Clearly there's some work to be done to make use of the real estate (the out of the box app is styled on windows mobile devices... but it's just standard web stuff and CSS)

OK - Android this week. Palm Pre and iPhone 3 next week. So many great gadgets to choose from!! Don't you just love competition?

I was fortunate enough to attend Google IO last week. (each year it just gets better and better - if you missed it - put it on your calendar for next year). Amongst some of the great sessions I attended was one that deals with two of my most favourite subjects - user interaction and voice technology. Presented by TV Raman and Charles L. Chen - they discuss the Eyes-Free Project : a project that aims to enable fluent eyes-free use of mobile devices running Android. Target uses range from eyes-busy environments like in-car use to users who can't or don't want to look at the visual display. When you watch the video you will see some of the UI innovations for taking advantage of the touch screen without needing to actually look at the screen.

You can download the applications to your Android phone. It's great to see such innovation around user interactivity - especially on a mobile device. The mobile device has the ability to sense more about it's environment than your PC can - so go ahead, watch the video and really make the most of these great new computing platforms.
Download the presentation here

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.

Using this virtualized product, You can have your entire Siebel 8.1.1 instance up and running within a few hours of download. There are many well documented financial savings and environmental benefits to be gained from running your applications in a virtualised environment (I've posted a high level already on this blog).

To get the VM image - go here http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux (not the application section).

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, download today, start saving money and saving the planet.

Have fun!

We were at the Google Campfire One event yesterday for the launch of several major developments that bring the Cloud closer to Enterprise Applications in a secure and open standards manner.

The video shows Mark Woollen, VP Social CRM Applications, demonstrating how Google Gadgets and Google Applications running on a private Google site provisioned for an Enterprise customer (but hosted by Google) can access on premise CRM services and data (or any other data from other Oracle Applications for that matter) in a manner that IT can be comfortable with. The open source Google Secure Data Connector sits behind the firewall and allows traffic from the Google site domain to access information from the CRM application. Authentication is done through OAuth.

This is an exciting development because it helps developers deliver new applications and gadgets in the cloud that can co-exist seamlessly with traditional behind the firewall enterprise applications and data. The solution makes use of the new REST API's currently in development for Siebel. The REST API's are being built in a versionless manner - so any Siebel version or vertical solution can take advantage of the cloud. [In Beta, see bottom of post for contacts]

Perhaps the other major announcement is the availability of the Google Java App Engine.

Imagine that you have built a great application running on Oracle Weblogic Server and you want to now deliver some subset of that capability to a third party organisation such as a business partner. Google and Oracle are champions of standardisation. By following standards it is now possible to take your Oracle Weblogic application and run it on the Google AppEngine. It is now possible to build Java applications on the AppEngine and have them work with Siebel - either through the REST API's or even the Siebel Java Data Bean. You old timers will recall the Siebel Java Wizard. Well it's time to take that for a spin and see what cool cloud apps you can build to work with Siebel. Remember - you get all the benefits of hosting (no set up, no hardware, no initial startup cost) but without the drawbacks of proprietary, walled-garden SaaS platforms. It's great news for developers, great news for open standards and brilliant news for customers. So what are you waiting for? Head over to http://code.google.com/appengine/ and get started today!

For details contact Mark Woollen, Mandeep Bhullar or Dipock Das.

If you are in or around any of these locations on these dates - be sure to sign up for the workshop [Contact Frank McBath]

The Microsoft Oracle Center of Excellence will be hosting a SQL Server Performance Workshops at the following locations:

This workshop is free to all customers.

The content focuses on how to run a high performance SQL Server environment with Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards.
Workshop Content
There are many classes that cover SQL Server. There are also just as many that cover Oracle Applications… but very few cover the intersection of the two.

This two day workshop covers the specifics of how the Oracle application interacts with SQL Server and how to architect a scalable and highly available solution. Its focus starts at the ODBC level and goes down to the disk.
Emphasis is on isolating issues, finding problems before they happen, and performance tuning. The goal of the workshop is to move beyond “my system’s slow” into WHY it’s slow and how to fix it. We’ll cover: what to look at, what it means, and what “good” & “bad” look like on a wide variety of platforms.
While the workshop is in lecture format, real world examples are used exclusively in the form of perfmon and profiler traces in addition to numerous trip reports and health checks that have been done with customers over the last 5 years. We’ll use out of the box tools and basic scripts to gather up information and apply common sense techniques to come up with answers.
Skills learned in this workshop can also be applied to other enterprise applications in your landscape.
Target Audience: DBAs, Siebel/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards Administrators, Consultants

Topics Covered

• Top Reasons for SQL Server 2005/2008
• Query Repro: Reproducing Problem Queries Outside of the Application and Tools to Fix Them
• Performance Tuning Methodology: A Repeatable Process
• Hands on Performance Tuning Lab
• Databases & Disk Drives: Architecting a Scalable Solution
• SQL Server Settings
• Case Study Handouts
• Architecting for RSCI
• SQL Server Compression
• Hyper-V and Virtualization

Location & Registration
The workshop will be held at the Microsoft offices in Japan and the US.
To register for the event, please email Frank McBath.
Additional details are available by contacting Frank McBath (frankmcb@microsoft.com), MOCE Global Database Evangelist.
For a complete list of all workshops in Japan & United States locations, abstract, workshop & lab content, and logistics, please click on the following link for our newsletter: MOCE Events 2009 Q2

To Register for the event, contact Frank McBath Frank McBath