There is an old military saying. “No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.” Somehow the current times let me believe that this is almost true for most business plans today. One conclusion from the quote above could be to not plan at all. Just go with the flow and react.
But this doesn’t work in the world of business. Not only the customers but also the business partners along the value chain need to know what they can expect from you. Stick with a once made plan - irrespective of what is happening - doesn’t work either. So, how can a business plan survive the first contact with the market? I think the key is the planning process itself. The process need to be dynamic, flexible and aligned. Dynamic means that the plan is adapted ongoing, well known through concepts like rolling forecasts. Flexible planning enables the planners to make all changes themselves and requires a high degree of automation and integration. Sending around hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets is anything but flexible. Alignment across multiple different planning cycles is crucial to understand variances, deficiencies and trade offs that need to be made. Altogether it improves the agility. Now “Let’s just do it again” is a piece of cake with respect to your planning processes and your planning survives infinite contacts with the market.

Within an EPM system the integrated planning capabilities are the crux to translate and transform assumptions, targets and objectives into executable plans. Flexibility is the key to develop the agility driving or reacting to changes.

My questions to you today: How long does it take you to re-plan your business? And, how many different planning cycles do you need to align?

A long while back I posted an entry on linking to a report via a URL. All was good but it only worked if you either:

1. Were hooking BIP up to SSO with your calling application or
2. You placed the report in the Guest folder which was unsecured.

Now, back in an earlier release the dev guys sneaked a feature out that I was vaguely aware of and thought I knew but it took the almighty Bryan Wise to remind me. You can now pass the username and password on the URL to avoid the two cases above and open up other possibilities.

You can just add the following parameters to your URL

&id=XXXXXX&passwd=YYYYYY

For example:

http://127.0.0.1:9704/xmlpserver/HR Manager/W2/W2.xdo?id=Administrator&passwd=Administrator

What about security? Well 'developer beware'!, I wanted some cool Latin phrase that no one would understand but the translators are a little funky in my opinion. Never the less, its a feature, its up to you if you want to use it, or maybe your security folks. So, now you know and I now have somewhere to point folks who ask me about it :)

In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco, ThoughtWorks' Ian Robinson explains how a RESTful HTTP approach can be applied in an Enterprise project. He makes use of many of the techniques that make HTTP a powerful protocol, including caching, hypermedia, and the use of standard formats such as Atom Syndication for event notification.

 

QCon Webcast Located here

This is a really good presentation looking at the various use cases and things to consider when building an Enterprise Application using REST. Well worth 58 minutes of your time.

Oracle Press Release Oracle Updates Oracle’s JD Edwards World and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ToolsContinued Investment in JD Edwards Demonstrates Oracle’s Commitment to Applications Unlimited Strategy COLLABORATE 2009, ORLANDO, FL. – May 5, 2009News Facts Building upon its Oracle “Applications Unlimited” strategy, Oracle today announced the latest release of Oracle’s JD Edwards World and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools at COLLABORATE 09. JD Edwards World A9.2 includes hundreds of enhancements and new Purchase Card Management module that help lower customers’ total cost of ownership. This latest version allows companies to reduce inventory costs, eliminate lead times and improve productivity. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools Release 8.98.1 includes new tools and technology capabilities for leveraging Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus), an integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager and certification with the latest platform technology releases. Oracle is also delivering JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 24.0 for customers running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application releases XE and 8.0.JD Edwards WorldNew Industry Functionality Helps Preserve Cash, Reduce Cost JD Edwards World A9.2 helps project-based industries be more profitable by maximizing contract cash flow with “pay when paid” processing capability, improvements to contract usability and accuracy and a more efficient labor correction process with Labor Reclass module enhancements. Upgrades to JD Edwards World A9.2 support: Reduced administrative costs of processing small invoices with a new Purchase Card Management Module. More flexibility and information sharing through new EDI User Defined Fields for Trading Partners. Greater control of data by leveraging Approvals Management for Purchasing enhancements. Manufacturing and distribution customer benefits from reduced costs associated with the administration of internal work orders with Orderless Processing, increased accuracy and an accelerated shipment confirmation process with Batch Ship Confirm updates and more efficient shop floor operations through automatically created Shop Floor Calendars.Technical Innovation Provides Access to Advanced Applications and Business Information Allowing easier, faster sharing and delivery of information, JD Edwards World A9.2 leverages Oracle’s leading products and technology to enable the following capabilities: Advanced analytics that take advantage of Oracle's Demantra Demand Management integration to better forecast and anticipate market needs. Cost savings by relying on the expanded Oracle User Productivity Kit training content. Speedy delivery of information that helps reduce operating costs with electronic report distribution. Increased flexibility of data and reporting through Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher integration that allows reports to be distributed via email, fax, FTP or on the Web. Conformity to Oracle Application Integration Architecture standards for future integration needs and increased access to applications and technology options.JD Edwards EnterpriseOneComprehensive System Management Across the Enterprise Achieving more streamlined integration, the Oracle Enterprise Manager application pack developed for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools Release 8.98.1 delivers the ability to manage and support Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and other applications and technology components such as the Oracle Database and application server, all from one single console. Information on Business Performance Through embedded Oracle Business Intelligence reports, the new JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools provide more in-depth analytics to enable better decisions by ERP users. Integration with Oracle BI Suite EE Plus empowers business users to create their own reports and queries within JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, expanding the overall business intelligence capabilities available to casual, day-to-day users. Release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 24.0 Now Available Today, Oracle is also delivering JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 24.0 for customers running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application releases XE and 8.0. Through Oracle’s Applications Unlimited program, this latest release further demonstrates Oracle’s ongoing investment in platforms and technologies for older, supported versions of JD Edwards products.Supporting Quotes "JD Edwards World A9.2 will allow us to take advantage of new, key manufacturing and distribution enhancements such as Work Orderless Processing, work order ledger, batch ship confirm and the introduction of Oracle BI Publisher and an improved document distribution," said David Bryant, Maxco's Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. " With JD Edwards World A9.2, the cost/benefit ratio is very favorable. With this latest release, and in conjunction with our IBM iSeries server, Maxco continues to have a solid and reliable foundation for the future." “These latest updates to the JD Edwards products offer technical innovations that give JD Edwards customers improved integration with third-party products and access to advanced applications and business information,” said Oracle Group Vice President, JD Edwards, Lenley Hensarling. “These new products help JD Edwards customers drive down the cost of ownership while expanding on analytics capability and delivering measurable efficiencies.”General Availability Oracle’s JD Edwards World A9.2 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.98.1 and 24.0 are currently available. Supporting Resources About Oracle’s JD Edwards World Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ToolsAbout Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest business software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

TrademarksOracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.Contact Info

 

Jessica Moore
Oracle
+1.650.506.8741
jessica.moore@oracle.com

 

 

Steven Propper
Blanc & Otus for Oracle
+1.415.856.5114
spropper@blancandotus.com

 

 

Oracle Press Release Oracle® Enterprise Manager Adds Application Management Pack for Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOneContinues to Deliver on Top-Down Application Management Strategy COLLABORATE 09, Orlando, FL – May 5, 2009 News Facts Furthering its Applications Unlimited commitment to customers, Oracle today announced a new Oracle® Enterprise Manager Application Management Pack to support Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. With this Application Management Pack, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers gain a comprehensive, integrated solution for monitoring, diagnostics, configuration and service level management. Through its unique top-down approach to application management, Oracle Enterprise Manager enables customers to reduce IT complexity and management costs while increasing efficiencies and the performance of their enterprise applications.Comprehensive and Centralized Application Management The Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Management Pack for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is specifically designed to automate and streamline management tasks, helping to lower total cost of ownership and improve application performance and availability. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers can now centrally manage their environments using Oracle Enterprise Manager, along with other applications such as the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise and other infrastructure software, such as application servers, databases, and hosts. Highlights of the Application Management Pack for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne include: Component Monitoring & Diagnostics – provides comprehensive coverage of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne specific components, enabling application administrators to proactively manage, address and respond to the first signs of impending issues, helping prevent down time; Service Test Monitoring – enables administrators to monitor the performance and availability of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, allowing the application to be managed according to business needs; Configuration Management – helps improve traceability for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne configuration changes, reducing the effort to troubleshoot configuration related problems and to achieve better control over application changes; and, Service Level Management – enables the definition of common application service level objectives for IT and business stakeholders; automates the tracking of objectives and provides comprehensive reporting for decision makers to quickly implement necessary corrective actions when needed.Supporting Quote “Oracle provides customers the ability to proactively monitor and manage the health of their applications and underlying technologies through an integrated management solution,” said Richard Sarwal, Oracle senior vice president Product Development. “Oracle Enterprise Manager now extends these capabilities to our JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers to help them further enhance the performance and availability of their applications while streamlining management, reducing costs and providing additional investment protection.” Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager Data Sheet: Oracle Enterprise Manager Application Management Pack for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Application Management Blog Oracle Enterprise Manager Twitter feed About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest business software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

TrademarksOracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.Contact Info

 

Teri Whitaker
Oracle
+1.650.506.9914
teri.whitaker@oracle.com

Meredith Obendorfer
Blanc & Otus
+1.415.856.5167
mobendorfer@blancandotus.com

My name is Bahaaldine. I am working in France as a SOA Consultant since 2008.

The diversity of technological subjects offered by SOA is one of the reasons why I’ve chosen this domain.

I have been warmly welcomed, and the experts in the team helped me to improve my skills in this line if business. 
My work consists of helping customers to set up a
Service-Oriented Architecture. The subject is in vogue nowadays because many companies have numerous monolithic applications that are not able to exchange data. The lack of interaction between the applications slows down the productivity. This is where SOA helps and brings added value. The need exists, and it’s very important for companies to modernize their old systems to be competitive.

What I like about working on a SOA project is defining the customer’s business processes and monitor the activities. The creation of business processes allow me to learn how the mechanisms work that govern the customer’s business work. Working as a consultant also improves my functional skills. The monitoring of business processes shows what the key performance indicators are for the customer business. The idea of having the ability to give customers visibility on their business is rewarding.

More than a trend, SOA is a paradigm, a new design pattern for complex IT systems

Last week was fairly quiet on Mix. Here are the numbers:

• Registered users: 41,525
• Active users (30-day): 4,736 (11.4%)
• Page views (30-day): 62,535
• Twitter followers: 857

The new features mentioned last week are currently under review and we'll release them as soon as we're done with testing.

It has been a while since I last wrote something about OCFS2. For those that don’t know what this is, OCFS2 is a feature-rich standard Linux cluster filesystem. Linus took OCFS2 into mainline in the 2.6.16 time frame and it is being actively maintained. The majority of the work has always been done at Oracle however folks from Novell have provided many contributions, as well as individuals like Christopher Hellwig.

OCFS2 is a really nice filesystem that is used by many people out there, if we track the ocfs2-users and ocfs2-devel mail lists it is clear that many people out there make use of it for their own applications.

We provide OCFS2 RPMs for Oracle Enterprise Linux(OEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL) on oracle.com and we make the RPMs available integrated on ULN for the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers. Even though the code is in the 2.6.18 kernel that is used in RHEL5, they decided to not compile the modules so we compile them out of the kernel. (we do not modify the kernel config and build them in because that would be considered a change)

For people that want to use OCFS2 or play with it, it’s included in OEL as an extra (not modifications of existing RHEL code). You can get the RPMS for RHEL from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). It is all free for use and download. If you need support you can purchase an Unbreakable Linux support subscription and that includes support for the filesystem.

You can find tons of information on our oss.oracle.com website http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/. Some of the new features that are in the mainline Linux release of the filesystem are listed below. The most notable one is REFLINK which I will cover in more detail. All OCFS2 development is public and every change is immediately published on oss in our git repositories.

- extended attributes. in fact the value of each extended attribute can be as large as a regular file. Which is larger than even ext3 can do.

- Posix ACL support

- support for userspace cluster stacks. If needed it is possible to use OCFS2 with cman and pacemaker

- jbd2 support. This gives us 64-bit blocknumbers and we can theoretically support 4PB filesystems. with jbd1 the limit is/was 16TB per filesystem

- quota support

- metadata checksums and ecc. all metadatablocks in OCFS2 now have a checksum field. If the checksum fails, there is an ECC field that can recover a single bit error. If it is unrecoverable then OCFS2 will make this single inode unreadable but it does not or will not affect the rest of the filesystem. In most filesystems this would take the entire filesystem into read-only mode.

- improved inode allocation. This will help with filesystems which a huge huge number of files.

- indexed directories. This will improve performance of lookups of a single name.

- reflink which creates a target inode that shares the data extents of the source inode in a copy-on-write fashion.

Now, about reflink. The reason we implemented reflink is for Oracle VM. As you know, a virtual machine/guest owns one or more virtual disks. These virtual disks are represented as files on a filesystem hosted by the hypervisor. In the case of Oracle VM, if you have SAN or iSCSI storage, we put an OCFS2 filesystem on top of this, managed by the management domain (dom0). The virtual disks live on top of this OCFS2 volume.

These virtual disks can become very large, they usually are many GB’s in size. So when a user wants to create a clone of a virtual machine or create a virtual machine based on an existing template, we copy the content of the original virtual disks to a new set of virtual disks. By default this duplicates the amount of storage used.

ie. you have VM1 with a 40gb virtual disk (vm1/system.img) and you want to copy that to create VM2 based on the same virtual disk image (vm2/system.img).

The reflink feature in OCFS2 which was published to fs-devel and ocfs2-devel a while back, supports this operation through effectively creating hard links but with copy-on-write (or basically a point-in-time data hard link).

Today, we copy the file vm1/system.img to vm2/system.img. Tomorrow, we do reflink vm1/system.img vm2/system.img. At initial create time no additional space is used, no actual copying is done, it just creates a totally new inode/file and shares the data extents. As soon as a write is done to one or the other side, 1mb chunks are copied over where the writes occur.

This allows us to create instant copies of files (or in the case of Oracle VM, virtual disk images).

Some of the advantages of reflink are :

- Each “hard link” or point-in-time copy, is a regular file for the OS, for an application etc, so there are no changes needed to applications or backup software. This is totally transparent, there is no container around these files etc. Unlike vmdk and vhd where the snapshots live inside the containers.

- It is fully cluster safe so this works in an OCFS2 filesystem cluster so the link and the COW works on any node even if the file is used and opened on another node. This allows us in the Oracle VM case to create snapshots and run these new VMs on a different node than the original VM is running.

- This is a generic feature just like symlink. It is available to any user or application.

- It is open source (part of OCFS2 code) free to use for anyone.

Below is an example of reflink. It shows the diskspace usage, it shows the time it takes to complete the commands and also a simple modification done with dd to one file and show how that affects both files.

ls -l total 1771896 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img ===============================================================

df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 3.9G 47G 8% /ocfs2
===============================================================

reflink el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img

real 0m0.030s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
===============================================================
ls -l
total 1771896
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:59 el4.5-system1.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img
===============================================================
df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 3.9G 47G 8% /ocfs2
===============================================================
md5sum el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system.img

real 0m31.094s
user 0m7.420s
sys 0m10.530s
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system1.img

real 0m34.553s
user 0m7.500s
sys 0m10.140s

===============================================================
dd if=/dev/zero of=el4.5-system1.img bs=1M count=1000 seek=500 conv=notrunc
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 104.889 seconds, 10.0 MB/s
===============================================================
ls -l
total 3543792
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 13:02 el4.5-system1.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img
===============================================================
df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 4.9G 46G 10% /ocfs2
===============================================================
md5sum el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system.img

real 0m32.430s
user 0m7.920s
sys 0m11.340s
b67b39c3c86a4110cb795f516bc7f86b el4.5-system1.img

real 0m32.069s
user 0m7.920s
sys 0m10.350s

enjoy.

As a bit of an experiment I have set up the Project Lifestyle Twitter account at http://twitter.com/PMLifestyle The idea here is really to use it as a companion (micro)blog to this one. Let’s see how it goes…

I have been playing around with GoAnimate which is a website that lets you build Flash animation clips. Besides making it very simple to create (if you can build a PowerPoint, you can build GoAnimate) - they have licensed characters from third-parties such as Star Trek. You can also upload your own.

I thought it would be fun to see if this might be another way to explain technology information.

You can check out my clip that I built to explain virtual directory (in general, not OVD specific) technology using the characters from Star Trek.