Search Results

Search found 21658 results on 867 pages for 'small business'.

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

Page 98/867 | < Previous Page | 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105  | Next Page >

  • Use the Latest Guided Learning Paths for BI & EPM Partners

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    Keep up to date with the current version Guided Learning Paths for BI Partners @ https://competencycenter.oracle.com/opncc/glp_list.cc, for Example: Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Business Intelligence Implementation Consultant Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for CRM Implementation Specialist Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for ERP Implementation Specialist Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation 11g Implementation Specialist Oracle Essbase 11 Implementation Specialist PreSales Consultant Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 PreSales Specialist Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g PreSales Specialist Oracle Essbase 11 PreSales Specialist Sales Person Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 Sales Specialist Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Sales Specialist Oracle Essbase 11 Sales Specialist

    Read the article

  • Are there any small scale, durable document/object databases?

    - by Joe Doyle
    I have a few .Net projects that would benefit from using a document/object database opposed to a relational one. I think that db4o would be a good choice, but we're not sure how much the cost is. I'd love to use MongoDB but it's design isn't for small scale, single server applications. Are there other options out there that I just haven't run across for small scale applications? EDIT: So is this a space that doesn't have a good solution, yet? Are there no small scale & durable document databases? Would my best choice be to use MongoDB and set the --syncdelay option set to 1?

    Read the article

  • Is it a good idea to "migrate business logic code into our domain model"?

    - by Bytecode Ninja
    I am reading Hibernate in Action and the author suggests to move business logic into our domain models (p. 306). For instance, in the example presented by the book, we have three entities named Item, Bid, and User and the author suggests to add a placeBid(User bidder, BigDecimal amount) method to the Item class. Considering that usually we have a distinct layer for business logic (e.g. Manager or Service classes in Spring) that among other things control transactions, etc. is this really a good advice? Isn't it better not to add business logic methods to our entities? Thanks in advance.

    Read the article

  • Three Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Today's blog post comes to us from John Bruswick! This post is an abridged version of John’s white paper in which he discusses three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise.   By [email protected], Oracle Principal Sales Consultant Effective social collaboration is actionable, deeply contextual and inherently derives its value from business entities outside of itself. How does an organization begin the journey from traditional, siloed collaboration to natural, business entity based social collaboration? Successful enablement of enterprise social collaboration requires that organizations embrace the following tenets and understand that traditional collaborative functionality has inherent limits - it is innovation and integration in accordance with the following tenets that will provide net-new efficiency benefits. Key Tenets of Optimal Social Collaboration Leverage a Ubiquitous Social Fabric - Collaborative activities should be supported through a ubiquitous social fabric, providing a personalized experience, broadcasting key business events and connecting people and business processes.  This supports education of participants working in and around a specific business entity that will benefit from an implicit capture of tacit knowledge and provide continuity between participants.  In the absence of this ubiquitous platform activities can still occur but are essentially siloed causing frequent duplication of effort across similar tasks, with critical tacit knowledge eluding capture. Supply Continuous Context to Support Decision Making and Problem Solving - People generally engage in collaborative behavior to obtain a decision or the resolution for a specific issue.  The time to achieve resolution is referred to as "Solve Time".  Users have traditionally been forced to switch or "alt-tab" between business systems and synthesize their own context across disparate systems and processes.  The constant loss of context forces end users to exert a large amount of effort that could be spent on higher value problem solving. Extend the Collaborative Lifecycle into Back Office - Beyond the solve time from decision making efforts, additional time is expended formalizing the resolution that was generated from collaboration in a system of record.  Extending collaboration to result in the capture of an explicit decision maximizes efficiencies, creating a closed circuit for a particular thread.  This type of structured action may exist today within your organization's customer support system around opening, solving and closing support issues, but generally does not extend to Sales focused collaborative activities. Excelling in the Unstructured Future We will always have to deal with unstructured collaborative processes within our organizations.  Regardless of the participants and nature of the collaborate process, two things are certain – the origination and end points are generally known and relate to a business entity, perhaps a customer, opportunity, order, shipping location, product or otherwise. Imagine the benefits if an organization's key business systems supported a social fabric, provided continuous context and extended the lifecycle around the collaborative decision making to include output into back office systems of record.   The technical hurdle to embracing optimal social collaboration would fall away, leaving the company with an opportunity to focus on and refine how processes were approached.  Time and resources previously required could then be reallocated to focusing on innovation to support competitive differentiation unique to your business. How can you achieve optimal social collaboration? Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration styles and integrates data from a variety of sources and business applications -- allowing you to achieve optimal social collaboration. Looking to learn more? Read John's white paper, where he discusses in further detail the three principals to optimize social collaboration within an enterprise. 

    Read the article

  • ATG Live Webcast June 28: Scrambling Sensitive Data in EBS 12 Cloned Environments

    - by BillSawyer
    Securing the Oracle E-Business Suite includes protecting the underlying E-Business data in production and non-production databases.  While steps can be taken to provide a secure configuration to limit EBS access, a better approach to protecting non-production data is simply to scramble (mask) the data in the non-production copy.   The Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack can be used in situations where confidential or regulated data needs to be shared with other non-production users who need access to some of the original data, but not necessarily every table.  Examples of non-production users include internal application developers or external business partners such as offshore testing companies, suppliers or customers. The Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack is applied to a non-production environment with the Enterprise Manager Grid Control Data Masking Pack.  When applied, the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack will create an irreversibly scrambled version of your production database for development and testing. This ATG Live Webcast is your chance to come learn about the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Template for Data Masking Pack from the experts. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Template for Data Masking The agenda for the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack webcast includes the following topics: What does data masking do in E-Business Suite environments? De-identify the data Mask sensitive data Maintain data validity How can EBS customers use data masking? References Join Eric Bing, Senior Director and Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager, as they discusses the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack.Date:                  Thursday, June 28, 2012Time:                 8:00AM Pacific Standard TimePresenters:     Eric Bing, Senior Director                           Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product ManagerWebcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged) To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              100865To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  599097152If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training here.If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

    Read the article

  • Java 6 Certified with Forms and Reports 10g for EBS 12

    - by John Abraham
    Java 6 is now certified with Oracle Application Server 10g Forms and Reports with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0.6, 12.1.1 and higher). What? Wasn't this already certified? No, but a little background might be useful in understanding why this is a new announcement. We previously certified the use of Java 6 with E-Business Suite Release 12 -- with the sole exception of Oracle Application Server 10g components in the E-Business Suite technology stack. Oracle Application Server 10g originally included Java 1.4.2 as part of its distribution.  E-Business Suite 12 uses, amongst other things, the Oracle Forms and Reports 10g components running on Java 1.4. Java 1.4 in the Oracle Application Server 10g ORACLE_HOME is used exclusively by AS 10g Forms and Reports' for Java functionality.  This version of Java is separate from the Java distribution used by other parts of EBS such as Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J). What's new about this certification? You can now upgrade the older Java 1.4 libraries used by Oracle Forms & Reports 10g to Java 6. This allows you to upgrade the Java releases within the Oracle Application Server 10g ORACLE_HOME to the the same level as the rest of your E-Business Suite technology stack components. Why upgrade? This becomes particularly important for customers as individual vendors' support lifecycle for Java 1.4 reaches End of Life: Oracle's Sun JDK Release 1.4.2's End of Extended Support: February 2013 (Sustaining Support indefinitely after) IBM SDK and JRE 1.4.2's End of Service: September 2013 HP-UX Java 1.4.2's End-of-Life : May 2012 Along with Oracle Forms, Java lies at the heart of the Oracle E-Business Suite.  Small improvements in Java can have significant effects on the performance and stability of the E-Business Suite.  As a notable side-benefit, later versions of Java have improved built-in and third-party tools for JVM performance monitoring and tuning.Our standing recommendation is that you always stay current with the latest available Java update provided by your operating system vendor.  Don't forget to upgrade Forms & Reports to 10.1.2.3 E-Business Suite 12 originally shipped with Oracle Application Server 10g Forms & Reports 10.1.2.0.2.  That version is no longer eligible for Error Correction Support. New Forms and Reports 10g patches are now being released with Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 as the prerequisite. Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 was certified for EBS 12 environments in November 2008. If you haven't upgraded your EBS 12 environment to Forms & Reports 10.1.2.3, this is a good opportunity to do so. References Using Latest Update of Java 6.0 with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (My Oracle Support Document 455492.1) Overview of Using Java with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (My Oracle Support Document 418664.1) Oracle Lifetime Support Policy (Oracle Fusion Middleware) IBM Developer Kit Lifecycle Dates HP-UX Java - End of Life Policy & Release Naming Terminology Related Articles OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 Certified With EBS R12 Java 6 Certified with E-Business Suite Release 12

    Read the article

  • Tap Into Tier 1 ERP

    - by Christine Randle
    By: Larry Simcox, Senior Director, Accelerate Corporate Programs     Your customers aren’t satisfied with so-so customer service. Your employees aren’t happy with below average salaries.   So why would you settle for second-rate or tier 2 ERP?   A recent report from Nucleus Research found that usability improvements and rapid implementation tools are simplifying deployments, putting tier 1 enterprise applications well within reach for midsize companies. So how can your business tap into the power of tier 1 ERP? And what are the best ways to manage a deployment?   The Reputation of ERP Implementations Overhauling internal operations and implementing ERP can be a challenging endeavor for organizations of all sizes. Midsize companies often shy away from enterprise-class ERP, fearing complexity, limited resources and perceived challenging deployments. Many forward thinking executives experienced ERP implementations in the late 90s and early 2000s and embrace a strategy to grow their business by investing in a foundation for innovation and growth via ERP modernization projects.   In recent years there has been a strong consumerization of IT with enterprise applications and their delivery methods evolving to become more user-friendly.  Today, usability improvements and modern implementation tools have made top-tier ERP solutions more accessible for growing companies. Nucleus found that because enterprise-class software can now be rapidly deployed, the payback is quicker, the risks are lower, the software is less disruptive and overall, companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors and achieve more success with the advantages these types of systems deliver.   Tapping into the power of tier 1 ERP can be made much easier with Oracle Accelerate solutions. Created by Oracle's expert partners and reviewed by Oracle, Oracle Accelerate solutions are simple to deploy, industry-specific, packaged solutions that provide a fast time to benefit, which means getting the right solution in place quickly, inexpensively with a controlled scope and predictable returns.   How are growing midsize companies successfully deploying tier 1 ERP? According to Nucleus Research, companies can increase success in their tier 1 ERP deployments by limiting customization, planning a rapid go-live, bettering communication across departments, and considering different delivery options. Oracle Accelerate solutions incorporate industry best practices and encourage rapid deployments. And even more, Nucleus found customers deploying tier 1 ERP with Oracle that had used Oracle Business Accelerators, Oracle’s rapid implementation tools, reduced the time to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite by at least 50 percent.   Industrial manufacturer L.H. Dottie is one company that needed ERP with enhanced capabilities to support its growth and streamline business processes. Using out-of-the-box configuration of Oracle E-Business Suite modules (provided by Oracle Business Accelerators and delivered by Oracle Partner C3 Business Solutions), L.H. Dottie was able to speed its implementation and went live in just six and a half months. With tier 1 ERP, the company was able to grow and do its business better, automating a variety of processes, accelerating product delivery and gaining powerful data analysis capabilities that helped drive its business into further regions. See more details about their ERP implementation here.   Tier 1 enterprise-class applications have proven to boost the success of Oracle’s midsize customers. As Nucleus Research iterates, companies poised for growth or seeking to compete against larger competitors absolutely can tap into the power of tier 1 ERP and position themselves as enterprise-class through leveraging Oracle Accelerate solutions.   You can learn more here about The Evolving Business Case for Tier - 1 ERP in Midsize Companies in our exclusive webcast with Nucleus.   ###  

    Read the article

  • Wisdom Lies in Collaborative Power and Intelligence

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    By Alakh Verma, Director, Platform Technology Solutions   In my recent blog posts, I shared insights on Predictive Analytics (Will Predictive Analytics at 'Speed of Thoughts' Help Businesses?), Real Time Decisions (How critical are Real Time decisions in business today?) and their significance in our lives in general and in businesses today. In the current business paradigm shift- with evolutionary social business, it is paramount that businesses look for wisdom in collaborative power and intelligence and equip their employees with the tools to engage with one another. There is an old time saying that 5 sticks tied together are stronger and unable to break as opposed to an individual stick. We have recently witnessed the power of ordinary people uniting together and fought collaboratively using Facebook and Twitter to topple down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya—and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. And an India one man’s (Anna Hazare) campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands to the streets in support. As anyone who has worked in a sizeable organization knows, there is no guarantee that the organization as a whole will perform efficiently and achieve its goals, even if each employee is individually efficient and every team has a high level of productivity. To achieve enterprise productivity, it is necessary not only for individuals and groups to “do things right” by working productively but also for the enterprise as a whole to “do the right things” - form the right teams, make the right decisions, allocate resources correctly, and effectively coordinate activities across the entire organization. Most organizations fall short of the optimal level of enterprise productivity because of one or more of these reasons, all at a great cost to the business.  They are disconnected from themselves with various parts of the organization unintentionally working at cross-purposes with each other.  Information that exists is not getting shared or reused.  Human talent is not being applied where it is most needed.  The same problems are being solved repeatedly by multiple groups. Intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity, with a potentially dramatic impact on the financial performance of the business. Whether it is a simple email exchange, a physical or virtual meeting, a task force, or a large-scale project, the activity is inherently collaborative.  In fact, collaboration can be defined as the work that takes place among people when a business process is not pre-determining how the work should take place. Collaboration is many things: information sharing, brainstorming, problem solving, best practice negotiation, innovation, coordination of activity, alignment of purpose, and so forth.  Collaboration is the “white space” between the business processes; it is the glue that holds an organization together, and the lubricant that allows the machinery to keep running.  Real time search and collaborative capabilities of the right people with the right content supported by defined processes will provide unparallel wisdom in the organization in the most competitive business environment today. Interestingly, technologies such as Oracle WebCenter offer these capabilities in our Web based business transactions and compliment in the overall collaborative intelligence and power to truly transform organizations to social businesses. Looking to learn more about engaging your employees to collaborate together and providing a complete user experience for your customers? You won't want to miss our webcast today! Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

    Read the article

  • New Version 3.1 Endeca Information Discovery Now Available

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Business User Self-Service Data Mash-up Analysis and Discovery integrated with OBI11g and Hadoop Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.1 (OEID) is a major release that incorporates significant new self-service discovery capabilities for business users, including agile data mashup, extended support for unstructured analytics, and an even tighter integration with Oracle BI.  · Self-Service Data Mashup and Discovery Dashboards: business users can combine information from multiple sources, including their own up-loaded spreadsheets, to conduct analysis on the complete set.  Creating discovery dashboards has been made even easier by intuitive drag-and drop layouts and wizard-based configuration.  Business users can now build new discovery applications in minutes, without depending on IT. · Enhanced Integration with Oracle BI: OEID 3.1 enhances its’ native integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation. Business users can now incorporate information from trusted BI warehouses, leveraging dimensions and attributes defined in Oracle’s Common Enterprise Information Model, but evolve them based on the varying day-to-day demands and requirements that they personally manage. · Deep Unstructured Analysis: business users can gain new insights from a wide variety of enterprise and public sources, helping companies to build an actionable Big Data strategy.  With OEID’s long-standing differentiation in correlating unstructured information with structured data, business users can now perform their own text mining to identify hidden concepts, without having to request support from IT. They can augment these insights with best in class keyword search and pattern matching, all in the context of rich, interactive visualizations and analytic summaries. · Enterprise-Class Self-Service Discovery:  OEID 3.1 enables IT to provide a powerful self-service platform to the business as part of a broader Business Analytics strategy, preserving the value of existing investments in data quality, governance, and security.  Business users can take advantage of IT-curated information to drive discovery across high volumes and varieties of data, and share insights with colleagues at a moment’s notice. · Harvest Content from the Web with the Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit:  Oracle now provides best-of-breed data access to website content through the Oracle Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit.  This provides an agile, graphical interface for developers to rapidly access and integrate any information exposed through a web front-end.  Organizations can now cost-effectively include content from consumer sites, industry forums, government or supplier portals, cloud applications, and myriad other web sources as part of their overall strategy for data discovery and unstructured analytics. For more information: OEID 3.1 OTN Software and Documentation Download And Endeca available for download on Software Delivery Cloud (eDelivery) New OEID 3.1 Videos on YouTube Oracle.com Endeca Site /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

    Read the article

  • Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

    - by Bil Simser
    Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

    Read the article

  • Is Financial Inclusion an Obligation or an Opportunity for Banks?

    - by tushar.chitra
    Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). However, this is not just a third-world phenomenon. According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), in the US, post 2008 financial crisis, one family out of five has either opted out of the banking system or has been moved out (American Banker). Moving this huge unbanked population into mainstream banking is both an opportunity and a challenge for banks. An obvious opportunity is the significant untapped customer base that banks can target, so is the positive brand equity a bank can build by fulfilling its social responsibilities. Also, as banks target the cost-conscious unbanked customer, they will be forced to look at ways to offer cost-effective products and services, necessitating technology upgrades and innovations. However, cost is not the only hurdle in increasing the adoption of banking services. The potential users need to be convinced of the benefits of banking and banks will also face stiff competition from unorganized players. Finally, the banks will have to believe in the viability of this business opportunity, and not treat financial inclusion as an obligation. In what ways can banks target the unbanked For financial inclusion to be a success, banks should adopt innovative business models to develop products that address the stated and unstated needs of the unbanked population and also design delivery channels that are cost effective and viable in the long run. Through business correspondents and facilitators In rural and remote areas, one of the major hurdles in increasing banking penetration is connectivity and accessibility to banking services, which makes last mile inclusion a daunting challenge. To address this, banks can avail the services of business correspondents or facilitators. This model allows banks to establish greater connectivity through a trusted and reliable intermediary. In India, for instance, banks can leverage the local Kirana stores (the mom & pop stores) to service rural and remote areas. With a supportive nudge from the central bank, the commercial banks can enlist these shop owners as business correspondents to increase their reach. Since these neighborhood stores are acquainted with the local population, they can help banks manage the KYC norms, besides serving as a conduit for remittance. Banks also have an opportunity over a period of time to cross-sell other financial products such as micro insurance, mutual funds and pension products through these correspondents. To exercise greater operational control over the business correspondents, banks can also adopt a combination of branch and business correspondent models to deliver financial inclusion. Through mobile devices According to a 2012 world bank report on financial inclusion, out of a world population of 7 billion, over 5 billion or 70% have mobile phones and only 2 billion or 30% have a bank account. What this means for banks is that there is scope for them to leverage this phenomenal growth in mobile usage to serve the unbanked population. Banks can use mobile technology to service the basic banking requirements of their customers with no frills accounts, effectively bringing down the cost per transaction. As I had discussed in my earlier post on mobile payments, though non-traditional players have taken the lead in P2P mobile payments, banks still hold an edge in terms of infrastructure and reliability. Through crowd-funding According to the Crowdfunding Industry Report by Massolution, the global crowdfunding industry raised $2.7 billion in 2012, and is projected to grow to $5.1 billion in 2013. With credit policies becoming tighter and banks becoming more circumspect in terms of loan disbursals, crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative channel for lending. Typically, these initiatives target the unbanked population by offering small loans that are unviable for larger banks. Though a significant proportion of crowdfunding initiatives globally are run by non-banking institutions, banks are also venturing into this space. The next step towards inclusive finance Banks by themselves cannot make financial inclusion a success. There is a need for a whole ecosystem that is supportive of this mission. The policy makers, that include the regulators and government bodies, must be in sync, the IT solution providers must put on their thinking caps to come out with innovative products and solutions, communication channels such as internet and mobile need to expand their reach, and the media and the public need to play an active part. The other challenge for financial inclusion is from the banks themselves. While it is true that financial inclusion will unleash a hitherto hugely untapped market, the normal banking model may be found wanting because of issues such as flexibility, convenience and reliability. The business will be viable only when there is a focus on increasing the usage of existing infrastructure and that is possible when the banks can offer the entire range of products and services to the large number of users of essential banking services. Apart from these challenges, banks will also have to quickly master and replicate the business model to extend their reach to the remotest regions in their respective geographies. They will need to ensure that the transactions deliver a viable business benefit to the bank. For tapping cross-sell opportunities, banks will have to quickly roll-out customized and segment-specific products. The bank staff should be brought in sync with the business plan by convincing them of the viability of the business model and the need for a business correspondent delivery model. Banks, in collaboration with the government and NGOs, will have to run an extensive financial literacy program to educate the unbanked about the benefits of banking. Finally, with the growing importance of retail banking and with many unconventional players eyeing the opportunity in payments and other lucrative areas of banking, banks need to understand the importance of micro and small branches. These micro and small branches can help banks increase their presence without a huge cost burden, provide bankers an opportunity to cross sell micro products and offer a window of opportunity for the large non-banked population to transact without any interference from intermediaries. These branches can also help diminish the role of the unorganized financial sector, such as local moneylenders and unregistered credit societies. This will also help banks build a brand awareness and loyalty among the users, which by itself has a cascading effect on the business operations, especially among the rural and un-banked centers. In conclusion, with the increasingly competitive banking sector facing frequent slowdowns and downturns, the unbanked population presents a huge opportunity for banks to enhance their customer base and fulfill their social responsibility.

    Read the article

  • Core Data: Inverse relationship only mirrors when I edit the mutableset. Not sure why.

    - by zorn
    My model is setup so Business has many clients, Client has one business. Inverse relationship is setup in the mom file. I have a unit test like this: - (void)testNewClientFromBusiness { PTBusiness *business = [modelController newBusiness]; STAssertTrue([[business clients] count] == 0, @"is actually %d", [[business clients] count]); PTClient *client = [business newClient]; STAssertTrue([business isEqual:[client business]], nil); STAssertTrue([[business clients] count] == 1, @"is actually %d", [[business clients] count]); } I implement -newClient inside of PTBusiness like this: - (PTClient *)newClient { PTClient *client = [NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"Client" inManagedObjectContext:[self managedObjectContext]]; [client setBusiness:self]; [client updateLocalDefaultsBasedOnBusiness]; return client; } The test fails because [[business clients] count] is still 0 after -newClient is called. If I impliment it like this: - (PTClient *)newClient { PTClient *client = [NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"Client" inManagedObjectContext:[self managedObjectContext]]; NSMutableSet *group = [self mutableSetValueForKey:@"clients"]; [group addObject:client]; [client updateLocalDefaultsBasedOnBusiness]; return client; } The tests passes. My question(s): So am I right in thinking the inverse relationship is only updated when I interact with the mutable set? That seems to go against some other Core Data docs I've read. Is the fact that this is running in a unit test without a run loop have anything to do with it? Any other troubleshooting recommendations? I'd really like to figure out why I can't set up the relationship at the client end.

    Read the article

  • SQL Server 2008: CASE vs IF-ELSE-IF vs GOTO

    - by Saharsh Shah
    I have some rules in my application and I have written the business logic of that rules in my procedure. At the time of creation of procedure I came to know that CASE statement won't work in my scenario. So I have tried two ways to perform same operations (using IF-ELSE-IF or GOTO) shown as below. Method 1 Using IF-ELSE-IF conditions: DECLARE @V_RuleId SMALLINT; IF (@V_RuleId = 1) BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END ELSE IF (@V_RuleId = 2) BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END ELSE IF (@V_RuleId = 3) BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END /* ... ... ... ...*/ ELSE IF (@V_RuleId = 19) BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END ELSE IF (@V_RuleId = 20) BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END Method 2 Using GOTO statement: DECLARE @V_RuleId SMALLINT, @V_Temp VARCHAR(100); SET @V_Temp = 'GOTO RULE' + CONVERT(VARCHAR, @V_RuleId); EXECUTE sp_executesql @V_Temp; RULE1: BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END RULE2: BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END RULE3: BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END /* ... ... ... ...*/ RULE19: BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END RULE20: BEGIN /*My business logic*/ END Today I have 20 rules. It can be increase to any number in future. If I can able to use CASE statement then I have not any problem with performance, but I can't do that so I am worried about the performance of my procedure. Also one thing to be noticed that this procedure will execute very frequently by application. My questions are: Is there any way to use CASE statement in my procedure? If not, which method is best to use in my procedure to improve the performance of my code? Thanks in advance...

    Read the article

  • Options for small windows network setup without dedicated server?

    - by Mitch
    I'm very weak on networking and hope someone can point me in the right direction: I have written some windows client/server software which incorporates a database which is located on a windows server. I have a test installation running at a customer's office where the server has a static IP address. In this case its easy for the clients to access the database because of the fixed IP address. Also, customers with network servers generally have specialist support staff to set up my software, so its not such a problem for me. However I also need to offer the software to customers who have small offices with less than 10 PCs and no dedicated network server. In this case I want the customer to be able to nominate one PC as the database "server" and install my software and have the clients access it. But in this situation I believe the "server" PC may not have a dedicated IP address. Q1: What is the best way to set this up simply and make it work? Can I reliably reference the "server" by using its name, or is there a way to assign dummy fixed IP addresses? Ideally this needs to be workable on small networks running a mixture of XP/Vista/Windows7 as my target market may well have mixed OSes etc. I guess this would be akin to home networking? Many thanks Mitch

    Read the article

  • Are there any small scale persisitant document/object databases?

    - by Joe Doyle
    I have a few .Net projects that would benefit from using a document/object database opposed to a relational one. I think that db4o would be a good choice, but the $1200 commercial price tag is bit too much for us. I'd love to use MongoDb but it's design isn't for small scale, single server applications. Are there other options out there that I just haven't run across for small scale applications?

    Read the article

  • Windows 7 shows a drive as full in summary but files shown on drive are very small

    - by Rob
    I have a drive partitioned so it is seen by Windows as 2 drives: C:\ and D:\ Windows 7 shows D:\ as full up in the graphical summary in 'My Computer' summary of all the drives, e.g. the bar graph indicates full and nearly all of the drive's capacity, 108Gb, is full. So I go into the D:\ drive to look at the files, I see several folders. I select them all and the right-click menu Properties to count their size, expecting the value to be about the same as what Windows reports in the summary, i.e. nearly 108Gb. But the properties window shows the files are very small, Kbs and Mbs, nowhere near 108Gbs. One of the folders is a backup, but its size is very small. I've checked the folder options to show all system files and hidden files too - and counted these in the properties. Something invisible is holding the space. What is happening here? I'm afraid to delete anything if it removes valuable backups. Have I got huge backups here? Why can't I see them? How do I see them?

    Read the article

  • Is Ubuntu a viable replacement of Windows XP for small enterprise environments?

    - by Alex. S.
    Hi all, I'm a newbie systems administrator, so any advice would be great. I would like to setup ubuntu 8.04 lts in a small office of consulting in management (around 50 workstations) instead of Windows XP. I would install MS Office 2007 via WINE (*). It would be a fresh installation, so the migration would be less of a pain. The new setup would also include a small server as document repository and a backup server by now. Later, I would install another goodies like a IM server, a document management solution, and whatnot collaborative tool. What do you advice in this scenario? Do you think is viable? Should I try to convince my managers this is a good idea? I consider myself as a fair experienced user in both systems, and I'm the only guy in charge of everything. I need to cut costs down, and I think that antivirus and antimalware software are a waste of money and time. Is this good idea?, or should I resign and try to lock down the Windows systems and install AV software? Is there anything else in this setup I'm not foreseeing? (*) The only catch in my test machine until now had been that Office SmartArt doesn't work properly, the rest of Office 2007 may seem ok.

    Read the article

  • Simple, centralized user management on a small LAN - NIS or LDAP?

    - by einpoklum
    I'm setting up a small LAN for my team. It will, for all intents and purposes, not be connected to any external networks. I would it to have centralized control of user accounts (at least, I think I'd like that; I'm also considering using puppet, so theoretically I could just push /etc/passwd changes, or something). The number of machines is fixed, but not very small. Mostly they're 'attached' to a single user, but sometimes people work remotely on someone else's box; and there are a couple of servers. I've read this question, but my scenario is much simpler (even simpler than in this question) and I'd like to do something (relatively) quick, with not much hassle, but not a dirty totally-insecure hack. Is NIS relevant for my scenario? If not, what's the most hassle-free way to set up LDAP (or LDAP+Kerberos) to achieve the same? Notes: I have no experience with setting up either NIS or LDAP. We use Debian-flavored Linux distributions, mainly Kubuntu 12.04 (not my choice, but that's the way it is).

    Read the article

  • What are the best ways to scale small business applications ?

    - by Rachel
    I have one small online sale business but I want to make it scalable at limited expense and so am looking out at various services which can help me make my business scalable. I was looking into Amazon Web Services and it seems to be a viable option. Are there any other ways for adding scalability to small online businesses ?

    Read the article

  • Is it abuse to put application/business logic inside of jQuery plugins?

    - by RenderIn
    Is it appropriate to create jQuery plugins which are specific to a single page? I've been creating generic plugins that are not tied to any context and contain no business logic, but some people I've talked to suggest that almost all javascript, including business logic and logic specific to a single page, should be inside of jQuery plugins. Is it appropriate to have a validateformXYZ plugin which validates a specific HTML form? I'm buying into jQuery 100% but am not sure if this is a misuse or not.

    Read the article

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

< Previous Page | 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105  | Next Page >