This post is courtesy of Margaret Errington. 

In an era where storage is very affordable, collecting and storing data is no longer an issue. This explosion in data growth within the enterprise can bring new headaches, that of protecting it. Additionally,  if we are to add budget constraints, high service-level agreements, and technologies, such as virtualization to the mix, the capabilities of traditional backup and recovery processes may be a bit strained.

Customers are looking for backup/recovery solutions that address scalability, the ability to backup applications and databases both in the cloud and on-premises, and at the level of files to complete VMs.

In collaboration with Oracle, Backup and Recovery Software Partners have certified solutions for enterprise infrastructures built on Oracle Linux and/or Oracle VM. These solutions are available whether the customer’s IT environment who are on-premises or in the cloud. Below are some partners with currently supported data protection solutions:

• Acronis with Acronis Backup Advanced
• Actifio with Actifio Sky. Actifio Sky for Oracle Cloud is  available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace
• Asigra with Asigra Cloud backup
• Zmanda, a Carbonite company with Amanda Enterprise
• Arcserve with two backup products: Arcserve Backup and Arcserve Unified Data Protection
• Barracuda Networks with Barracuda Backup
• CloudBerrry Lab with CloudBerry Backup. CloudBerry Explorer provides a user interface to Oracle cloud storage
• Commvault with Commvault Software (formerly Simpana)
• Dell with Rapid Recovery and NetVault
• EMC with its Data Protection Suite (DPS), with Avamar and NetWorker as key components
• FalconStor Optimized backup (VTL & NAS)
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Data Protector; StoreOnce
• R1Soft  with Server backup Manager
• SEP with Sesam
• Storware with vProtect
• Storix System Backup Administrator
• Veritas Technologies with Backup Exec and  NetBackup, available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace

Visit: Oracle Cloud Marketplace; Oracle Cloud; Infrastructure for Open Cloud: Oracle Linux; Oracle VM

Need more information? Contact us at: ol-ovm-info_ww at oracle.com. 

The Oracle Service Bus has built in features to poll an IMAP of POP3 mail account. There are loads of excellent blog posts that exactly describe how to do it. However, when the mail server happens to be a Microsoft Exchange server, things become shady. Exchange’s IMAP implementation tends to be not really that compatible, and the server log will fill up with stacktraces such as:

Of course we can connect using the Exchange Web Services (EWS) using the OSB, but that is loads of work. Luckily there is DavMail. DavMail is an gateway that sits in between Exchange and your third party mail clients. Using DavMail, you can connect using simple POP3 or IMAP protocols to DavMail which in turn connects to Exchange using the EWS. DavMail is build in java, and runs happily on WebLogic Server.

So, download DavMail’s WAR distribution for SourceForge. Unpack the WAR-file and edit the properties file in WEB-INF/classes.

Set is to run in Server mode, and let it know where the EWS is: Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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It's that time of year again.  The holiday season is upon us.  We are going to take a blog break until after the first of the year.  We will continue with our regularly scheduled blogs on Thursday, January 5, 2017. 

As your time permits during this little break perhaps you can catch up on our past posts and recorded training material.  Keep our holiday break in mind as you post comments and await feedback.

May your holiday season be peaceful, and the year ahead be prosperous.

References

• Getting Started with Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud (Note 2066260.1)
• Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud Landing Page
• Oracle E-Business Suite Learning Subscription
• Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud White Paper

• Getting Started with EBS on Oracle Cloud
• Can I Test EBS on Oracle Cloud?
  

Check out our newest Vision Demo - Multi Attribute Weighted Scoring in Oracle Sourcing to learn about this new functionality.

We have used the following buyer, scorers and suppliers/ supplier users for the demo.

Sourcing Buyer User :
CBAKER

Scoring Team Users :
1. MFG
2. CHORTON
3. CBROWN

Suppliers / Supplier Users :
1. GE PLASTICS (Supplier User : GEPLASTIC)
2. Advanced Sterilization Products (Supplier User : SAMSUPP)
3. Dell Computers (Supplier User : JAGANATH)

A sample calculation of weighted scoring is illustrated in the following table:

For complete steps review the Vision Demo - Multi Attribute Weighted Scoring in Oracle Sourcing Doc ID 2215322.1

Any questions? Start a discussion in the Procurement Community.

Having Issues Generating Supporting References or Creating Custom Account Derivation Rules?

Transactions and Debit Memos have no issue, but Credit Memos, Receipts and Adjustments are not generating correctly.

This is because Credit Memos, Receipts and Adjustments have different Sources.

Example A:    Trying to Create Supporting References for Application Identifier

Example B:    Trying to Create Supporting Reference for Account Number

Responsibility: Receivables
Navigation: Setup > Accounting > Accounting Method Builder > Sources > Sources

For a complete list of available sources for each Item Type, in the Sources form, under Display Name, Query:
Credit Memo%
Receipt%
Adjustment%

Written by Alexandra Georgescu, Oracle University Ecemea Marketing Manager 

The problem of youth unemployment is nothing new.

Since the economic crisis, it has been difficult for young people to enter the workforce.

Even if the economy has shown signs of recovery over the last few years, there are other factors giving students and graduates headaches: the lack of in demand skills and greater competition.

• Since 2005, the number of employed people has remained steady or has increased in some countries. 
• Older people are working longer, with an 11% increase for those aged 55-59, while more mothers are returning to the workforce, with a 4% increase for women aged 35-39. 
• The result? Greater competition to obtain job for younger people, who are often disadvantaged by their lack of proven experience.

When it comes to introducing new faces into the workplace, a frequently heard complaint is that secondary and tertiary education does not offer enough experience with the skills employers are looking for and are required in the industry.

Even in developed economies, where enrollment in upper secondary schools is often near 100 percent, nearly one in five students does not acquire a minimum level of basic skills needed to be gainfully employed.

The good news is we already have an important part of the solution.

We know millions of young people are searching for jobs, and there are many sectors within the economy that are looking to hire, with focus on the IT sector.

How can the road from education to employment be paved with success?

Rapid changes in technology, in patterns of work and in employment relationships, as well as new forms of start-ups, require constant adjustment to new labor market conditions. It's crucial to address skills mismatches.

To give youth the best opportunity to transition to a great job calls for investing in education and high quality training. They need to be empowered with skills that match labor market demands.

A great deal of progress has been made in recent years toward understanding the complexities of youth employment and how to promote it.

To improve the chances for young people around the world, we need to focus on four frontier areas:

1. Digital Age Impact – the technological revolution is fundamentally changing work and relationships, but this shift is unevenly felt across the world.

2. Skills Gap – in order to fill the skills gap, opportunities for men, women and those at the lowest end of the spectrum need to improve. 

3. Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment – worldwide, youth are 1.6 times more likely than adults to display entrepreneurial activity, which needs to be bolstered.

4. Quality Jobs – quantitative unemployment measurements do not reflect quality of employment; a deeper understanding of today’s working conditions is required.

Elevate Your Skills & Career Prospects 

If you want to pursue a career in the tech industry, Oracle University can empower you to do just that.

The IT industry is going to experience very high growth centered on data analysts, software and applications developers as a result of the digital transformation in every industry.

• Cloud Computing and Big Data analytics will constitute a significant driver of employment growth. 
• Individuals who can process, analyze, visualize and present data will continue to be in demand. 
• If you're passionate about databases and want to develop in demand skills, online or classroom learning programs will elevate your skills.

As an active facilitator of higher education, Oracle University provides global students with opportunities to achieve optimal career results by adding the digital learning element to classroom curriculum.

Utilize the Oracle Workforce Development Program

Through this focused program that's designed specifically for students, they can receive training and become certified to use cutting edge technologies relevant to a variety of jobs in the IT sector and beyond.

Check out the most popular Oracle Certifications to take the first step in developing a solid base for a successful IT career.

View Source and full report here.

Some time ago I was having a discussion about the setup of a SOA project on which a former colleague was about to work on. The purpose of this project was to implement a synchronous service API for a third party systems to integrate with. This API needed to conform to a B2B standard (written some ten years ago) and in their particular case, it would need to provide data from their legacy ERP system.

The API description consists of several different ‘business operations’ where their request messages come in over HTTP in a variety of predefined formats, e.g. as an HTTP GET operation where the parameters are encoded in the URL string or sending an HTTP POST operation where the request message is contained in the body: in both cases, the response is handed back as an XML message. In order not to exclude third party systems, both flavours of operations would need to be implemented.

One of the other requirements for the API was that it needed to implement an operation to list all operations that it currently supports, together with the endpoints on which these operations need to be invoked.

Restrictions

One of the current implementation of the third party systems they were looking to integrate with was quite quirky in that it required all operations to have the exact same endpoint. So, it was a tough choice to either exclude this system from the possible clients and create a ‘proper’ implementation where all operations have their own endpoints, or to provide an implementation where there’s only one endpoint that basically functions as a dispatcher for the different operations.

Summarizing:

• XML POST interface, request = XML, response = XML for all operations
• HTTP GET interface, request = None, response = XML for all operations
• Provide a single endpoint accepting all these requests at the same address

Service Bus to the rescue

As we were discussing the project and its requirements, it turned out that their internal IT department had already started development using Oracle SOA Suite, as their skills in BPEL were ‘the hammer that made this problem look like a nail’. However, my feeling was that this project would actually be much better off by the introduction of Oracle Service Bus to transform different message formats into a generic XML representation (and depending on the complexity: implement the message flows entirely in Service Bus or offload the more complicated ones to SOA Suite).

Scenario

As I am somewhat branded by my background in chemistry, I will show my proposed implementation using some ‘chemical’ webservices from WebServiceX as an example. For the backend implementation, invariably the SOAP implementation of the service will be used. For my convenience, I am reusing the XML structures that are provided by the WebserviceX implementations, saving myself the hassle of transforming the messages structurally or with respect to their namespaces.

In the following scenario, I am exposing two operations (GetAtomicNumber and GetAtomicWeight) in two different message formats:

HTTP GET: http://server:host/HttpGetAtomicNumber?RequestName=GetAtomicNumber&elementName=boron

XML POST: http://server:host/GetAtomicNumber

Furthermore, all operations will also be available at a consolidated endpoint for both request message formats, at http://server:host/OneProxyForAll

Schematic implementation

The following diagram shows a schematic representation of the desired setup; on the left hand side, you can see the exposed proxies (HTTP GET, XML POST and Generic Gateway), connected through some Service Bus flow logic with a Service Bus Business Service, exposing the actual implementation logic:

Environment

The sample project was built using Oracle’s 12.1.3 Virtual Image, downloadable from Oracle Technology Network. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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We have some customers which only use OSB - and not SOA Suite. When you want to patch - should you look only at WLS and OSB-patches? The answer is no.

One such reason is documented on MOS: Should the SOA Bundle Patches for 11g and 12c be applied to OSB (Doc ID 2102449.1). It states: In 12c, since OSB services can use JCA technology adapters, there is value in applying the SOA Bundle Patches where fixes to these adapters are included.

The other reason is because JDeveloper has common features in the two products. For example SOA patch 22226040: java.lang.NullPointer for XQuery File ver 1.0 in JDEV 12.2.1 OSB Proj - is one you would like to use for OSB on 12.2.1. The problem is shown in our blog post: OSB Patch. If the patch does not work - remember to do the cleanup-steps mentioned at the end of the blog.

My advise is to create a predefined Patch Search in MOD so you can monitor existing patches. Here are some of my searches.

One good thing you can see is the last time you searched. For example for OSB - then WLS, SOA and OSB are relevant. My advise is to order patches so you see the latest updates first, and that you at least should add the recommended patches. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Happy Holidays to all Oracle Linux fans, we wish you all the best for 2017.

Here are the top 5 blogs of 2016:

Deployment of Oracle Applications and Database with OpenStack Murano (Beta)

Take Action on Dirty Cow

Are Cloudlets in Your Forecast?

What is on tap for Linux Container strategy in 2016?

Training Thursdays: Learn about Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux

See you all in 2017!

A time-sensitive SQL script has been created for customers to archive historical lease data on 31-Dec-2016.  In January, a patch will be released to enable users to archive historical lease data at each month-end, but this will not be available for DEC-16.  This temporary feature is available now via Doc ID 2217593.1 - IFRS16 / ASC842 Look Back Period Archive SQL Script, Release 12.   

Look Back Period Requirements:

Tenants of real estate property are required to comply with new accounting and reporting standards published by the IFRS 16 and ASC 842.  To comply with these standards, tenants must first report results of their lease portfolios in the two years preceding the effective date, 2017 and 2018, known as the Look Back period. 

The two-year Look Back requires users to “rebuild” existing Leases, to report comparative financial results of operations from 2017 and 2018.  Because the scope of this requirement is limited to the need to compare financial results in 2019 with prior years, there is no requirement to reproduce or archive transactions or accounting events.  The requirement is to:

• Calculate and report the present value of asset and liability balances;
• Calculate and report the financial streams for asset amortization, interest accrual and lease expense 

The solution for this two-year Look Back is temporary, from 01-JAN-2017 to the final implementation of the final compliance solutions up to 01-JAN-2019. 

Purpose of Script:

The purpose of this script is to enable users to archive the lease data for the month-end of December 2016 (example: on 31-DEC-2016).  The queries in the scripts should be used to archive data in custom tables manually. Later, in January 2017, a patch will be released that will enable users to perform the archival using a concurrent program.  At that point, users should move data archived for the month-end of December 2016 from custom tables to standard history tables released as part of the patch for use later.  After the patch is released, users are expected to use the concurrent program for archival, rather than the script.

Note: Prior to archival, users can create payment terms if needed for initial direct costs, tenant improvements, renewal and termination options or other payments to third party suppliers to include them in the present value of asset and liability balances and related financial streams. 

To access the script, please review Doc ID 2217593.1.

In the last weeks I had the privilege to test some of our upcoming PaaS middleware solutions by myself. One of the results a full integration scenario developed by drag and drop - you can see above. It is amazing how fast, easy, nice and rich integrations, can be built by a citizen developer like myself. Hope to see you all at the PaaS Partner Community Forum 2017! #jkwc

Jürgen Kress

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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How can you create  custom XPath functions in Oracle Service Bus 12c? And how can you use these in both  XSLT and XQuery? Let’s find it out. I like to show you how they’re different in behaviour.

The context of my post comes from one of my projects, where we were migrating quite some (stateless) services from the SOA (BPEL) platform to Service Bus. Since our clients were already ‘virtualized’ to our clients (i.e. clients invoked them through the Service Bus), we could easily change the implementation platform without changing the service contracts.

For the transformation, we were reusing the existing XSL transformations, so a couple of the custom XPath functions had to be made available in Service Bus. Additionally, we were also introducing the DVM (Domain Value Maps) as a replacement for a custom coded lookup-implementation, created when DVMs did not yet exist. For this purpose, we had to create a custom XPath wrapper function, in order to implement some custom logging that the customer did not want to lose.

Test XPath function

As a simple scenario, I am using base-64 encoding and decoding to be implemented as custom XPath functions (code is shared through GitHub). In order to test the custom XPath function, I have created some very simple proxies and pipelines that do not route to any other service but instead just call upon a transformation in order to test my custom functions:

Child elements

In the reply element I have three different child elements, the first contains the untransformed contents of the input string and the second contains the base64 encoded contents. The last element contains the value after invoking the decode operation on the encoded string, to verify that the inverse operation restores the original value. Read the complete article here.

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More often than not, you will want your processes to interact with other services or processes inside or outside your enterprise. Since integration options are rather typical in Oracle Process Cloud Service, this article will help you to apply best practices for creating and managing your connections in a sustainable fashion.

Process Cloud integration points

Let’s say you have modelled a process in Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) for a private home loan application. Chances are quite high that this process will need some extra information to make the right decisions, like a credit check or a risk assessment and you will want to store the result of the application somewhere, for example in a database.
This requires several integration points in your PCS application. Now if you would directly import the WSDLs of those web services that you need to integrate with, it’s most likely not going to work. For example, Oracle Policy Automation, which you can use for risk assessment, has a highly generic interface and without XSLT support in PCS, you can’t make a proper request. Other services might require WS-Addressing or other technical aspects that PCS doesn’t support, so you need to put something in between. For this something, you can use various SOA and Service Bus products or Oracle’s Integration Cloud Service, once it has matured some more to deal with web services properly.

Creating the interface – challenges

So, you have decided to put one or more layers of services between PCS and the web services that you need to invoke. Regardless of your architecture, you need to keep some considerations in mind: Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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