Oracle BI Publisher 11.1.1.9.0 is available !!!

 

 

Oracle BI Publisher 11.1.1.9.0 was GA on May 19th and you can get the download, documentation, certification matrix and release notes here at the BI Publisher home page in OTN. Here is a quick snapshot of new features in this release. The download is also available at Oracle Software Delivery Cloud site. The documentation page has also been given a fresh new structure.

Well, the Word Addon is still not updated, which means it still does not support Microsoft Word 2013. But templates can be created online on the BIP server site itself.

TCC: Prevent Duplicates in Exports

 

 

Sometimes while running TCC exports with some complex filters, the same record might turn up more than once in in the final export file. The reason for this is that Taleo has a fixed datamodel, the relationships between various entities is pre-configured and cannot be overriden. So and M:M relationship cannot be converted to 1:M. Due to this, some records might be exported multiple ones.

Turns out, there is an easy way to fix this in the export process itself In the General tab of the Export file setup ,click on Advanced.

 

 

On the popup window, check the "Prevent Duplicates" option. This will ensure that records get exported only once in an export file.

Stop Using Tail -F (Mostly)

 

I still see a lot of people using tail -f to monitor files that are changing, mostly log files. If you are one of them, let me show you a better alternative: less +F

The less documentation explains well what this +F is all about:

Scroll forward, and keep trying to read when the end of file is reached. Normally this command would be used when already at the end of the file. It is a way to monitor the tail of a file which is growing while it is being viewed. (The behavior is similar to the "tail -f" command.)

So it says that it's similar to tail -f, but why I think it's better?

Simply put, it allows you to switch between navigation and watching mode. We all have been there: You are watching a file with tail -f, and then you need to search for something in this file, or just navigate up and down. Now you need to exit tail (or open a new shell), and ack this file or open it with vim to find what you are looking for. After that, you run tail again to continue watching the file. There's no need to do that when you are using less.

Let's say you want to watch the file production.log:

$ less +F production.log

Important
log
information
here

Waiting for data... (interrupt to abort)

Here you have pretty much the same behaviour you'd get with tail.

Now let's say something interesting appears, and you want to search all the occurrences of "foo". You can just hit Ctrl-c to go to "normal" less mode (as if you had opened the file without the +F flag), and then you have all the normal less features you'd expect, including the search with /foo. You can go to the next or previous occurrence with n or N, up and down with j and k, create marks with m and do all sort of things that less(1) says you can do.

Once you are done, just hit F to go back to watching mode again. It's that easy.

When you need to watch multiple files at the same time, tail -f can actually give you a better output. It will show you something like this:

$ tail -f *.txt

==> file1.txt <==
content for first file

==> file2.txt <==
content for second file

==> file3.txt <==
content for third file

When a change happens, it prints the file name and the new content, which is quite handy.

With less, it would be like this:

$ less +F *.txt

content for first file

It shows the content of just one file at a time. If you want to see what's happening in the second file, you need to first Ctrl-c to go to normal mode, then type :n to go to the next buffer, and then F again to go back to the watching mode.

Depending on your needs, it might still be worth to use less for multiple files, but most of the time I just go with tail for these cases. The important thing is to know the tools that we have available and use the right one for the job at hand.

The Failure Of Agile

 

I have always felt that Agile has failed. No Indian IT company I know of implements agile in its truest form. So it was not surprising to see one of the creators of agile himself ranting about this. He is also proposing a new standard.

Enjoy.

TCC: Transition Attachments need to be unzipped twice

 

TCC (Taleo Connect Client) is Taleo's (Enterprise Edition) official data export/import tool, but it does not allow manipulations on files uploaded/attached into the Taleo system.  To work with files attached, you need the TCC Custom Steps library. But again, it appears though stores files uploaded into some modules differently on their system.

For documents in the Recruiting module, Taleo first compresses, and then encodes the file in Base64. This is because internally it uses webservices for TCC, and Base64 seems like the only way to send binary attachments over SOAP XMLs. So while using TCC Custom Steps to export the attached files, you have to first decode the Base64 content, and then unzip it. Fortunately, the library's com.taleo.integration.client.customstep.xml.ExtractAttachedFilePostStep class does this automatically.

But when I used the same step to export documents from the Transitions module, the final files appeared corrupted, they would not open up in file viewers for PDF or Doc format. Turns out, the files exported are still in zip format. They need to be unzipped once more to get the final file.

So for Transition module, Taleo Zips it twice, then Base64 encodes it once. For exporting the files using TCC, the need to be unzipped twice. The above mentioned class does not do this automatically.

Answer: Different Class

The Custom Library documentation mentions another class in the same library ,com.taleo.integration.client.customstep.xml.ExtractFilesPostStep , which has more options.

 

According to the documentation, for documents, this step needs to have an operation value of "DecodeBase64,Gunzip". It does not mention whether operations can be chained.

They can. For transition documents, the operation has to be "DecodeBase64,Gunzip,Gunzip"

Here is the final configuration:

The final files generated by this sequence perfectly opened up in a PDF reader, so all transition forms are stored in PDF format in Taleo.

Cloudworld Mumbai - 2015

 

Oracle recently held a CloudWorld session in Mumbai to further market and push their cloud services. Looks like they are very keen on getting enterprises to move to the Cloud for their operations, the days of on-premise installations are numbered.

Here are the slides presented at this session.

 

Oracle CloudWorld
Mumbai- 7th April 2015

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Shailender Kumar, Managing Director, Oracle India
Oracle Keynote: Modern Business Modern Cloud
Shawn Price, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Go-to-Market and Product Business Groups, Oracle USA
Sponsor Keynote: Wipro
Sreenath AV, Vice President and Global Head - Oracle Practice, Wipro
Customer Leader Keynote
K. V. Srinivasan, Chief Executive Officer, Reliance Commercial Finance

TRANSFORM MARKETING

The New Digital Dialogue
Abe Smith, VP Emerging Markets, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle USA

2015 Annual Outlook: What to Expect in Data Driven Marketing & Advertising
Shelly Singh, COO & Director, DMAi and Vatsal Asher CEO & Director, DMAi

Simple steps to lead nurturing success; Gain maximum rewards for your business
Will Griffith, Senior Director Marketing Cloud, Oracle APAC

MODERNIZE SALES

Modern Sales in the Cloud
Atul Tuli, Senior Director - CX, Oracle APAC

Sales Performance Perfected
Caesar Peter, Senior Director - CX Applications, Oracle APAC

Customer Showcase: Reliance Commercial Finance
Shashi Ravulapaty, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Reliance Commercial Finance

Driving Higher Sales Productivity with Mobile Technology
Sanjiv Mahesh, Regional SC Director, Oracle India

Close Bigger Deals Faster with CPQ Cloud
Virginia Lo, Senior Director - CX Applications, Oracle APAC

MODERNIZE CUSTOMER SERVICE

The Path to Modern Customer Service
Brian Curran, Vice President Customer Experience Strategy and Design, Oracle USA

How to Differentiate Your Brand with Modern Service
YS Lee, Director Service Cloud, Oracle APAC

Modern Contact Centers with solution showcase
YS Lee, Director Service Cloud, Oracle APAC and Abhay Kacker, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle India

Outsmart the Competition with the Right Social Customer Service Strategy
Atul Tuli, Senior Director - CX, Oracle APAC

Improving Service Engagements
Merlyn Gordon, Director Customer Experience Strategy and Design

MODERNIZE HR

Modern HR in the Cloud with Customer Showcase
Anand Subbaraman, Vice President, HCM Product Strategy, Oracle USA and Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Apollo Hospitals

Why Building a Talent-Centric Strategy Is Critical for Your Business
Kristina Webb, Senior Director, HCM Transformation HCM Applications, Oracle APAC

Is Your Organization Able to Make Data-Driven Decisions?
Neeraj Narang, Principal Solutions Consultant – HCM

The Benefits of Bringing Social into Your Workplace
Kristina Webb, Senior Director, HCM Transformation HCM Applications, Oracle APAC

MODERNIZE THE BACK OFFICE

Transform your Business with a modern ERP
Hirak Kayal, Product Management India and PPM/JAPAC, Oracle

Accelerate Your Planning Process and Customer Showcase
Shridar Jayakumar, Program Director - EPM, BI & Exalytics, Oracle APAC

Equip Finance with Insight and Efficiency
Rajesh Ramdas, Director Applications, Oracle India

Empower Modern Project Management with Customer Showcase
Hirak Kayal, Product Management India and PPM/JAPAC, Oracle

Improving Returns on Innovation
Rathinakumar Vaidyanathan, Director, Supply Chain Solutions Consulting, Oracle Asia Pacific

Emerging Best Practices in Distribution and Logistics
Sunil Kumar, Solutions Director, Oracle India

INNOVATE MORE

Innovate with Oracle's Public Cloud Platform and Infrastructure Services
Ravi Pinto, Director Product Management, Oracle India

Rapidly Build and Deploy Rich Applications with Oracle Cloud PaaS
Sudershan Singh, Principal Product Manager, Oracle India

Streamline Collaboration Across Your Organization with Oracle Documents
Praveen Balakrishnan, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle India

Unlocking the Power of Business Analytics in Oracle Cloud
Shridar Jayakumar, Program Director - EPM, BI & Exalytics, Oracle APAC

Deliver World-Class Smartphone and Tablet Applications with Oracle Mobile
Ravi Pinto, Director Product Management, Oracle India

Tame the Cloud Integration Beast
Krishnaprem Bhatia, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle India

TCC: Changing Entity Tree Depth

 

While working with the Taleo Connect Client, sometimes you will need to work with complex hierarchy levels in the Entity tree. I am talking of this tree structure on the right side of your TCC Designer:           Cleartext.blogspot.com

If you start opening up the levels in the entity, you can go down to four levels. That is the default setting after installation. To go further down, you will need to increase the depth of this entity tree. This is done via Window-> Preferences   Cleartext.blogspot.com

Try increasing the value of Depth , under the Client -> Design option. And restart the TCC exe. But do be careful, entering large values can cause your TCC client to crash.  When I entered a value of 10 and restarted, the exe would not open up. And it started throwing java heap related errors. The change you make is global , and will reflect in all the products in the Installation Pack.

This article first appeared on Cleartext.blogspot.com