA platforms Showed how daily closure procedures carried out overnight by banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions to analyze each day’s business, can typically be cut from around six hours to 20 minutes, some 18 times faster, when running on Oracle Exadata Simulated concurrent back-ups while running applications under normal working conditions to prove that Oracle Exadata-based solutions can be backed up during business hours without causing bottlenecks or impacting the end-user experience Demonstrated that Oracle Exadata’s built-in analytics, data mining and OLTP capabilities make it the highest-performance, lowest-cost choice for large data warehousing operations Showed how Oracle Exadata’s columnar compression and intelligent storage architecture allows 10 times more data to be stored than on competitor platforms Demonstrated how Oracle Exadata cuts hardware requirements significantly by consolidating workloads on to fewer servers which delivers greater power efficiency and lower operating costs that competing systems from IBM and other manufacturers Proved to ISVs that migrating solutions to Oracle Exadata’s preconfigured, pre-integrated hardware and software can be completed rapidly, at low cost, and with minimal business disruption Demonstrated how storage servers, database servers, and network switches can be added incrementally and inexpensively to the Oracle Exadata platform to support business expansion On track to grow revenues by 10% in year one and by 15% annually thereafter through increased business generated from Oracle Partners and ISVs

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Pet Store Loyalty Programs: I'm Not Loyal Yet!

- by ruth.donohue

After two years of constantly being asked (aka "pestered) by my now eight-year-old daughter for a dog (or any pet that is more interactive than a goldfish), I've finally compromised with a hamster purely by chance. Friends of ours had recently brought home a female hamster, and (surprise, surprise) two weeks later, they were looking for homes for 11 baby hamster pups. Since the pups were not yet ready to be weaned from their mother, my daughter and I had several weeks to get ready -- and we spent that extra time visiting a number of local pet stores and purchasing an assortment of hamster books, toys, exercise equipment, food, bedding, and cage -- not cheap! Now, I'm usually an online shopper (i.e. I love reading user reviews and comparing prices), but for kids, there is absolutely no online substitute for actually walking into a store and physically picking out something you want. We have two competing pet shops within close proximity to where we live, and I signed up for their rewards programs to get discounts on select items. I'm sure it takes a while to get my data into the system (after all, I did fill out a form the old-fashioned way), but as it has been more than two weeks for one store and over a week for the other, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as we by now pretty much have most of what we think we need. Everything I've purchased has been purely hamster or small animal related, so in an ideal world, the stores would have me easily figured out as a hamster owner. Here is what I would be expecting of a loyalty rewards program: Point me to some useful links, either information provied by the company or external websites where I can learn more. Any value-add a business can provide to make my life easier makes me a much more loyal customer. What things can I expect as a new pet owner? Any hamster communities? Any hamster-related events? Any vets that specialize in small animals in the vicinity? Send me an email with other related products I may be interested in. Upsell and cross-sell to me. We've go the basics and a couple of luxuries, but at this point, I'm pretty excited (surprisingly) about the hamster, and my daughter is footing the bill with her birthday and Christmas money. She and I would be more than happy to spend her money! Get this information to me faster. As I mentioned, my window of opportunity is getting smaller, as eithe rmy daughter's money will run out on other things or we'll start losing the thrill of buying new hamster toys and treats. I realize this is easier said than done, and undoubtedly, the stores are getting value knowing my basic customer information and purchase history. Buth, they could really benefit by delivering a loyalty program that really earned my loyalty. "Goldeen" needs a new water bottle, yogurt chips, and chew toys as he doesn't seem to like the ones we bought. So for now, I'll just go to whichever store is the most convenient. Oh, and just for fun (not related to this post), here are a couple of videos my daughter really got a kick out of watching: Hamster on a Piano Tic in a Spin-Dryer

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Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining weight: Examples of certified add-on's

- by Richard Lefebvre

The Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining traction. Please find below few examples of the partners having certified their add-on's to seamlessly work on top of Oracle Fusion CRM. For more information, please contact [email protected] · Opportunity-to-Quote. Big Machines now integrates seamlessly to Oracle Fusion CRM, enabling customers with complex products and services and multiple sales channels to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote process, including product selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, and approval workflows. Create a custom hyperlink in the Opportunity to invoke Big Machines CPQ application to create a quote and sync up with the Fusion CRM custom quote object using the CRUD operations. The quote can be updated using the custom button in the custom tab in the opportunity details. See: http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php · SaaS Billing and Subscription Management. Is your prospect/customer asking whether top billing partners support Fusion CRM? Positioning an integrated CRM solution for billing usage and subscription based services? Need to implement a billable solution on the Oracle Java Cloud Service? Aria Systems and Zuora have recently engaged with Oracle to deepen their integrations to Fusion CRM and team with Oracle for joint opportunities. · Google Apps, SharePoint, Email-CRM Integrations o Do your prospects use Google Apps in their business operations? A “Best of AppExchange” award winner recently completed their integration for Fusion CRM. CirrusInsight plugs Fusion CRM web services directly into Gmail, allowing you to search existing opportunity or contact, provide account information, and create an interaction such as phone call, appointment, or email against a customer or contact in Fusion CRM directly from Gmail. o An EMEA / France based partner, Aryvart provides bi-directional synchronization of appointments and tasks between Google calendar and Oracle Fusion CRM. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to use Google calendar for appointments. o Looking to lower the barrier and expand in SharePoint accounts? InFact Group (EMEA / France & Germany) provides Microsoft SharePoint Connector for Oracle Fusion CRM. With this solution, you can store documents attached to an opportunity, into Microsoft SharePoint repository. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to collaborate across existing content management infrastructure. o Need to connect to MacMail, GroupWise, or Outlook/Exchange? Omni Technology is a partner whose Riva CRM Integration recently engaged for support Fusion CRM as a key platform. Migration Tools from competitive CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM. Data Migration Tools from legacy CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM. A partner with the tools and techniques to speed adoption, Conemis provides data integration tools to export data from legacy CRM, and import into Oracle Fusion CRM via WebServices APIs. For customers, it means reducing cost of data migration from legacy CRM system into Oracle Fusion CRM.

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Amazon Product Advertising API SOAP Namespace Changes

- by Rick Strahl

About two months ago (twowards the end of February 2012 I think) Amazon decided to change the namespace of the Product Advertising API. The error that would come up was: <ItemSearchResponse > was not expected. If you've used the Amazon Product Advertising API you probably know that Amazon has made it a habit to break the services every few years or so and I guess last month was about the time for another one. Basically the service namespace of the document has been changed and responses from the service just failed outright even though the rest of the schema looks fine. Now I looked around for a while trying to find a recent update to the Product Advertising API - something semi-official looking but everything is dated around 2009. Really??? And it's not just .NET - the newest thing on the sample/APIs is dated early 2011 and a handful of 2010 samples. There are newer full APIs for the 'cloud' offerings, but the Product Advertising API apparently isn't part of that. After searching for quite a bit trying to trace this down myself and trying some of the newer samples (which also failed) I found an obscure forum post that describes the solution of getting past the namespace issue. FWIW, I've been using an old version of the Product Advertising API using the old Microsoft WSE3 services (pre-WCF), which provides some of the WS* security features required by the Amazon service. The fix for this code is to explicitly override the namespace declaration on each of the imported service method signatures. The old service namespace (at least on my build) was: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2009-03-31 and it should be changed to: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01 Change it on the class header:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapService("http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(Property[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(BrowseNode[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(TransactionItem[]))] public partial class AWSECommerceService : Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapClient { and on all method signatures:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapMethodAttribute("http://soap.amazon.com/ItemSearch")] [return: System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("ItemSearchResponse", Namespace="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] public ItemSearchResponse ItemSearch(ItemSearch ItemSearch1) { Microsoft.Web.Services3.SoapEnvelope results = base.SendRequestResponse("ItemSearch", ItemSearch1); return ((ItemSearchResponse)(results.GetBodyObject(typeof(ItemSearchResponse), this.SoapServiceAttribute.TargetNamespace))); } It's easy to do with a Search and Replace on the above strings. Amazon Services <rant> FWIW, I've not been impressed by Amazon's service offerings. While the services work well, their documentation and tool support is absolutely horrendous. I was recently working with a customer on an old AWS application and their old API had been completely removed with a new API that wasn't even a close match. One old API call resulted in requiring three different APIs to perform the same functionality. We had to re-write the entire piece from scratch essentially. The documentation was downright wrong, and incomplete and so scattered it was next to impossible to follow. The examples weren't examples at all - they're mockups of real service calls with fake data that didn't even provide everything that was required to make same service calls work. Additionally there appears to be just about no public support from Amazon, only peer support which is sparse at best - and getting a hold of somebody at Amazon, even for pay seems to be mythical task. It's a terrible business model they have going. I can't see why anybody would put themselves through this sort of customer and development experience. Sad really, but an experience we see more and more these days. Nobody puts in the time to document anything anymore, leaving it to devs to figure this stuff out over and over again… </rant>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp Web Services Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Windows Azure Use Case: Web Applications

- by BuckWoody

This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Many applications have a requirement to be located outside of the organization’s internal infrastructure control. For instance, the company website for a brick-and-mortar retail company may want to post not only static but interactive content to be available to their external customers, and not want the customers to have access inside the organization’s firewall. There are also cases of pure web applications used for a great many of the internal functions of the business. This allows for remote workers, shared customer/employee workloads and data and other advantages. Some firms choose to host these web servers internally, others choose to contract out the infrastructure to an “ASP” (Application Service Provider) or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. In any case, the design of these applications often resembles the following: In this design, a server (or perhaps more than one) hosts the presentation function (http or https) access to the application, and this same system may hold the computational aspects of the program. Authorization and Access is controlled programmatically, or is more open if this is a customer-facing application. Storage is either placed on the same or other servers, hosted within an RDBMS or NoSQL database, or a combination of the options, all coded into the application. High-Availability within this scenario is often the responsibility of the architects of the application, and by purchasing more hosting resources which must be built, licensed and configured, and manually added as demand requires, although some IaaS providers have a partially automatic method to add nodes for scale-out, if the architecture of the application supports it. Disaster Recovery is the responsibility of the system architect as well. Implementation: In a Windows Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment, many of these architectural considerations are designed into the system. The Azure “Fabric” (not to be confused with the Azure implementation of Application Fabric - more on that in a moment) is designed to provide scalability. Compute resources can be added and removed programmatically based on any number of factors. Balancers at the request-level of the Fabric automatically route http and https requests. The fabric also provides High-Availability for storage and other components. Disaster recovery is a shared responsibility between the facilities (which have the ability to restore in case of catastrophic failure) and your code, which should build in recovery. In a Windows Azure-based web application, you have the ability to separate out the various functions and components. Presentation can be coded for multiple platforms like smart phones, tablets and PC’s, while the computation can be a single entity shared between them. This makes the applications more resilient and more object-oriented, and lends itself to a SOA or Distributed Computing architecture. It is true that you could code up a similar set of functionality in a traditional web-farm, but the difference here is that the components are built into the very design of the architecture. The API’s and DLL’s you call in a Windows Azure code base contains components as first-class citizens. For instance, if you need storage, it is simply called within the application as an object. Computation has multiple options and the ability to scale linearly. You also gain another component that you would either have to write or bolt-in to a typical web-farm: the Application Fabric. This Windows Azure component provides communication between applications or even to on-premise systems. It provides authorization in either person-based or claims-based perspectives. SQL Azure provides relational storage as another option, and can also be used or accessed from on-premise systems. It should be noted that you can use all or some of these components individually. Resources: Design Strategies for Scalable Active Server Applications - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972349.aspx Physical Tiers and Deployment - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx

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Beyond Chatting: What ‘Social’ Means for CRM

- by Divya Malik

A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle In a recent post on the Oracle Applications blog, my colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of Human Capital Management. So, in turning to a conversation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA), let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies, consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal, third-party partners, etc.? Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales, introverts arguably have a distinct disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards – none of them to individuals and all of them to TEAMS of individuals. That’s how it works in Sales. Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a solution. They work with you as a collective team. And so how is all this collaboration STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search. It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at some point in history. This is where social networking for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors – just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version control. But lest we get carried away, let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most sales organizations, this is how the game is won. To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com

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