We are thrilled to let you know that Oracle Service Cloud (previously known as "RightNow") was named a Leader in two Forrester Customer Service “Waves” with the top overall ‘Current Offering’ and ‘Strategy’ scores in the mid-market wave.

Oracle Service Cloud is rated a Leader position for our ability to scale, serve and meet the needs across both enterprise and small & medium business customers.

Oracle Service Cloud’s significantly improved position compared to the previous wave, reflecting Oracle's major investment in new development and focus on meeting our customers’ needs.

Each session runs 2 hours and will provide an in-depth look into each topic. There will be demos, a question and answer session as well as a brief overview of next steps for those who require more detailed training.

Do you really understand what Oracle’s Fusion Middleware entails and what it can do? Expert trainer and consultant, Martin Schlichenmayer clears the fog surrounding the power of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware.

Discover:

• Oracle’s Fusion Middleware history
• the center of it all – the Application Server
• more about the central role of WebLogic Application Server
• what differentiates SOA Suite from BPM Suite and where both interact with Webcenter and ADF.
• the role of the Enterprise Service Bus and the Services Registry / Repository
• the difference between Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence

After more than decade implementing SOA, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that prevent organisations from realising the benefits of SOA is the lack of some sort of governance in their SOA implementations. I have also come to the sad conclusion that even though this is well known fact, many (end customers and SIs alike) still lack understanding of what SOA Governance is and why is it needed. Having said that, I created this post not only for my own reference, but also share this knowledge for those wishing to improve their understanding on this amazing topic.

Hopefully this FAQ provides some concise answers to many of these questions.

• What is SOA Governance?
  
• What SOA Governance isn’t?
  
• Why is SOA Governance needed?
  
• What are the objectives of SOA Governance?
  
• What are the key components of SOA Governance?
  
• What are the top challenges that prevent successful SOA Governance implementation?
  
• What is the most common mistake organizations make in enforcing SOA Governance?
  
• What Oracle tools do I need to successfully implement SOA Governance?
  
• To what degree does successful SOA governance require organizational change?
  
• What impact, if any, trends such as Cloud, API development, Mobile Computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things( IoT) have on SOA Governance?
  
• Is there any practical book on how to implement SOA Governance?
  

What is SOA Governance?

R. In simplistic terms, SOA Governance is the alignment of processes, people and tools needed to ensure that a SOA implementation is successful. SOA Governance primary objective is to maximise the benefits that SOA can bring to the business and IT. One thing to bear in mind is that SOA Governance does not exist on its own; it is in fact an extension of IT governance and EA governance. 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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Each session runs 2 hours and will provide an in-depth look into each topic. There will be demos, a question and answer session as well as a brief overview of next steps for those who require more detailed training.

Do you really understand what Oracle’s Fusion Middleware entails and what it can do? Expert trainer and consultant, Martin Schlichenmayer clears the fog surrounding the power of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware.

Discover:

• Oracle’s Fusion Middleware history
• the center of it all – the Application Server
• more about the central role of WebLogic Application Server
• what differentiates SOA Suite from BPM Suite and where both interact with Webcenter and ADF.
• the role of the Enterprise Service Bus and the Services Registry / Repository
• the difference between Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence

Guest Post by Amy Willard of the Oracle Documentation Team

The Release 8 Oracle Fusion Technology library has been published. The library is now an integral part of the Oracle Fusion Applications Documentation Library. To access the library, go to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/fusion-apps-doc-1508435.html, select the “Oracle Fusion Applications 11g Release 8 (11.1.8)” link, and then click the “Technology” tab.  

Each book in the library contains a “What’s New” chapter that describes new and changed features and other significant changes in the release. The chapter is the first in every book.

Summaries of the Release 8 changes are the following:

Oracle Fusion Applications Installation Guide

This book has been expanded and restructured. In addition to new introduction and new overview chapters, several existing chapters have been updated. Detailed information about how to plan for an installation has been added, and the Oracle Fusion Applications Installation Workbook (in Microsoft Excel format) has been created as a companion to the guide. Architects, system engineers, and implementers can use the workbook to plan and record all the details for an environment installation (such as server names, URLs, port numbers, installation paths, and so on).

The book now contains extensive information about how to install and provision Oracle Identity Management and its associated databases, and how to troubleshoot these installations.

Finally, the guide now includes all content from the Oracle Fusion Applications Post-Installation Guide, which has been retired.

Oracle Fusion Applications Patching Guide

The Maintenance Mode feature has been added. Maintenance Mode allows a controlled access for applying patches. Information is still available to users in read-only mode, and transactions are disabled.

Oracle Fusion Applications Upgrade Guide

The upgrade process was changed so that steps are now run to check system reliability in pre-downtime mode after all prerequisites have been met. In addition, an automated upgrade to the Oracle Identity Management database is available if the environment meets specific requirements.

Oracle Fusion Applications Developer’s Guide

A new “Implementing Audit Reports” chapter has been added. The Attachments chapter has been updated with new methods and elements, and a new section describing the Attachments Carousel has been added. 

A number of changes have been made to Flexfield information, including the Extensible Flexfield Registration Metadata Wizard; enabling extensible flexfields for business intelligence; the ability to protect value sets, descriptive flexfields, and extensible flexfield pages and contexts from end-user configuration; and the custom FlexfieldsDeploymentServiceJob Oracle Enterprise Scheduler job, which enables you to programmatically deploy a flexfield.

In addition, the user interface provided by the UI Shell has been updated, and the new format for the fusion_apps_wls.properties file is explained.

Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide for Developers

The book now contains information about the new skyros skin extension and the ability to customize task flows in Oracle BPM Worklist. In addition, a chapter explaining how to modify the Oracle Business Intelligence repository (RPD) to support Oracle Fusion Applications analyses and report customizations has been added.

Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator’s Guide

The security chapter has been entirely rewritten, and a number of feature enhancements and bug fixes have been added. The number of links to external references has been reduced, in some cases, content was migrated to this book to eliminate the need for the links.

Oracle Fusion Applications Installing and Managing in an Oracle VM Environment

The book has been updated to reflect the most recent changes in deployment properties.

Oracle Fusion Applications Enterprise Deployment Guide for Customer Relationship Management
Oracle Fusion Applications Enterprise Deployment Guide for Financials

Topology diagrams have been updated to reflect the changes made in this release, and existing database host requirements have been enhanced. The “Scaling Out Oracle HTTP Server” chapter has been restructured, and all associated screen shots have been updated to reflect changes made in this release. 

For installing components for an enterprise deployment using the Provisioning process, screen shots have been updated to reflect changes made in Release 8. In addition, the faststartstop.sh script now contains more options. For Oracle Business Intelligence scale out, file-based persistence has been replaced with Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) persistence. For Oracle SOA Suite scale out, information about switching Oracle User Messaging Service to use Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ-JMS) has been added, and instructions for creating and configuring JMS servers and JDBC stores has been revised.

In addition, the “Configuring Oracle Business Intelligence Applications” chapter has been removed from both books. Topics covered in this chapter can be found in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Installation Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.8.0).

Java SE Embedded 8 의주요기능중하나인, Compact Profile에대한소개입니다. 

Webcast: E-Business Tax Series, Session 2 – Basic Overview, Regime To Rate Setup & Transactional Flow (US Based Setup) From A Financials Perspective

Date: April 23, 2014 at 11:00 am ET, 9:00 am MT, 4:00 pm GMT, 8:30 pm IST

Join us to learn how to create a Regime to Rate Flow in R12. This session will focus on US based examples from a Financials perspective. This one hour webcast provides technical and functional users with an overview of E-Business Tax (EBTax), its setup and flow. It will also be helpful to those who’ve recently upgraded or are planning to upgrade to R12. Session 2 of 6 in the E-Business Tax Webcast Series, complete details can be found in Doc ID 740966.1.

Topics will include:

• Overview of E-Business Tax
• Regime to Rate setup
• Sample transactional flow

Details & Registration: Doc ID 1626097.1

A guest post from Peter Rae, Head of Corporate Communications for Oracle ECEMEA, about the Oracle CloudWorld event in Moscow,  on April 8 2014

Keeping the me-here-now generation happy means building your business around the customer – with new technology.

Russia’s businessmen attending Oracle CloudWorld in Moscow yesterday listened, possibly with growing dislike, to a description of Anastasia. She is the new generation of customer; the customer that wants to shop all day, find exactly what they want immediately but have the goods delivered at their own convenience. She’s a person who thinks that because she has a smart device she can dictate how she lives, and anyone coming into contact with her had better give her what she wants the way she wants it if they want to keep her as a customer.

Companies need to listen to their customers, predict what they need and respond with great service – quickly. With a customer like Anastasia – and there are millions of Anastasias – the bald truth is that only companies with more powerful, faster, newer IT systems will satisfy her. A daunting prospect for a CIO, perhaps, but at CloudWorld delegates learned that if they do it right, that infrastructure will be more cost effective to run, require lower maintenance, deliver better performance and possess the agility to change as quickly as Anastasia changes her mind.

CloudWorld attendees in Moscow listened to stories of customers who had made that change – Nike, Maersk, Aeroflot – big names with new technology and new ways of engaging with their customers. Social listening, big data analysis, mobile applications, engineered systems, cloud computing – all new technologies, all working together to satisfy Anastasia, and at the same time delivering more profit and more efficiency. 

This is the first time in the history of IT that consumers are dictating what technologies businesses need to acquire, and conference delegates were reminded that the enormous elephant that is IT transformation is eaten one bite at a time. The road to customer-centric IT is now well sign-posted. Businesses cannot afford to resist the new technology wave, but they can choose how they start out on their ride.

 Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees (see brief bio at the end of the post) and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column.

Author: Phil Hunt

Basic Authentication (part of RFC2617) was developed along with HTTP1.1 (RFC2616) when the web was relatively new. This specification envisioned that user-agents (browsers) would ask users for their user-id and password and then pass the encoded information to the web server via the HTTP Authorization header.

Basic Auth approach quickly died in popularity in favour of form based login where browser cookies were used to maintain user session, rather than repeated re-transmission of the user-id and password for each web request. Basic Auth was clinically dead and ceased being the "state-of-the-art" method for authentication.

These days, now that non-browser based applications are increasing in popularity, one of the first asks by architects is support for Basic Authentication. It seems the Basic Authentication "zombie" lives on. Why is this? Is it for testing purposes? 

Why should Basic Authentication die?

Well, for one, Basic Auth requires that web servers have access to "passwords" which have continually been shown to be one of the weakest security architecture. Further, it requires that the client application ask users directly for their user-id and password greatly increasing the points of attack a hacker might have. A user giving an application (whether a mobile application or a web site) their user-id and password is allowing that application the ability to impersonate the user.  Further, we now know that password re-use continues to undermine this simple form of authentication.

There are better alternatives.

A better alternative uses "tokens", such as the cookies I mentioned above, to track client/user login state. An even better solution, not easily done with Basic Auth, is to use an adaptive authentication service whose job it is to evaluate not only a user's id and password, but can also evaluate multiple factors for authentication. This can go beyond the idea of something you know, to something you are, and something you have types of factors. Many service providers are even beginning to evaluate network factors as well, such as, has the user logged in from this IP address and geographical location before?

In order to take advantage of such an approach, the far better solution is to demand OAuth2 as a key part of your application security architecture for non-browser applications and APIs. Just like form-based authentication dramatically improved browser authentication in the 2000s, OAuth2 (RFC6749 and 6750), and its predecessor, Kerberos, provide a much better way for client applications to obtain tokens that can be used for authenticated access to web services.

Token authentication is far superior because:

• Tokens cleanly separate user authentication and delegation from the application's activities with web services.
• Tokens do not require that clients impersonate users. They can be highly scoped and restrictive in nature.
• The loss of a token, means only a single service is compromised where as the loss of a password compromises every site where a user-id and password is used.
• Tokens can be issued by multi-factor authentication systems.
• Tokens do not require access to a password data store for validation.
• Tokens can be cryptographically generated and thus can be validated by web services in a "stateless" fashion (not requiring access to a central security database). And,
• Tokens can be easily expired and re-issued.

If you missed the IoT training session on Monday, we were at the Oracle Santa Clara campus diving into the world of computer boards. Embedded Expert Vinicius Senger talked to Principal Member of the Technical Staff, Gary Collins, and Java Architect Hinkmond Wong about the Raspberry Pi and other computer boards, IoT technologies and Java Embedded. 

Hinkmond sees Java well suited for Internet of Things because Java can handle complex programming with event processing, smart devices, cloud, and business intelligence. Hinkmond gave a tour of what was on his desk. He showed us Freescale i.MX6, Raspberry Pi, Hex bug, motion detector sensor, LCD screen, and a relay board. In his blog, he develops innovative embedded projects such as a Nest-like smart sensor to inspire developers to create their startups with Java.

You can visit other training sessions about Java Embedded and the Raspberry Pi. Enter the IoT Developer Challenge by May 30 for a chance to win a trip to JavaOne 

By Mike Vilimek

More and more, organizations are turning to the cloud for their next modern HR solution. But while the benefits of modern cloud applications are often clearly understood, many still want to see and hear how others did it before trying it themselves. Luckily, you can now hear firsthand how Newfield, an oil and gas exploration company, has optimized its Talent Management Lifecycle with Oracle HCM Cloud. Blane Kingsmore, HRIS Manager at Newfield, will talk about his company's decision to move their HR applications into the Cloud going forward and their use of mobile applications.

About Newfield Exploration Company: 

Newfield Exploration Company is an Independent Energy Company Headquartered in The Woodlands, TX. They have 4 US locations and are also in China. With 1500 employees, they're focused on boosting employee engagement and HR efficiency. Newfield is currently using Oracle HCM Cloud Performance, Goal Management, and Talent Review. They have also made these accessible to their workforce anytime, anywhere through Oracle's mobile applications. 

Click the button below to register and confirm your attendance for this event.

Mike Vilimek is an experienced technology professional and an active blogger, presenter, and thought leader on topics including recruiting and HR technology. As the Director, HCM Product Marketing at Oracle, Mike is responsible for defining global positioning and messaging for Oracle HCM solutions. Prior to joining Oracle, Mike led the product marketing teams at Talemetry, a recruiting technology provider and Oracle Platinum Partner, and data analytics provider ACL Services. Mike has been a frequent presenter at HR Technology events and webinars and has most recently presented at Oracle CloudWorld 2014, Oracle Open World 2013, the OHUG Annual Conference, and Collaborate.

Mike graduated from Simon Fraser University with a business degree in Marketing and International Business and was a member of the SFU Football team. Following graduation, Mike had a 7-year professional football career in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Follow him on Twitter: @MikeVilimek

Welcome to another post of the MySQL for Excel team, this time we will talk about another cool feature you can find in our latest release which can be downloaded directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.

In previous MySQL for Excel versions (1.1.3 and earlier) you couldn't change a connection after it was created. The workaround for that was to delete it and create a new one with the updated values or if MySQL Workbench was installed then edit the connection there, but now you can edit connections directly from the main panel by right clicking the connection you want to modify and select Edit Connection from the pop up menu:

The connection edit dialog works in a very similar fashion than the one in MySQL Workbench.
Just make the changes you want and click over the OK button to save your changes or click Cancel to discard any changes made to the selected connection:

That is how simply you can edit connections now directly from the main MySQL for Excel panel.

We always look forward to hear what new features you will like to see on future versions of MySQL for Excel so we encourage you to please visit our forum and let us know.
Thank you for your support!

See the latest Fusion Middleware Support News : March 2014!

Each session runs 2 hours and will provide an in-depth look into each topic. There will be demos, a question and answer session as well as a brief overview of next steps for those who require more detailed training.

Do you really understand what Oracle’s Fusion Middleware entails and what it can do? Expert trainer and consultant, Martin Schlichenmayer clears the fog surrounding the power of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware.

Discover:

• Oracle’s Fusion Middleware history
• the center of it all – the Application Server
• more about the central role of WebLogic Application Server
• what differentiates SOA Suite from BPM Suite and where both interact with Webcenter and ADF.
• the role of the Enterprise Service Bus and the Services Registry / Repository
• the difference between Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence

Although it's a point release Bean Validation 1.1 brings a number of important features to Java EE 7. Easily the most important such feature is method validation. Beyond helping enforce design-by-contract in key service layer API classes (typically implemented in EJB3 or CDI) method validation plays an important role in helping ensure valid input to remote client endpoins written in JAX-RS and WebSocket. Hardy Ferentschik of the JBoss community explains the feature well. There's also the 15-minute Bean Validation 1.1 presentation by specification lead Emmanuel Bernard on the GlassFish videos YouTube channel as well the slide deck for my own lighting talk:

If you are interested in how method validation might be used in a realistic scenario with JAX-RS and WebSocket, feel free to dig into my example application on GitHub demostrating how Java EE 7 can be used with JavaScript MV* frameworks (in this case AngularJS).

Overview

Oracle announces the support of the 400GB eMLC SATA SSD on Netra SPARC T4-1 server (ATO and X-option parts).

Key Dates

Revenue Release: April 8, 2014

Please read the Product Bulletinon Oracle HW TRC for more details.

(If you are not registered on Oracle HW TRC, clickhere ...and follow the instructions..)