Warning: is_executable() [function.is-executable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/usr/local/bin/curl) is not within the allowed path(s): (/var/www/www.schuirink.net) in /var/www/www.schuirink.net/www/xml/snoopy/snoopyclass.php on line 208
using alternative parser codepage:utf-8
Another lazy job ;-). If you are trying the tutorial from the link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe1013jdev/10131/bslayer/bslayer.htm
At the same time you feel like to have a complete sample to play with then download the sample file from http://skydrive.live.com. The sample file name is OrderEntry.zip. My MSN ID is chanmmn@hotmail.com
Do feedback to me if the end product does not run for you.
Under heavy security in the bowels of a secret building, this spy-phone photo shows some of the many laptops and servers being configured for exhibition hall booths.
The Democratic convention is over. The Republican convention is over. Those were just warm-up acts for the one you're truly interested in, right? Take at look at some more reasons why Oracle OpenWorld is the conference you cannot miss this year.
OpenWorld Hands-On Labs—Another Bite at the Apple
There's no better way to experience new technology than to take it out for a test drive. Oracle ACE Floyd Teter talks about how helpful the hands-on labs were at Collaborate 08, and advises you to sign up early for those sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.
OpenWorld Once Again
Chen Shapira, a DBA living in Cupertino, CA, has set up an ambitious agenda for the show. And now that she's shared it, we can all help make sure she doesn't get too nervous to present her Unconference session this year.
Get Out Your Glue Guns and See If You Can Beat This
The Triora Group has come up with a great contest for the show. If you're crafty, or even if you're not, head over to their blog and enter to win some conference bling.
Where's Red Hat This September?
The folks at Red Hat hit the road on their 2008 North American Red Hat Road Tour at the beginning of the month. You can catch one of their theater sessions at Oracle OpenWorld booth #622.
Oracle OpenWorld
EDS, an Elite Sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld, has some intriguing speakers and showcases lined up for the conference, including Nothing Like it in the World: Lessons of Security, Confidence, and Trust from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. See what else they have planned for the show.
The Open Web Foundation is an interesting new initiative which shows that a new generation is interested in standards. They have different needs. They are willing to create something new. Alternatively, they have lost faith in the traditional players like national standards bodies (certainly) as well as players of the 1990s' Internet age, such as Oasis and W3C.
As I hinted out earlier - we have a new blog dedicated to business level discussion on directories. It's called Directory Service Stories and we have posted our first post on a customer related story.
The purpose of that blog in compared to mine is that we will focus on customer stories and higher level use cases. While i continue to be more technical here.
As blogger John Brunswick points out, Enterprise 2.0 enjoys a high buzz factor and generates a lot of excitement, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
That buzz and excitement can leave you all tingly and panting to implement lots of cool Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. But decisions made while buzzed and excited often have interesting results. And by interesting I mean things like weird late-night phone calls and unexplained tattoos.
So John suggests a calm, rational, business-focused approach when considering Enterprise 2.0:
There is no doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting [the technologies] with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point.
"
["category"]=>
string(12) "Architecture"
["guid"]=>
string(76) "http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/2008/09/applying_enterprise_20_where_i.html"
["pubDate"]=>
string(31) "Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:07:47 -0500"
}
[7]=>
array(6) {
["title"]=>
string(90) "MKB Bank Centralized Database Accounts in AD and Eliminated Helpdesk Calls on DB Passwords"
["link"]=>
string(77) "http://blogs.oracle.com/odsstories/2008/09/mkb_bank_centralized_database.html"
["description"]=>
string(346) "
Read our new white-paper on MKB Bank and how they used OVD to centralize database accounts in Active Directory. This solution was integrated with their existing 3rd party provisioning system and helped eliminate helpdesk calls about database passwords.
Since I'm focusing this blog more on the technical side - I thought I would try to regularly provide a set of links and commentary to security and privacy articles I find.
"For Your Browser Only" -- Reminds developer's that if you are writing cookies from your server code to remember to mark them "HTTP Only". This dramatically reduces the surface area for cross-site scripting attacks. I would also add that other techniques - such as using a standards-based framework for authentication/session management and risk-based access control like Oracle provides via Fusion Middleware and the Access Management Suite will add extra protection.
What Californians Understand About Privacy Online -- A paper showing how big the gulf is between the average person's perception of how their privacy is protected and the reality . One could of course make a joke about what do you expect from people who elect "The Terminator" their governor but it is a real problem.
SQL Injection issue in :limit and :offset parameter -- A two-fer this week - security issues in two of the most popular frameworks out there - Spring and now Rails. I give credit to the author for trying to help raise awareness and in general I think adopting frameworks (in particular standard - whether that's "Standard" like JSF or a "standard" like Spring/Rails) make you more productive - and yes, secure.
5 Features Your Login System Must Have -- An interesting article for those who are still "rolling their own system". Of course for an enterprise - I'm not sure of any valid use case where that would be a good idea - there's too many good products out there such as Oracle Access Management Suite that can do this for you without needing to become a SSO developer. If you are working on a consumer site - then at the very least, you should adopt something like OpenID or Infocards so that you are not managing passwords.
Here is one website you do not want your company name to appear on, http://datalossdb.org/. What is it?
"DataLossDB, formerly the Attrition.org Data Loss Database Open Source, is an research project aimed at documenting known and reported data loss incidents world-wide. The effort is now a community one, with the move to OSF, and relies on the contributions of users like you to grow and prune the database."
Basically the public at large submit to this website any known security breaches in the form of hacked websites, lost documents, media, laptops etc. It is a vastly improved interface to the former website, http://attrition.org/. People can now search by date, by incident type, industry even by what is the largest known loss of records! A leader board on which you will all want to avoid being in the top ten. Any guesses at what technology might be able to help you ensure that even when your intranets are hacked, laptops lost and firewalls breached, your most sensitive content still remains safe? I don't think I even need to say it...
One of the basic elements we consider each time we plan for the Keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld is what music we should play before the presentations. Over the years we've piped in everything from contemporary rock to very eclectic music from groups like The Magnetic Poets (if you were there last year you heard them). And we've even had live bands.
So, what could we do a little differently this year? How about an avant-garde cellist! Zoe Keating has been described as a "one woman orchestra" and "a distinctive mix of old and new—layers of sound, that feel more like orchestrations than a solo instrument." Her distinct performance will create an energetic environment and add a unique stream to our digital conversation for a very special ambience in the Keynote Hall. Zoe is pretty excited to be playing for you. She even posted about it on her own blog.
I saw Zoe play (on a moving bus) in July and was immediately struck by her music and how perfectly it would fit in with the atmosphere of Oracle OpenWorld. So, I was thrilled when she agreed to play for us. You can check out some of her videos on YouTube to get a sense of her musical style ahead of time, but I definitely encourage you to show up early for all of the keynotes to hear her play. That will also give you plenty of time to check out the digital conversation, get a good seat, and connect with old friends.
We've got a great lineup of Keynotes this year, and a few surprises along the way that we think you'll like. We're in meetings virtually every day now planning these special touches for you, and I can personally tell you that this may be the best year yet.
I am planning to write a quick reference section (QR) with all the tips for the programmers / administrators. This will help us to quickly check the list of to-do things. So, this is my first QR.
This is a quick reference to know what client side jar files are needed to be added in the CLASSPATH when we are trying to use JMS (in-memory/file or database) from an application client (java code or any other 3rd party JMS client). Following are the JAR files needed in the classpath:
Client-side JAR Files Required for OEMS JMS In-Memory and File-Based Lookup:
(Required only if the opmn:ormi prefix is used in Oracle Application Server environment.)
Note: If you cant find jndi.jar in the above specified location, then it should be there available in $ORACLE_HOME/datadirect/sun/lib directory.
This quick reference should be helpful when programming with OC4J JMS.
"
["guid"]=>
string(82) "http://blogs.oracle.com/learnwithpavan/2008/09/quick_reference_1_clientside_j.html"
["pubDate"]=>
string(31) "Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:20:23 +0530"
}
[13]=>
array(6) {
["title"]=>
string(56) "Nearly 1000 laptops go missing at London Heathrow a week"
["link"]=>
string(71) "http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/nearly_1000_laptops_go_missing.html"
["description"]=>
string(3500) "
The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper, has just reported on some research done by the Ponemon Institute for Dell computers. The research has found that in a year about 800,000 laptops are either lost or stolen at airports all over the world. Shocking numbers, consider how many of these laptops contain sensitive information which is now totally out of the owner’s control.
The research highlights some scary statistics. In the US about 12,000 laptops go missing each week, 10% within Los Angeles. When asking the travelers if they took any steps to protect their content they found nearly 60% admitted no protection around their confidential information.
How do you protect against losing such devices? You may have encrypted the hard disk, but what if in the laptop bag the sensitive documents resided on non-encrypted USB drives or CDs and DVDs? Are you able to protect these storage devices? DLP products might be able to destroy the copies of the documents, but it needs some form of remote access to the laptop to issue the self destruct commands. These laptops might be powered up without internet access and the content stolen. The report is doing the rounds with other news websites that are suggesting varying methods on how to solve the problem and the issue of laptop theft has been in the press for many years.
Of course, I’m leading to the use of information rights management as the best solution. Not only would IRM ensure the documents were encrypted and access to them denied once the laptops and related devices are lost, but the responsibility for protecting the information doesn't need to rely on the end user. Deploying IRM and integrating with the content management systems, network file storage servers and also providing users with pre-sealed document templates ensures that content is correctly classified and protected without placing a burden on the end user make that decision.
We obviously use Oracle IRM within the company and a few years ago we had someone loose a laptop at an airport (Don't worry Mark, I won't name and shame... oops). Our response was simple, we disabled his Windows account credentials and temporarily revoked his rights to content on the IRM server whilst we sorted out new account details and reset passwords. We were safe in the knowledge that all the important documents on that laptop were secure.
If you want to learn more about how this technology can help you protect your organizations content either contact your Oracle sales representative or email us and we can give you access to our easy to use online evaluation system.
Well the hand waving around CMIS is in full swing but the actual impact is yet to be determined. CMIS is the Content Management Interoperability Services specification that is being submitted to OASIS for standards ratification (download it here). Oracle is a member of the CMIS community and helped to review/vet/confirm the spec along with others such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, OpenText, and Alfresco.
By now you should have read that it is a Web Services/REST/Atom/SOAP specification for getting at your unstructured content regardless of what content management system it lives in. With the CMIS-defined HTTP calls, standard create, read, update, delete operations against a compliant repository are the same regardless of the vendor repository architecture. If this sounds like JCR (in purpose not API) to you then you're on the right track. But while .Net shops were never going to participate in a java spec, CMIS invites them into the fold.
CMIS is the big tent content management specification. Honestly, I like it because, as David Nuescheler point out in the CMS Watch article linked below, "...the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language..." is a good thing. The reality is that many organizations operate in heterogeneous ECM environments. All of us vendors spend cycles on producing system specific components, web parts, adapters, and agents to talk with, store in, migrate from our competitors' systems. This will make that easier.
What I don't buy (just yet) is that this proposed standard is all that was missing to allow customers to keep their content just where it is and usher in a new and glorious era of enterprise mashups. The standard provides the common baseline of access/retrieval/interaction with unstructured content and its metadata across the participating ECM systems. You can bet the vendors will start here and differentiate on top.
But just the fact that we're all starting here is a very good step in the right direction. Keep in mind that, right now, this is a .5 draft specification so we will see maturation as time goes on and folks sign on.
...there's a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal.
It is not necessarily vendor involvement that drives the adoption of standards. Often it is the success of products that use them that causes standards to take off.
There are a number of benefits of interoperability according to the group, including:
* Improved user access:
* Cost Reduction:
* Protection of Current Environments (clipped)
With ZendCon next week and Oracle OpenWorld the week after, you might soon get inspired to present your own pet topic. It's easy(ish) and fun to share knowledge. The "stuff" you're playing with deserves a bigger audience. Conferences are an ideal way to see where the industry is heading and to learn new techniques. Presenting is an ideal reason to attend and great on your resume.
The ever efficient organizing committee of PHP Quebec has reminded me that their call for speakers closes in a month. The conference is in Montreal, Canada between March 4 and 6th, 2009. It will be the seventh time the conference has run - wow.
Tickets are booked, hotels are reserved, excitement is building... yes it is time for Oracle OpenWorld! As data warehouse and OWB enthusiasts we all want to know the best sessions to go to. Here is a useful PDF printable booklet that you can bring to the show to see the times for the OWB and DW related sessions. Anything from Data Mining, through partitioning, via OWB and to OLAP is in here.
Oh and don't miss Andy Mendelsohn's session... should be good. Don't miss Larry's session this year, it promises to be good fun. Not sure if we have the cute penguins from 2 years ago again, but there will be sufficient stuff to talk about after that.
As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around these technologies it is common to overhear IT managers and executives at various technology conferences inquiring with each other as to what their "enterprise 2.0 projects / play / strategies” are in an effort to grasp this nebulous space, where hard ROI is very elusive. Due to this it is easy to loose sight of why these technologies might make sense in the portfolio of solutions that IT can provide to the businesses that they support. In the midst of all of this commotion it is essential to remember to step back and see if these technologies even make sense for the business initiatives that we are supporting.
It is time to revisit business analysis basics and be careful to make sure we have not started focusing entirely too much about the perceived need for these tools, opposed to a specific need. These tools are powerful and attractive, but we really need to understand if and how these technologies should be leveraged - pinpointing where they can alleviate business pains. In the work that I have done with a range of enterprise software deployments there is a consistent trend demonstrating successful implementations result when done to address a specific need, tools that were put into place because the technology was in vogue failed. Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise fit the same bill. Do not look to implement them because eWeek magazine or another publication has labeled it as the thing that other IT executives will implement this year.
I hope to clear the air in this post by outlining the virtues of each tool (specifically tagging, blogging and wikiing) and through a series of questions add clarity to where they would make business sense and allow the virtues to be realized.
Tagging
Social tagging technology excels at handling large amounts of unstructured data that is not served by traditional knowledge management systems (i.e. folders upon folders buried in a large, somewhat static hierarchy). Given this power it needs to be considered as part of an overall knowledge management strategy for information workers, but it also needs to specifically address some pain or a specific need of the business.
As information volumes continue to rapidly expand in the enterprise it is very difficult to organize and catalog assets, even with the support of full-time librarians. Additionally, in a world of M&A and constantly shifting organizational structures, it can be all the more important in helping people to reign in and make sense of this data. It is not uncommon for users to spend an extra fifteen minutes searching for an article within traditional search engines when they could not explicitly state their query to return satisfactory results. By contrast, tagging technologies have allowed them to see what other, related categories materials might fall into, speeding their searches drastically. Here are some questions that may help your organization determine if tagging would support the business by meeting specific business needs.
Is your company currently experiencing quantifiable issues finding documents or other digital assets within your network? Is it a big enough of an issue to act on?
Is a technology like social tagging something that your organization's culture would embrace? Is the user base directly asking for it? It is important to keep in mind that tagging will only benefit end users if they are willing to contribute to the tagging of document. As enterprise tagging matures it is likely that it will gain acceptance in much the same way instant messaging has within the enterprise.
Is there any research or knowledge intensive work at your organization that tagging may accelerate through more effective discovery of information?
Are there opportunities to use this technology to help external customers more easily do business with your company?
Would it be possible to designate someone to own and manage the platform from a business standpoint at a department or enterprise level?
Blogging
Blogs are great tools to rapidly publish and share expertise within an organization. Unlike email, a blog posting persists and is generally visible to a large audience which is able to engage the author in a dialog with comments or questions for everyone to see. Unlike a discussion forum, a blog posting provides detailed information around a particular topic, rather than a brief comment or question. A blog is also generally associated with a single person, allowing them to gain recognition in their organization or respective field. In your organization it might be a software developer, operations specialist or researcher that is able to provide a significant amount of value with this tool.
It may sound strange, the key to enterprise blogging is not about creating blog entries to be consumed by the entire enterprise, but about providing a single, unified platform that specific business participants can use to write posts for discrete audiences. Blogging within departments or to specific niches where the information is most relevant is the most valuable use of the technology. One of my prior postings (Niche Cooking for Portal Success) details a philosophy aligned with this approach which will work equally well for blogging. The following questions will help you to identify if it makes for your organization to deploy this technology.
Do you have experts in your organization that have pointers that others would benefit from in a measurable way?
How often would there be something that someone would blog about that people across the enterprise could really benefit from? Our foremost needs revolve around what it takes to get our work done, so any blogging that takes place in an organization has to help meet this need. With rare exception anything else is not providing value that can justify putting a platform into place and taking the time to manage it.
Would connecting with customers, partners or external constituents add value for your business? Would it be worthwhile enough for the investment?
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to their blogs during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Wikiing
Due to the allure of ubiquitous knowledge capture and propagation, a wiki deployment requires an extra amount of careful thought as to why and how it will be deployed to the enterprise. Given the potential, as demonstrated publicly by Wikipedia, many companies entertain having a wiki tool whose content expands into all sections of their business. This risk is that this generic, organization wide deployment, would most likely bring little business value to the enterprise and leave people wondering why they ever made an investment into the technology.
Similar to blogging technology, Wikis are going to be most effective when deployed for a very specific reason. A deployment could occur within a department, across departments or even with areas outside of or around the company, but should always tie back to a specific need that the tool is supporting. Wikis do an excellent job of helping knowledge workers collaborate on projects or support a function or process, by capturing tacit knowledge, sharing “facts”, presenting methods and or publishing best practices. Instead of being done by a single user, a Wiki allows a team to work together – enhancing and updating areas to evolve with the business. There is no better “living document” than a Wiki. Take a moment to think about the following questions to see if a Wiki might make sense for your business.
Does your business have undocumented processes or knowledge that could help a specific department or function perform more effectively if captured in a Wiki format?
Is there a simple place where new employees could go to learn during an on-boarding process? As policies, procedures or reporting structures and processes change within an organization a Wiki does an excellent job of making sure people can get up to speed.
Does an identifiable bottleneck exist with some members of your organization that could be alleviated if they were able to share their knowledge collectively with other employees?
Given the categorization that a Wiki imposes would it make existing knowledge more accessible if placed into the a unified format that a group could manage and edit? Since a Wiki can be an authoritative place for a collection of related materials it requires far less maintenance than a series of disparate files to maintain, enhance and manage.
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to the Wiki during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Final Thoughts
There is not doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting them with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point. Hopefully some of the above questions can help your organization to focus, clarify and be successful with where and how these emerging technologies can benefit your company.
I just had a sneak preview of the Oracle OpenWorld On Demand portal, and I have to say it's pretty cool. I found the most unique and impressive feature to be the integrated transcript available for each and every keynote. The transcripts are synched to the videos, allowing you to use a quick and simple word search to immediately hone in to a specific point in the video.
Let's say you want to view the exact moment when Larry Ellison makes a surprise announcement about ... the America's Cup. Simply choose the display option "Topics & Transcripts" and do a keyword search on "America's Cup." Your results will allow you to skip right to the very second of video you're looking for.
The portal will provide 28 hours of keynotes with synchronized video, slides, scrolling transcripts, and downloadable MP3s and MP4s. All 1,700 hours of general sessions will be available in audio along with PDFs of the presentation slides. For your convenience, all audio, video, and supporting materials can be streamed or accessed right on the site, or downloaded for later. Presentations are posted within 24 hours of the live sessions.
You'll also get news and announcements updated continually throughout Oracle OpenWorld and beyond. Blogs and communities will allow you to rate presentations, ask questions, network, and more. Prepopulated content is scheduled to be available Tuesday, September 16.
Click here to check out Oracle OpenWorld On Demand and the rest of this year's official Add Ons. But don't forget, you need to register before you can add.
Another lazy job ;-). If you are trying the tutorial from the link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe1013jdev/10131/bslayer/bslayer.htm
At the same time you feel like to have a complete sample to play with then download the sample file from http://skydrive.live.com. The sample file name is OrderEntry.zip. My MSN ID is chanmmn@hotmail.com
Do feedback to me if the end product does not run for you.
Under heavy security in the bowels of a secret building, this spy-phone photo shows some of the many laptops and servers being configured for exhibition hall booths.
The Democratic convention is over. The Republican convention is over. Those were just warm-up acts for the one you're truly interested in, right? Take at look at some more reasons why Oracle OpenWorld is the conference you cannot miss this year.
OpenWorld Hands-On Labs—Another Bite at the Apple
There's no better way to experience new technology than to take it out for a test drive. Oracle ACE Floyd Teter talks about how helpful the hands-on labs were at Collaborate 08, and advises you to sign up early for those sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.
OpenWorld Once Again
Chen Shapira, a DBA living in Cupertino, CA, has set up an ambitious agenda for the show. And now that she's shared it, we can all help make sure she doesn't get too nervous to present her Unconference session this year.
Get Out Your Glue Guns and See If You Can Beat This
The Triora Group has come up with a great contest for the show. If you're crafty, or even if you're not, head over to their blog and enter to win some conference bling.
Where's Red Hat This September?
The folks at Red Hat hit the road on their 2008 North American Red Hat Road Tour at the beginning of the month. You can catch one of their theater sessions at Oracle OpenWorld booth #622.
Oracle OpenWorld
EDS, an Elite Sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld, has some intriguing speakers and showcases lined up for the conference, including Nothing Like it in the World: Lessons of Security, Confidence, and Trust from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. See what else they have planned for the show.
The Open Web Foundation is an interesting new initiative which shows that a new generation is interested in standards. They have different needs. They are willing to create something new. Alternatively, they have lost faith in the traditional players like national standards bodies (certainly) as well as players of the 1990s' Internet age, such as Oasis and W3C.
As I hinted out earlier - we have a new blog dedicated to business level discussion on directories. It's called Directory Service Stories and we have posted our first post on a customer related story.
The purpose of that blog in compared to mine is that we will focus on customer stories and higher level use cases. While i continue to be more technical here.
As blogger John Brunswick points out, Enterprise 2.0 enjoys a high buzz factor and generates a lot of excitement, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
That buzz and excitement can leave you all tingly and panting to implement lots of cool Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. But decisions made while buzzed and excited often have interesting results. And by interesting I mean things like weird late-night phone calls and unexplained tattoos.
So John suggests a calm, rational, business-focused approach when considering Enterprise 2.0:
There is no doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting [the technologies] with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point.
"
["category"]=>
string(12) "Architecture"
["guid"]=>
string(76) "http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/2008/09/applying_enterprise_20_where_i.html"
["pubDate"]=>
string(31) "Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:07:47 -0500"
}
[7]=>
array(6) {
["title"]=>
string(90) "MKB Bank Centralized Database Accounts in AD and Eliminated Helpdesk Calls on DB Passwords"
["link"]=>
string(77) "http://blogs.oracle.com/odsstories/2008/09/mkb_bank_centralized_database.html"
["description"]=>
string(346) "
Read our new white-paper on MKB Bank and how they used OVD to centralize database accounts in Active Directory. This solution was integrated with their existing 3rd party provisioning system and helped eliminate helpdesk calls about database passwords.
Since I'm focusing this blog more on the technical side - I thought I would try to regularly provide a set of links and commentary to security and privacy articles I find.
"For Your Browser Only" -- Reminds developer's that if you are writing cookies from your server code to remember to mark them "HTTP Only". This dramatically reduces the surface area for cross-site scripting attacks. I would also add that other techniques - such as using a standards-based framework for authentication/session management and risk-based access control like Oracle provides via Fusion Middleware and the Access Management Suite will add extra protection.
What Californians Understand About Privacy Online -- A paper showing how big the gulf is between the average person's perception of how their privacy is protected and the reality . One could of course make a joke about what do you expect from people who elect "The Terminator" their governor but it is a real problem.
SQL Injection issue in :limit and :offset parameter -- A two-fer this week - security issues in two of the most popular frameworks out there - Spring and now Rails. I give credit to the author for trying to help raise awareness and in general I think adopting frameworks (in particular standard - whether that's "Standard" like JSF or a "standard" like Spring/Rails) make you more productive - and yes, secure.
5 Features Your Login System Must Have -- An interesting article for those who are still "rolling their own system". Of course for an enterprise - I'm not sure of any valid use case where that would be a good idea - there's too many good products out there such as Oracle Access Management Suite that can do this for you without needing to become a SSO developer. If you are working on a consumer site - then at the very least, you should adopt something like OpenID or Infocards so that you are not managing passwords.
Here is one website you do not want your company name to appear on, http://datalossdb.org/. What is it?
"DataLossDB, formerly the Attrition.org Data Loss Database Open Source, is an research project aimed at documenting known and reported data loss incidents world-wide. The effort is now a community one, with the move to OSF, and relies on the contributions of users like you to grow and prune the database."
Basically the public at large submit to this website any known security breaches in the form of hacked websites, lost documents, media, laptops etc. It is a vastly improved interface to the former website, http://attrition.org/. People can now search by date, by incident type, industry even by what is the largest known loss of records! A leader board on which you will all want to avoid being in the top ten. Any guesses at what technology might be able to help you ensure that even when your intranets are hacked, laptops lost and firewalls breached, your most sensitive content still remains safe? I don't think I even need to say it...
One of the basic elements we consider each time we plan for the Keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld is what music we should play before the presentations. Over the years we've piped in everything from contemporary rock to very eclectic music from groups like The Magnetic Poets (if you were there last year you heard them). And we've even had live bands.
So, what could we do a little differently this year? How about an avant-garde cellist! Zoe Keating has been described as a "one woman orchestra" and "a distinctive mix of old and new—layers of sound, that feel more like orchestrations than a solo instrument." Her distinct performance will create an energetic environment and add a unique stream to our digital conversation for a very special ambience in the Keynote Hall. Zoe is pretty excited to be playing for you. She even posted about it on her own blog.
I saw Zoe play (on a moving bus) in July and was immediately struck by her music and how perfectly it would fit in with the atmosphere of Oracle OpenWorld. So, I was thrilled when she agreed to play for us. You can check out some of her videos on YouTube to get a sense of her musical style ahead of time, but I definitely encourage you to show up early for all of the keynotes to hear her play. That will also give you plenty of time to check out the digital conversation, get a good seat, and connect with old friends.
We've got a great lineup of Keynotes this year, and a few surprises along the way that we think you'll like. We're in meetings virtually every day now planning these special touches for you, and I can personally tell you that this may be the best year yet.
I am planning to write a quick reference section (QR) with all the tips for the programmers / administrators. This will help us to quickly check the list of to-do things. So, this is my first QR.
This is a quick reference to know what client side jar files are needed to be added in the CLASSPATH when we are trying to use JMS (in-memory/file or database) from an application client (java code or any other 3rd party JMS client). Following are the JAR files needed in the classpath:
Client-side JAR Files Required for OEMS JMS In-Memory and File-Based Lookup:
(Required only if the opmn:ormi prefix is used in Oracle Application Server environment.)
Note: If you cant find jndi.jar in the above specified location, then it should be there available in $ORACLE_HOME/datadirect/sun/lib directory.
This quick reference should be helpful when programming with OC4J JMS.
"
["guid"]=>
string(82) "http://blogs.oracle.com/learnwithpavan/2008/09/quick_reference_1_clientside_j.html"
["pubDate"]=>
string(31) "Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:20:23 +0530"
}
[13]=>
array(6) {
["title"]=>
string(56) "Nearly 1000 laptops go missing at London Heathrow a week"
["link"]=>
string(71) "http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/nearly_1000_laptops_go_missing.html"
["description"]=>
string(3500) "
The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper, has just reported on some research done by the Ponemon Institute for Dell computers. The research has found that in a year about 800,000 laptops are either lost or stolen at airports all over the world. Shocking numbers, consider how many of these laptops contain sensitive information which is now totally out of the owner’s control.
The research highlights some scary statistics. In the US about 12,000 laptops go missing each week, 10% within Los Angeles. When asking the travelers if they took any steps to protect their content they found nearly 60% admitted no protection around their confidential information.
How do you protect against losing such devices? You may have encrypted the hard disk, but what if in the laptop bag the sensitive documents resided on non-encrypted USB drives or CDs and DVDs? Are you able to protect these storage devices? DLP products might be able to destroy the copies of the documents, but it needs some form of remote access to the laptop to issue the self destruct commands. These laptops might be powered up without internet access and the content stolen. The report is doing the rounds with other news websites that are suggesting varying methods on how to solve the problem and the issue of laptop theft has been in the press for many years.
Of course, I’m leading to the use of information rights management as the best solution. Not only would IRM ensure the documents were encrypted and access to them denied once the laptops and related devices are lost, but the responsibility for protecting the information doesn't need to rely on the end user. Deploying IRM and integrating with the content management systems, network file storage servers and also providing users with pre-sealed document templates ensures that content is correctly classified and protected without placing a burden on the end user make that decision.
We obviously use Oracle IRM within the company and a few years ago we had someone loose a laptop at an airport (Don't worry Mark, I won't name and shame... oops). Our response was simple, we disabled his Windows account credentials and temporarily revoked his rights to content on the IRM server whilst we sorted out new account details and reset passwords. We were safe in the knowledge that all the important documents on that laptop were secure.
If you want to learn more about how this technology can help you protect your organizations content either contact your Oracle sales representative or email us and we can give you access to our easy to use online evaluation system.
Well the hand waving around CMIS is in full swing but the actual impact is yet to be determined. CMIS is the Content Management Interoperability Services specification that is being submitted to OASIS for standards ratification (download it here). Oracle is a member of the CMIS community and helped to review/vet/confirm the spec along with others such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, OpenText, and Alfresco.
By now you should have read that it is a Web Services/REST/Atom/SOAP specification for getting at your unstructured content regardless of what content management system it lives in. With the CMIS-defined HTTP calls, standard create, read, update, delete operations against a compliant repository are the same regardless of the vendor repository architecture. If this sounds like JCR (in purpose not API) to you then you're on the right track. But while .Net shops were never going to participate in a java spec, CMIS invites them into the fold.
CMIS is the big tent content management specification. Honestly, I like it because, as David Nuescheler point out in the CMS Watch article linked below, "...the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language..." is a good thing. The reality is that many organizations operate in heterogeneous ECM environments. All of us vendors spend cycles on producing system specific components, web parts, adapters, and agents to talk with, store in, migrate from our competitors' systems. This will make that easier.
What I don't buy (just yet) is that this proposed standard is all that was missing to allow customers to keep their content just where it is and usher in a new and glorious era of enterprise mashups. The standard provides the common baseline of access/retrieval/interaction with unstructured content and its metadata across the participating ECM systems. You can bet the vendors will start here and differentiate on top.
But just the fact that we're all starting here is a very good step in the right direction. Keep in mind that, right now, this is a .5 draft specification so we will see maturation as time goes on and folks sign on.
...there's a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal.
It is not necessarily vendor involvement that drives the adoption of standards. Often it is the success of products that use them that causes standards to take off.
There are a number of benefits of interoperability according to the group, including:
* Improved user access:
* Cost Reduction:
* Protection of Current Environments (clipped)
With ZendCon next week and Oracle OpenWorld the week after, you might soon get inspired to present your own pet topic. It's easy(ish) and fun to share knowledge. The "stuff" you're playing with deserves a bigger audience. Conferences are an ideal way to see where the industry is heading and to learn new techniques. Presenting is an ideal reason to attend and great on your resume.
The ever efficient organizing committee of PHP Quebec has reminded me that their call for speakers closes in a month. The conference is in Montreal, Canada between March 4 and 6th, 2009. It will be the seventh time the conference has run - wow.
Tickets are booked, hotels are reserved, excitement is building... yes it is time for Oracle OpenWorld! As data warehouse and OWB enthusiasts we all want to know the best sessions to go to. Here is a useful PDF printable booklet that you can bring to the show to see the times for the OWB and DW related sessions. Anything from Data Mining, through partitioning, via OWB and to OLAP is in here.
Oh and don't miss Andy Mendelsohn's session... should be good. Don't miss Larry's session this year, it promises to be good fun. Not sure if we have the cute penguins from 2 years ago again, but there will be sufficient stuff to talk about after that.
As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around these technologies it is common to overhear IT managers and executives at various technology conferences inquiring with each other as to what their "enterprise 2.0 projects / play / strategies” are in an effort to grasp this nebulous space, where hard ROI is very elusive. Due to this it is easy to loose sight of why these technologies might make sense in the portfolio of solutions that IT can provide to the businesses that they support. In the midst of all of this commotion it is essential to remember to step back and see if these technologies even make sense for the business initiatives that we are supporting.
It is time to revisit business analysis basics and be careful to make sure we have not started focusing entirely too much about the perceived need for these tools, opposed to a specific need. These tools are powerful and attractive, but we really need to understand if and how these technologies should be leveraged - pinpointing where they can alleviate business pains. In the work that I have done with a range of enterprise software deployments there is a consistent trend demonstrating successful implementations result when done to address a specific need, tools that were put into place because the technology was in vogue failed. Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise fit the same bill. Do not look to implement them because eWeek magazine or another publication has labeled it as the thing that other IT executives will implement this year.
I hope to clear the air in this post by outlining the virtues of each tool (specifically tagging, blogging and wikiing) and through a series of questions add clarity to where they would make business sense and allow the virtues to be realized.
Tagging
Social tagging technology excels at handling large amounts of unstructured data that is not served by traditional knowledge management systems (i.e. folders upon folders buried in a large, somewhat static hierarchy). Given this power it needs to be considered as part of an overall knowledge management strategy for information workers, but it also needs to specifically address some pain or a specific need of the business.
As information volumes continue to rapidly expand in the enterprise it is very difficult to organize and catalog assets, even with the support of full-time librarians. Additionally, in a world of M&A and constantly shifting organizational structures, it can be all the more important in helping people to reign in and make sense of this data. It is not uncommon for users to spend an extra fifteen minutes searching for an article within traditional search engines when they could not explicitly state their query to return satisfactory results. By contrast, tagging technologies have allowed them to see what other, related categories materials might fall into, speeding their searches drastically. Here are some questions that may help your organization determine if tagging would support the business by meeting specific business needs.
Is your company currently experiencing quantifiable issues finding documents or other digital assets within your network? Is it a big enough of an issue to act on?
Is a technology like social tagging something that your organization's culture would embrace? Is the user base directly asking for it? It is important to keep in mind that tagging will only benefit end users if they are willing to contribute to the tagging of document. As enterprise tagging matures it is likely that it will gain acceptance in much the same way instant messaging has within the enterprise.
Is there any research or knowledge intensive work at your organization that tagging may accelerate through more effective discovery of information?
Are there opportunities to use this technology to help external customers more easily do business with your company?
Would it be possible to designate someone to own and manage the platform from a business standpoint at a department or enterprise level?
Blogging
Blogs are great tools to rapidly publish and share expertise within an organization. Unlike email, a blog posting persists and is generally visible to a large audience which is able to engage the author in a dialog with comments or questions for everyone to see. Unlike a discussion forum, a blog posting provides detailed information around a particular topic, rather than a brief comment or question. A blog is also generally associated with a single person, allowing them to gain recognition in their organization or respective field. In your organization it might be a software developer, operations specialist or researcher that is able to provide a significant amount of value with this tool.
It may sound strange, the key to enterprise blogging is not about creating blog entries to be consumed by the entire enterprise, but about providing a single, unified platform that specific business participants can use to write posts for discrete audiences. Blogging within departments or to specific niches where the information is most relevant is the most valuable use of the technology. One of my prior postings (Niche Cooking for Portal Success) details a philosophy aligned with this approach which will work equally well for blogging. The following questions will help you to identify if it makes for your organization to deploy this technology.
Do you have experts in your organization that have pointers that others would benefit from in a measurable way?
How often would there be something that someone would blog about that people across the enterprise could really benefit from? Our foremost needs revolve around what it takes to get our work done, so any blogging that takes place in an organization has to help meet this need. With rare exception anything else is not providing value that can justify putting a platform into place and taking the time to manage it.
Would connecting with customers, partners or external constituents add value for your business? Would it be worthwhile enough for the investment?
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to their blogs during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Wikiing
Due to the allure of ubiquitous knowledge capture and propagation, a wiki deployment requires an extra amount of careful thought as to why and how it will be deployed to the enterprise. Given the potential, as demonstrated publicly by Wikipedia, many companies entertain having a wiki tool whose content expands into all sections of their business. This risk is that this generic, organization wide deployment, would most likely bring little business value to the enterprise and leave people wondering why they ever made an investment into the technology.
Similar to blogging technology, Wikis are going to be most effective when deployed for a very specific reason. A deployment could occur within a department, across departments or even with areas outside of or around the company, but should always tie back to a specific need that the tool is supporting. Wikis do an excellent job of helping knowledge workers collaborate on projects or support a function or process, by capturing tacit knowledge, sharing “facts”, presenting methods and or publishing best practices. Instead of being done by a single user, a Wiki allows a team to work together – enhancing and updating areas to evolve with the business. There is no better “living document” than a Wiki. Take a moment to think about the following questions to see if a Wiki might make sense for your business.
Does your business have undocumented processes or knowledge that could help a specific department or function perform more effectively if captured in a Wiki format?
Is there a simple place where new employees could go to learn during an on-boarding process? As policies, procedures or reporting structures and processes change within an organization a Wiki does an excellent job of making sure people can get up to speed.
Does an identifiable bottleneck exist with some members of your organization that could be alleviated if they were able to share their knowledge collectively with other employees?
Given the categorization that a Wiki imposes would it make existing knowledge more accessible if placed into the a unified format that a group could manage and edit? Since a Wiki can be an authoritative place for a collection of related materials it requires far less maintenance than a series of disparate files to maintain, enhance and manage.
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to the Wiki during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Final Thoughts
There is not doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting them with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point. Hopefully some of the above questions can help your organization to focus, clarify and be successful with where and how these emerging technologies can benefit your company.
I just had a sneak preview of the Oracle OpenWorld On Demand portal, and I have to say it's pretty cool. I found the most unique and impressive feature to be the integrated transcript available for each and every keynote. The transcripts are synched to the videos, allowing you to use a quick and simple word search to immediately hone in to a specific point in the video.
Let's say you want to view the exact moment when Larry Ellison makes a surprise announcement about ... the America's Cup. Simply choose the display option "Topics & Transcripts" and do a keyword search on "America's Cup." Your results will allow you to skip right to the very second of video you're looking for.
The portal will provide 28 hours of keynotes with synchronized video, slides, scrolling transcripts, and downloadable MP3s and MP4s. All 1,700 hours of general sessions will be available in audio along with PDFs of the presentation slides. For your convenience, all audio, video, and supporting materials can be streamed or accessed right on the site, or downloaded for later. Presentations are posted within 24 hours of the live sessions.
You'll also get news and announcements updated continually throughout Oracle OpenWorld and beyond. Blogs and communities will allow you to rate presentations, ask questions, network, and more. Prepopulated content is scheduled to be available Tuesday, September 16.
Click here to check out Oracle OpenWorld On Demand and the rest of this year's official Add Ons. But don't forget, you need to register before you can add.
Another lazy job ;-). If you are trying the tutorial from the link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe1013jdev/10131/bslayer/bslayer.htm
At the same time you feel like to have a complete sample to play with then download the sample file from http://skydrive.live.com. The sample file name is OrderEntry.zip. My MSN ID is chanmmn@hotmail.com
Do feedback to me if the end product does not run for you.
Under heavy security in the bowels of a secret building, this spy-phone photo shows some of the many laptops and servers being configured for exhibition hall booths.
[category] => 全般
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/Oraclejapanpr/2008/09/post_14.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:00:06 +0900
)
[3] => Array
(
[title] => Around the World
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2008/09/around_the_world_4.html
[description] =>
The Word from the Web – 09/12/08
The Democratic convention is over. The Republican convention is over. Those were just warm-up acts for the one you're truly interested in, right? Take at look at some more reasons why Oracle OpenWorld is the conference you cannot miss this year.
OpenWorld Hands-On Labs—Another Bite at the Apple
There's no better way to experience new technology than to take it out for a test drive. Oracle ACE Floyd Teter talks about how helpful the hands-on labs were at Collaborate 08, and advises you to sign up early for those sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.
OpenWorld Once Again
Chen Shapira, a DBA living in Cupertino, CA, has set up an ambitious agenda for the show. And now that she's shared it, we can all help make sure she doesn't get too nervous to present her Unconference session this year.
Get Out Your Glue Guns and See If You Can Beat This
The Triora Group has come up with a great contest for the show. If you're crafty, or even if you're not, head over to their blog and enter to win some conference bling.
Where's Red Hat This September?
The folks at Red Hat hit the road on their 2008 North American Red Hat Road Tour at the beginning of the month. You can catch one of their theater sessions at Oracle OpenWorld booth #622.
Oracle OpenWorld
EDS, an Elite Sponsor at Oracle OpenWorld, has some intriguing speakers and showcases lined up for the conference, including Nothing Like it in the World: Lessons of Security, Confidence, and Trust from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. See what else they have planned for the show.
[category] => Around the World
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2008/09/around_the_world_4.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:53:11 -0800
)
[4] => Array
(
[title] => Standards -- the new breed
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/2008/09/standards_the_new_breed.html
[description] =>
The Open Web Foundation is an interesting new initiative which shows that a new generation is interested in standards. They have different needs. They are willing to create something new. Alternatively, they have lost faith in the traditional players like national standards bodies (certainly) as well as players of the 1990s' Internet age, such as Oasis and W3C.
As I hinted out earlier - we have a new blog dedicated to business level discussion on directories. It's called Directory Service Stories and we have posted our first post on a customer related story.
The purpose of that blog in compared to mine is that we will focus on customer stories and higher level use cases. While i continue to be more technical here.
As blogger John Brunswick points out, Enterprise 2.0 enjoys a high buzz factor and generates a lot of excitement, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
That buzz and excitement can leave you all tingly and panting to implement lots of cool Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. But decisions made while buzzed and excited often have interesting results. And by interesting I mean things like weird late-night phone calls and unexplained tattoos.
So John suggests a calm, rational, business-focused approach when considering Enterprise 2.0:
There is no doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting [the technologies] with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point.
[category] => Architecture
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/2008/09/applying_enterprise_20_where_i.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:07:47 -0500
)
[7] => Array
(
[title] => MKB Bank Centralized Database Accounts in AD and Eliminated Helpdesk Calls on DB Passwords
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/odsstories/2008/09/mkb_bank_centralized_database.html
[description] =>
Read our new white-paper on MKB Bank and how they used OVD to centralize database accounts in Active Directory. This solution was integrated with their existing 3rd party provisioning system and helped eliminate helpdesk calls about database passwords.
Since I'm focusing this blog more on the technical side - I thought I would try to regularly provide a set of links and commentary to security and privacy articles I find.
"For Your Browser Only" -- Reminds developer's that if you are writing cookies from your server code to remember to mark them "HTTP Only". This dramatically reduces the surface area for cross-site scripting attacks. I would also add that other techniques - such as using a standards-based framework for authentication/session management and risk-based access control like Oracle provides via Fusion Middleware and the Access Management Suite will add extra protection.
What Californians Understand About Privacy Online -- A paper showing how big the gulf is between the average person's perception of how their privacy is protected and the reality . One could of course make a joke about what do you expect from people who elect "The Terminator" their governor but it is a real problem.
SQL Injection issue in :limit and :offset parameter -- A two-fer this week - security issues in two of the most popular frameworks out there - Spring and now Rails. I give credit to the author for trying to help raise awareness and in general I think adopting frameworks (in particular standard - whether that's "Standard" like JSF or a "standard" like Spring/Rails) make you more productive - and yes, secure.
5 Features Your Login System Must Have -- An interesting article for those who are still "rolling their own system". Of course for an enterprise - I'm not sure of any valid use case where that would be a good idea - there's too many good products out there such as Oracle Access Management Suite that can do this for you without needing to become a SSO developer. If you are working on a consumer site - then at the very least, you should adopt something like OpenID or Infocards so that you are not managing passwords.
[category] => Oracle BI EE
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/siebelessentials/2008/09/#005980
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:29:55 +0100
)
[10] => Array
(
[title] => Online Data Loss Database launched
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/online_data_loss_database_laun.html
[description] =>
Here is one website you do not want your company name to appear on, http://datalossdb.org/. What is it?
"DataLossDB, formerly the Attrition.org Data Loss Database Open Source, is an research project aimed at documenting known and reported data loss incidents world-wide. The effort is now a community one, with the move to OSF, and relies on the contributions of users like you to grow and prune the database."
Basically the public at large submit to this website any known security breaches in the form of hacked websites, lost documents, media, laptops etc. It is a vastly improved interface to the former website, http://attrition.org/. People can now search by date, by incident type, industry even by what is the largest known loss of records! A leader board on which you will all want to avoid being in the top ten. Any guesses at what technology might be able to help you ensure that even when your intranets are hacked, laptops lost and firewalls breached, your most sensitive content still remains safe? I don't think I even need to say it...
[category] => General
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/online_data_loss_database_laun.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:22:47 -0800
)
[11] => Array
(
[title] => Even Avant Cellists Love Oracle OpenWorld
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2008/09/even_avant_cellists_love_oracl_1.html
[description] =>
Don't Miss Zoe Keating Before the Keynotes
One of the basic elements we consider each time we plan for the Keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld is what music we should play before the presentations. Over the years we've piped in everything from contemporary rock to very eclectic music from groups like The Magnetic Poets (if you were there last year you heard them). And we've even had live bands.
So, what could we do a little differently this year? How about an avant-garde cellist! Zoe Keating has been described as a "one woman orchestra" and "a distinctive mix of old and new—layers of sound, that feel more like orchestrations than a solo instrument." Her distinct performance will create an energetic environment and add a unique stream to our digital conversation for a very special ambience in the Keynote Hall. Zoe is pretty excited to be playing for you. She even posted about it on her own blog.
I saw Zoe play (on a moving bus) in July and was immediately struck by her music and how perfectly it would fit in with the atmosphere of Oracle OpenWorld. So, I was thrilled when she agreed to play for us. You can check out some of her videos on YouTube to get a sense of her musical style ahead of time, but I definitely encourage you to show up early for all of the keynotes to hear her play. That will also give you plenty of time to check out the digital conversation, get a good seat, and connect with old friends.
We've got a great lineup of Keynotes this year, and a few surprises along the way that we think you'll like. We're in meetings virtually every day now planning these special touches for you, and I can personally tell you that this may be the best year yet.
See you in less than two weeks!
Paul Salinger
Vice President
[category] => Fun & Entertainment
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2008/09/even_avant_cellists_love_oracl_1.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:42:50 -0800
)
[12] => Array
(
[title] => Quick Reference 1 : Client-side JAR Files required for OEMS JMS In-Memory and File-Based Lookup and Database Lookup
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/learnwithpavan/2008/09/quick_reference_1_clientside_j.html
[description] =>
I am planning to write a quick reference section (QR) with all the tips for the programmers / administrators. This will help us to quickly check the list of to-do things. So, this is my first QR.
This is a quick reference to know what client side jar files are needed to be added in the CLASSPATH when we are trying to use JMS (in-memory/file or database) from an application client (java code or any other 3rd party JMS client). Following are the JAR files needed in the classpath:
Client-side JAR Files Required for OEMS JMS In-Memory and File-Based Lookup:
(Required only if the opmn:ormi prefix is used in Oracle Application Server environment.)
Note: If you cant find jndi.jar in the above specified location, then it should be there available in $ORACLE_HOME/datadirect/sun/lib directory.
This quick reference should be helpful when programming with OC4J JMS.
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/learnwithpavan/2008/09/quick_reference_1_clientside_j.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:20:23 +0530
)
[13] => Array
(
[title] => Nearly 1000 laptops go missing at London Heathrow a week
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/nearly_1000_laptops_go_missing.html
[description] =>
The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper, has just reported on some research done by the Ponemon Institute for Dell computers. The research has found that in a year about 800,000 laptops are either lost or stolen at airports all over the world. Shocking numbers, consider how many of these laptops contain sensitive information which is now totally out of the owner’s control.
The research highlights some scary statistics. In the US about 12,000 laptops go missing each week, 10% within Los Angeles. When asking the travelers if they took any steps to protect their content they found nearly 60% admitted no protection around their confidential information.
How do you protect against losing such devices? You may have encrypted the hard disk, but what if in the laptop bag the sensitive documents resided on non-encrypted USB drives or CDs and DVDs? Are you able to protect these storage devices? DLP products might be able to destroy the copies of the documents, but it needs some form of remote access to the laptop to issue the self destruct commands. These laptops might be powered up without internet access and the content stolen. The report is doing the rounds with other news websites that are suggesting varying methods on how to solve the problem and the issue of laptop theft has been in the press for many years.
Of course, I’m leading to the use of information rights management as the best solution. Not only would IRM ensure the documents were encrypted and access to them denied once the laptops and related devices are lost, but the responsibility for protecting the information doesn't need to rely on the end user. Deploying IRM and integrating with the content management systems, network file storage servers and also providing users with pre-sealed document templates ensures that content is correctly classified and protected without placing a burden on the end user make that decision.
We obviously use Oracle IRM within the company and a few years ago we had someone loose a laptop at an airport (Don't worry Mark, I won't name and shame... oops). Our response was simple, we disabled his Windows account credentials and temporarily revoked his rights to content on the IRM server whilst we sorted out new account details and reset passwords. We were safe in the knowledge that all the important documents on that laptop were secure.
If you want to learn more about how this technology can help you protect your organizations content either contact your Oracle sales representative or email us and we can give you access to our easy to use online evaluation system.
[category] => Data loss
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/irm/2008/09/nearly_1000_laptops_go_missing.html
[pubDate] => Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:49:37 -0800
)
[14] => Array
(
[title] => CMIS: My Take & Link Roundup
[link] => http://blogs.oracle.com/fusionecm/2008/09/cmis_my_take_link_roundup.html
[description] =>
Well the hand waving around CMIS is in full swing but the actual impact is yet to be determined. CMIS is the Content Management Interoperability Services specification that is being submitted to OASIS for standards ratification (download it here). Oracle is a member of the CMIS community and helped to review/vet/confirm the spec along with others such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, OpenText, and Alfresco.
By now you should have read that it is a Web Services/REST/Atom/SOAP specification for getting at your unstructured content regardless of what content management system it lives in. With the CMIS-defined HTTP calls, standard create, read, update, delete operations against a compliant repository are the same regardless of the vendor repository architecture. If this sounds like JCR (in purpose not API) to you then you're on the right track. But while .Net shops were never going to participate in a java spec, CMIS invites them into the fold.
CMIS is the big tent content management specification. Honestly, I like it because, as David Nuescheler point out in the CMS Watch article linked below, "...the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language..." is a good thing. The reality is that many organizations operate in heterogeneous ECM environments. All of us vendors spend cycles on producing system specific components, web parts, adapters, and agents to talk with, store in, migrate from our competitors' systems. This will make that easier.
What I don't buy (just yet) is that this proposed standard is all that was missing to allow customers to keep their content just where it is and usher in a new and glorious era of enterprise mashups. The standard provides the common baseline of access/retrieval/interaction with unstructured content and its metadata across the participating ECM systems. You can bet the vendors will start here and differentiate on top.
But just the fact that we're all starting here is a very good step in the right direction. Keep in mind that, right now, this is a .5 draft specification so we will see maturation as time goes on and folks sign on.
...there's a heightened need for interoperability between the vast and diverse sources that manage this content. Today's agreement is a major step forward in achieving this goal.
It is not necessarily vendor involvement that drives the adoption of standards. Often it is the success of products that use them that causes standards to take off.
There are a number of benefits of interoperability according to the group, including:
* Improved user access:
* Cost Reduction:
* Protection of Current Environments (clipped)
With ZendCon next week and Oracle OpenWorld the week after, you might soon get inspired to present your own pet topic. It's easy(ish) and fun to share knowledge. The "stuff" you're playing with deserves a bigger audience. Conferences are an ideal way to see where the industry is heading and to learn new techniques. Presenting is an ideal reason to attend and great on your resume.
The ever efficient organizing committee of PHP Quebec has reminded me that their call for speakers closes in a month. The conference is in Montreal, Canada between March 4 and 6th, 2009. It will be the seventh time the conference has run - wow.
Tickets are booked, hotels are reserved, excitement is building... yes it is time for Oracle OpenWorld! As data warehouse and OWB enthusiasts we all want to know the best sessions to go to. Here is a useful PDF printable booklet that you can bring to the show to see the times for the OWB and DW related sessions. Anything from Data Mining, through partitioning, via OWB and to OLAP is in here.
Oh and don't miss Andy Mendelsohn's session... should be good. Don't miss Larry's session this year, it promises to be good fun. Not sure if we have the cute penguins from 2 years ago again, but there will be sufficient stuff to talk about after that.
As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around these technologies it is common to overhear IT managers and executives at various technology conferences inquiring with each other as to what their "enterprise 2.0 projects / play / strategies” are in an effort to grasp this nebulous space, where hard ROI is very elusive. Due to this it is easy to loose sight of why these technologies might make sense in the portfolio of solutions that IT can provide to the businesses that they support. In the midst of all of this commotion it is essential to remember to step back and see if these technologies even make sense for the business initiatives that we are supporting.
It is time to revisit business analysis basics and be careful to make sure we have not started focusing entirely too much about the perceived need for these tools, opposed to a specific need. These tools are powerful and attractive, but we really need to understand if and how these technologies should be leveraged - pinpointing where they can alleviate business pains. In the work that I have done with a range of enterprise software deployments there is a consistent trend demonstrating successful implementations result when done to address a specific need, tools that were put into place because the technology was in vogue failed. Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise fit the same bill. Do not look to implement them because eWeek magazine or another publication has labeled it as the thing that other IT executives will implement this year.
I hope to clear the air in this post by outlining the virtues of each tool (specifically tagging, blogging and wikiing) and through a series of questions add clarity to where they would make business sense and allow the virtues to be realized.
Tagging
Social tagging technology excels at handling large amounts of unstructured data that is not served by traditional knowledge management systems (i.e. folders upon folders buried in a large, somewhat static hierarchy). Given this power it needs to be considered as part of an overall knowledge management strategy for information workers, but it also needs to specifically address some pain or a specific need of the business.
As information volumes continue to rapidly expand in the enterprise it is very difficult to organize and catalog assets, even with the support of full-time librarians. Additionally, in a world of M&A and constantly shifting organizational structures, it can be all the more important in helping people to reign in and make sense of this data. It is not uncommon for users to spend an extra fifteen minutes searching for an article within traditional search engines when they could not explicitly state their query to return satisfactory results. By contrast, tagging technologies have allowed them to see what other, related categories materials might fall into, speeding their searches drastically. Here are some questions that may help your organization determine if tagging would support the business by meeting specific business needs.
Is your company currently experiencing quantifiable issues finding documents or other digital assets within your network? Is it a big enough of an issue to act on?
Is a technology like social tagging something that your organization's culture would embrace? Is the user base directly asking for it? It is important to keep in mind that tagging will only benefit end users if they are willing to contribute to the tagging of document. As enterprise tagging matures it is likely that it will gain acceptance in much the same way instant messaging has within the enterprise.
Is there any research or knowledge intensive work at your organization that tagging may accelerate through more effective discovery of information?
Are there opportunities to use this technology to help external customers more easily do business with your company?
Would it be possible to designate someone to own and manage the platform from a business standpoint at a department or enterprise level?
Blogging
Blogs are great tools to rapidly publish and share expertise within an organization. Unlike email, a blog posting persists and is generally visible to a large audience which is able to engage the author in a dialog with comments or questions for everyone to see. Unlike a discussion forum, a blog posting provides detailed information around a particular topic, rather than a brief comment or question. A blog is also generally associated with a single person, allowing them to gain recognition in their organization or respective field. In your organization it might be a software developer, operations specialist or researcher that is able to provide a significant amount of value with this tool.
It may sound strange, the key to enterprise blogging is not about creating blog entries to be consumed by the entire enterprise, but about providing a single, unified platform that specific business participants can use to write posts for discrete audiences. Blogging within departments or to specific niches where the information is most relevant is the most valuable use of the technology. One of my prior postings (Niche Cooking for Portal Success) details a philosophy aligned with this approach which will work equally well for blogging. The following questions will help you to identify if it makes for your organization to deploy this technology.
Do you have experts in your organization that have pointers that others would benefit from in a measurable way?
How often would there be something that someone would blog about that people across the enterprise could really benefit from? Our foremost needs revolve around what it takes to get our work done, so any blogging that takes place in an organization has to help meet this need. With rare exception anything else is not providing value that can justify putting a platform into place and taking the time to manage it.
Would connecting with customers, partners or external constituents add value for your business? Would it be worthwhile enough for the investment?
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to their blogs during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Wikiing
Due to the allure of ubiquitous knowledge capture and propagation, a wiki deployment requires an extra amount of careful thought as to why and how it will be deployed to the enterprise. Given the potential, as demonstrated publicly by Wikipedia, many companies entertain having a wiki tool whose content expands into all sections of their business. This risk is that this generic, organization wide deployment, would most likely bring little business value to the enterprise and leave people wondering why they ever made an investment into the technology.
Similar to blogging technology, Wikis are going to be most effective when deployed for a very specific reason. A deployment could occur within a department, across departments or even with areas outside of or around the company, but should always tie back to a specific need that the tool is supporting. Wikis do an excellent job of helping knowledge workers collaborate on projects or support a function or process, by capturing tacit knowledge, sharing “facts”, presenting methods and or publishing best practices. Instead of being done by a single user, a Wiki allows a team to work together – enhancing and updating areas to evolve with the business. There is no better “living document” than a Wiki. Take a moment to think about the following questions to see if a Wiki might make sense for your business.
Does your business have undocumented processes or knowledge that could help a specific department or function perform more effectively if captured in a Wiki format?
Is there a simple place where new employees could go to learn during an on-boarding process? As policies, procedures or reporting structures and processes change within an organization a Wiki does an excellent job of making sure people can get up to speed.
Does an identifiable bottleneck exist with some members of your organization that could be alleviated if they were able to share their knowledge collectively with other employees?
Given the categorization that a Wiki imposes would it make existing knowledge more accessible if placed into the a unified format that a group could manage and edit? Since a Wiki can be an authoritative place for a collection of related materials it requires far less maintenance than a series of disparate files to maintain, enhance and manage.
Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to the Wiki during work hours?
Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?
Final Thoughts
There is not doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting them with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point. Hopefully some of the above questions can help your organization to focus, clarify and be successful with where and how these emerging technologies can benefit your company.
I just had a sneak preview of the Oracle OpenWorld On Demand portal, and I have to say it's pretty cool. I found the most unique and impressive feature to be the integrated transcript available for each and every keynote. The transcripts are synched to the videos, allowing you to use a quick and simple word search to immediately hone in to a specific point in the video.
Let's say you want to view the exact moment when Larry Ellison makes a surprise announcement about ... the America's Cup. Simply choose the display option "Topics & Transcripts" and do a keyword search on "America's Cup." Your results will allow you to skip right to the very second of video you're looking for.
The portal will provide 28 hours of keynotes with synchronized video, slides, scrolling transcripts, and downloadable MP3s and MP4s. All 1,700 hours of general sessions will be available in audio along with PDFs of the presentation slides. For your convenience, all audio, video, and supporting materials can be streamed or accessed right on the site, or downloaded for later. Presentations are posted within 24 hours of the live sessions.
You'll also get news and announcements updated continually throughout Oracle OpenWorld and beyond. Blogs and communities will allow you to rate presentations, ask questions, network, and more. Prepopulated content is scheduled to be available Tuesday, September 16.
Click here to check out Oracle OpenWorld On Demand and the rest of this year's official Add Ons. But don't forget, you need to register before you can add.
[category] => Sessions & Content
[guid] => http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2008/09/oracle_openworld_on_demand_sne_1.html
[pubDate] => Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:50:18 -0800
)
)
int(20)
20Oracle Blogs :: This newsfeed has a problem oracle_blogs @ the web & the world :: hundreds of fresh newsfeeds on schuirink.net
The Democratic convention is over. The Republican convention is over. Those were just warm-up acts for the one you're truly interested in, right? Take at look at some more reasons why Oracle OpenWorld is the conference you cannot miss this year.
One of the basic elements we consider each time we plan for the Keynotes at 
I just had a sneak preview of the Oracle OpenWorld On Demand portal, and I have to say it's pretty cool. I found the most unique and impressive feature to be the integrated transcript available for each and every