Best Practices

Planning for Success

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - 12:53 Best Practices Best Practices, planning, project management

Oftentimes during the course of a project, you may encounter schedule changes, new requirements or requirement changes, and risks. When these things happen, it is still possible to complete the project however, without a project plan, it’s almost impossible to do so successfully. A well-structured, clear, and concise project plan can always help to ensure that everything goes smoothly, no matter how many bumps you may encounter along the way.

According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project plan is defined as a “formal, approved document used to guide both project...

Splunk Data Input Pipeline and Processors

Posted by Rupak Pandya on Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - 11:38 Operational Intelligence, Best Practices Analytics, Best Practices, Data Inputs, Splunk

Image courtesy of the Splunk on Splunk App

I was a recent attendee of Splunk’s worldwide user’s conference .conf 2012. It was held at the ultra modern and chic Cosmopolitan Hotel located in the heart of Las Vegas, Nevada. Over 1000 people attended the conference and there were 90+ information sessions geared towards a wide range of Splunk user levels. At any given moment over the 3-day conference, there were 12-16 sessions going on at the same time. There was literally a world of knowledge being handed out to anyone who...

Packing Passwords

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Thursday, August 16, 2012 - 14:56 Cool Tools, Best Practices Best Practices, Cool Tools, Security

A common problem faced at the workplace and at home is finding a way to securely store your passwords. With people like “Anonymous” and identity thieves out there, gone are the days for scribbling passwords on post it notes (who would do such a thing?!?), or keeping word docs with your passwords listed on your hard drive. Users now want a more secure way to not only store passwords, but share them as needed.

Recently for a client site, we implemented Passpack (http://passpack.com/en/home/) as our online password repository, and so far, it...

Required Reading 3: How Useful is a Use Case?

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - 02:59 Best Practices, Function1 Best Practices, General

A use case can be formally defined as a list of steps defining interactions between a role and a system, to achieve a goal. However, if you haven’t written one yourself, you have at least heard the term somewhere. But exactly how useful are they when developing a product or defining a system process? Without having the proper understanding of use cases and the purpose of writing one, writing an effective case to elicit functional requirements can be pretty…useless.

Use cases can mainly be viewed as writing a story, so there is no real standardized format for writing them, making it...

Required Reading: The Basics

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 10:37 Best Practices, Function1 Best Practices, General

As a business analyst, requirements management is at the top of my list of interests and is something that is rarely talked about or discussed, but essential to any sucessful software development process. Without requirements, there are no defined statements as to which the project outcome should conform to. Each requirement should be documented, actionable, measureable, testable, and should define a business need or opportunity. This is important to a successful and timely delivery of systems, but when applied correctly, it can be used in all facets of decision making.

The...

Known limitations with the Web Center Interaction

Posted by Vasanth Manikumar on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - 01:05 Best Practices Best Practices

Hey all!

Over the last few months, I've had 2 customers run into 2 separate limitations with the Oracle Web Center Interaction(WCI) product, namely in version 6.1 MP1. The first of the two cases I had run into previously, so that prompted the idea for this post to share and build a running list of these limitations. The second of the 2 cases led me to dig deeper to find the reason for these constraints. What are these limitations you ask?

Well for example, if you're working with ALUI 6.1MP1, did you know that the maximum number of pages created within a community...

PTSpy log messages linked to ... hair loss?

Posted by Vasanth Manikumar on Monday, April 13, 2009 - 11:01 Best Practices Best Practices, ptspy

For the past few years, researchers have been perplexed about the causes behind the increased rate of hair loss in ALUI portal administrators. So, a team from Function1 took on the task of tracking these subjects for a few months and recorded the findings. One of the interesting things discovered was that the cause was not genetic or gender-specific in most cases. It was actually the simple explanation of the subjects repeatedly pulling on their hair while investigating problems with the portal.

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