LearnQuest blog

Not Too Late For Our FREE Enterprise Analysis Training Webinar!

Just a quick reminder! Next week LearnQuest will be holding a one-hour long session on Enterprise Analysis Training. As always, all of our training webinars are completely free of charge! From the course description on our website:

Enterprise Analysis is Business Analysis activities that provide the foundation for the Business Analyst to identify business needs (business architecture), develop solutions to meet those needs (process understanding) and assist in the long term strategies that position the enterprise in accomplishing its goals.

Make sure and register now to reserve your spot!

LearnQuest Attends IIBA Chapter Meeting

Last night we here at LearnQuest were fortunate enough to sponsor and attend a Greater Philadelphia chapter meeting of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). We were especially lucky to attend this particular meeting as it was a special event with a visit from IIBA President and CEO, Kathleen Barret, who oversees operations with 90 chapters and 12,000 members worldwide. An engaging and brilliant woman, Ms. Barret gave a presentation titled: "From Tactical to Strategic, a Business Analysts Path to Leadership." From the Greater Philadelphia IIBA website:



For many business analysts, they are faced with the question of “What do I want to be when I grow up?,” unfortunately more often than not their questions remained unanswered or they are encouraged to move towards a project management role.  There is hope, with the recognition of the Business Analyst profession taking on more of a spotlight within organizations, the prospect of moving through a career path, from tactical to strategic is becoming a reality. Through careful competency development, coaching and mentoring, management support, certification etc. the realization of playing an integral role in the strategic direction of an organization can be realized.  While it is not an easy endeavor, and does not happen overnight, finely practiced, disciplined and structured skills must be carefully nurtured, and applied before making the leap.

Overall the event was a positive experience for our attendees from LearnQuest. We got to meet some great and interesting people, and hope to be involved in future IIBA events. For more information about the IIBA and how to locate your regional chapter, visit their website, iiba.org. And for anyone interested in how LearnQuest can further or enhance your Business Analysis skills, please visit our website for a complete list of training courses!

Upcoming LearnQuest Webinars!

LearnQuest is holding the following webinars during the month of October. As always, our webinars are completely free of charge, and we hope that you and your staff will attend!

10/19: IBM Rational Quality Manager Overview Training

This webinar will discuss the use of IBM Rational Quality Manager Test Management and Manual Test Authoring tool. Quality Manager is a web-based test management system that integrates with other IBM Rational test and change management tools and provides planning, execution and reporting capabilities around large testing efforts. This webinar will discuss the main features and capabilities of the tool as well as key integration points with other software lifecycle tools.

Read more or register!

10/26: Enterprise Analysis Training

Enterprise Analysis is Business Analysis activities that provide the foundation for the Business Analyst to identify business needs (business architecture), develop solutions to meet those needs (process understanding) and assist in the long term strategies that position the enterprise in accomplishing its goals.

Read more or register!

10/28: IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1 Overview Training

IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1 is IBM’s application server product that provides the ability to consolidate, transform and display content from a variety of resources on the same web page. Many organizations use portal server to provide uniform access to content that resides on a variety of resources – both contemporary and legacy.

Read more or register!

Five Maven Tips and Tricks

Shekhar Gulati of Javalobby put together a helpful list of Maven tips that we thought might be helpful to our clients and readers. Here's an example:

1. Maven rf option
Most of us work in a multi-module environment and it happens very often that a build fails at some module. It's a big pain to rerun the entire the build. To save you from going through this pain, Maven has an option called rf (i.e. resume) from which you can resume your build from the module where it failed. So, if your build failed at myproject-commons you can run the build from this module by typing:

1.mvn -rf myproject-commons clean install

You can read the rest of the tips over at Javalobby, or for more resources to fine-tune your Java knowledge, LearnQuest has a full library of training courses in all different areas for all different knowledge levels. Please visit our website to find out what solution works best for you!

The State of Cloud Computing

Zenoss, the corporate sponsor of an open source cloud networking and management project put together a study with this accompanying poster (click to enlarge) on the state of cloud computing and network virtualization. If you'd like to read further, the full report of survey results can be found here.

 

As always, LearnQuest provides resources to help you get started with Cloud Computing. Visit our website for our list of VMWare course offering.

Exchange 2010 SP1's Top Ten Features

As you may or may not know, Microsoft recently released their brand spankin' new Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack, and InfoWorld has put together this convenient list of the top ten best features:

1. Public Folder permissions through the EMC
Public Folders may have been deprecated in Exchange 2007, but many companies still use them and plan to do so for as long as possible. Now, with SP1, you can see and configure permissions on those folders through the EMC (Exchange Management Console). This replaces the annoying method employed by the RTM version, freeing you from having to use the EMS (Exchange Management Shell) or having to work through Outlook to make permission changes.

2. Retention Policies and Tags go GUI
While Managed Folders (MRM 1.0) have been relegated to the EMS with SP1, Retention Policies (MRM 2.0) have been pulled out of the EMS and into the GUI to allow for easier MRM (Messaging Records Management). Moreover, you now have a variety of preconfigured Retention Policy Tags to get you started, as well as a couple of Retention Policies. Having this in the GUI will make it much easier for admins to make real use of MRM 2.0.

3. Deployment switch for roles and features
This is a nice option you can select when performing an Exchange installation, as it removes the need to manually install these roles and features through Server Manager or to run prerequisite commands in PowerShell. I tried it during my own deployment, and it didn't quite get me all the way through, as I had hoped. Some aspects of IIS weren't installed, forcing me to resort to PowerShell anyway. But I'm still putting this one on my list.

4. Federation with self-signed certificates
With SP1, a self-signed certificate will work for a federation trust with the Federation Gateway. Before SP1, demoing Federation (Organization Relationships and Sharing Policies) required getting not one third-party CA certificate but two to show how it worked between two domains. Now you can test this out using the self-signed cert.

5. RBAC (mostly) manageable through ECP
You can now create role groups through the ECP (Exchange Control Panel) and assign roles, role assignment policies, and so forth for RBAC (Role Based Access Control). You still need to create new roles through the EMS and custom write scopes in the EMS as well, but this is one step closer to a fully functional graphical RBAC.

Read 6 through 10 after the jump!

VMware Looking to Purchase Novell

Enterprise Operating Systems giant Novell is looking to divide up the company and sell off the separate pieces. Among the potential buyers is VMware, which is said to be in "advanced" negotiations. More from ComputerWorld:

VMware appears to be solely interested in acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux operating system and associated business. Novell's NetWare enterprise file sharing software may be purchased by Attachmate, a software firm specializing in supporting legacy applications, the Journal said.

The paper reported that up to 20 companies were interested in Novell, which put itself on the market in March, but that there are only a handful are serious contenders. Rumors have been flying around this week about the potential sale after an article in the New York Post said advanced acquisition talks were taking place between Novell and two unnamed companies.

Acquiring SUSE Linux would make sense for VMware, which has been actively acquiring companies to build a stack of software for running cloud services. Novell has partnered with VMware, making SUSE Linux the preferred OS for VMware-packaged virtual appliances. Novell has been building cloud services off its Linux base. Also, Red Hat has taken on VMware for the nascent cloud computing market, leveraging its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.

For all things VMware, check out the selection of training courses LearnQuest offers!

IBM Acquiring OpenPages

IBM has announced that they have acquired the risk management software company, OpenPages. More from InfoWorld:

IBM is acquiring OpenPages, a privately held company that makes software designed to help companies simplify risk management and corporate compliance activities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

OpenPages' software aggregates data pertaining to compliance and risk management (including operational risk, financial controls management, IT risk and internal audits) to create an enterprise-wide view of where a company is exposed and how risks might impact future performance.

The software can highlight inconsistencies in risk and performance goals. For example, a manufacturer with aggressive revenue goals for an emerging market may risk noncompliance with regional regulations or cost overruns associated with doing business in a remote location. The OpenPages software would give an aggregate view of the business opportunities and risks associated with the expansion, IBM says.

IBM's recent study of 1,900 global CFOs and senior finance leaders found that two out of three companies encountered material risk events within the past three years. Survey respondents indicated risk management has risen in priority by 93 percent since 2005.

OpenPages, based in Waltham, Mass., will become part of IBM's business analytics software portfolio. Over the past four years, IBM has invested more than $11 billion in its business analytics software and services business, which experienced 14 percent revenue growth in the second quarter of 2010. Among the companies it has acquired in this area are: Cognos, Coremetrics, Guardium, and Unica.

"Unforeseen risk can hurt a company's bottom line as well as its brand reputation,” said Rob Ashe, general manager for business analytics at IBM, in a statement. "Integrating risk management systems across once-divided units and functions is essential to seeing the bigger picture."

OpenPages has more than 200 customers, including Allianz, Barclays, Carnival Corporation, Duke Energy, and SunTrust.

For IBM training resources, please visit LearnQuest's website to browse our complete IBM course selections.

Google Code Allowing More Licenses

Google has announced on its Google Code blog that it will now accepting all open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative, much like open source project hosting sites such as SourceForge.  The hosting giant finally realized after five years that allowing more open source licenses might be better suited for supporting open source developers. More from the Google Code blog:

In our day-to-day work looking after open source licensing, we lamented the proliferation of licenses and decided that we would split the difference and only offer a very limited subset of the approved OSI licenses choices to our users as a stand against the proliferation of the same. You see, we felt then and still feel now that the excessive number of open source licenses presents a problem for open source developers and those that adopt that software. Thus when we launched project hosting on code.google.com, we only launched with a small subset of licenses.

This was hardly a barrier to adoption. While there were some complaints from some corners, in the intervening 5+ years since then, we've grown to become one of the largest hosts while allowing that ethic behind license choice to persist.

What's changing and why change now?

We've added an option to the license selector to allow any project to use an OSI approved license. Simply select “other open source” and indicate in your LICENSING, COPYING or similar file which license you are using.

Public domain projects are still only allowed on a case by case basis,as true public domain projects are quite rare and, in some countries, impossible. We encourage those that want to truly ship public domain to look at how D. Richard Hipp does things around SQLite and emulate his style. Email google-code-hosting@googlegroups.com if you’d like to request that license be applied to your project.

(Please note: we will continue to hunt down and kill non-open source projects or other projects using Google Code as a generic file-hosting service.)

Why change now? The TL;DR version is that we think we've made our point and that this new way of doing things is a better fit to our goal of supporting open source software developers.

The longer form of the reason why is that we never really liked turning away projects that were under real, compatible licenses like the zlib or other permissive licenses, nor did we really like turning away projects under licenses that serve a truly new function, like the AGPL. We also think that there were inconsistencies in how we handled multi-licensed projects (for instance: a project that is under an Apache license, but has a zlib component.)

To rectify this, we decided to add an additional option to the license selector that would accommodate some flexibility around open source licenses. We hope you find it useful and look forward to seeing how you use the site!

For more information on Open Source training, please visit the LearnQuest website for our complete listing of Open Source courses!

Adobe Illustrator to Get HTML5 Capabilities

 
Creating websites is about to get easier than ever, as Adobe Systems has released an expansion pack for their CS5 package which will allow designers and developers to create layouts in Illustrator 5, and conveniently export their designs to the Web and mobile platforms. More from InfoWorld:

With these capabilities, designers can build out a visual display once and export it to multiple platforms, such as Web pages, smartphones and tablets, as well as for print media, said Adobe senior product manager David Macy.

The pack can render designs using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) version 3 as well as the HTML5 Canvas element and the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) XML image format.

Adobe's HTML5 pack shows that the company, even as it continues to position its own Flash format as a way to bring rich functionality to the Web, is also acknowledging the potential ubiquity of HTML5. Apple, for instance, declined to support Flash on its own consumer electronics, in favor of HTML5 (although it recently recanted somewhat by allowing the use of cross-platform compilers to rebuild Flash files into device-native code).

By using CSS, designers can export a page they created in Illustrator to a Web page. CSS can capture many, though not all of the capabilities of Illustrator, so designers may have to jump back and forth between a Web rendition of their creation and the original, Macy admitted.

Nonetheless, this feature could dramatically cut the time it takes to design a product for multiple platforms, he said.

By using SVG and the Canvas elements, designers can add data and interactive elements to their images, Macy said. For instance, someone could build a stylish calendar template and have the different dates of each month populate the calendar at the appropriate locations, depending on the month.

With SVG, users can "zoom into" an image for greater detail, Macy said. The designer can also make each pixel "reactive," meaning that a workflow could be triggered if the user clicks on the pixel.

Using this approach, Macy demonstrated a Web page that allows the user to pick the background color and logo color of a T-shirt. When the user clicks on a color from the color chart below an illustration of the shirt, the page re-renders the shirt in that color.

In order to deploy the HTML5 pack, users must have version 15.0.1 of Adobe Illustrator CS.

To keep up with the ever-changing evolution of web design, LearnQuest has many courses to keep you up to speed. Visit our website for our entire catalog of courses!