Sybase today announced that it is delivering notice to the holders of its 3.50% Convertible Senior Notes Due 2029 of the closing on July 29, 2010 of the "second-step" cash merger of Sheffield Acquisition Corp...

Zend Technologies Launches Unlimited Subscription Model for Businesses Using PHP; Signs Major Enterprise Customers in U.S., Europe

Overview

eVisioner, a leader in team performance management systems, used components from the Altova® MissionKit® including: XMLSpy®, StyleVision®, UModel®, and DiffDog® to build a Web-based governance solution from the ground up. MetaTeam® is a unique XML-based collaboration environment that aims to raise project team performance and lower costs by empowering users with better organization and decision-making resources. MetaTeam lets organizations of all sizes provide work groups and virtual teams tools to structure projects, create living charters, optimize decision making, assign and align roles, manage relationships, track performance against goals, and more.

The Challenge

The vision for MetaTeam was a highly scalable application for the coordination and management of team goals, roles, and responsibilities. The solution needed to promote transparency and decision-making ability through effective organization and ultimately lead to better team performance.

After creating a prototype of the MetaTeam product, eVisioner realized that creating a consistent user interface for such a large program under active development would require either constant attention or an inflexible development process, and possibly both.  In addition, the developers needed a way to integrate documentation, import and export data, and allow customers to generate customized reports.  Together, all of these concerns suggested the implementation of an XML architecture.

The Solution

In keeping with the principles defined by the naked objects pattern, eVisioner planned to automatically generate the MetaTeam user interface from its domain model and an abstract application description in XML.

The eVisioner team found that the XML development tools and other components included in the Altova MissionKit were a perfect fit to model, build, and test the MetaTeam team governance application.

UML Model

Development of the MetaTeam application began with UML class and sequence diagrams created in Altova UModel. UModel provided a means to model the substantial changes that were required to move from the prototype to production-ready code. In addition, UModel's intuitive user interface made it easy to navigate, understand, and manipulate MetaTeam’s interface and the subclassing method that was used to approach a handful of complex central classes.

MetaTeam UML Class Diagram

XML Schema & Application Definition

eVisioner used the graphical XML Schema Editor in XMLSpy to create a wire frame model of the MetaTeam Web application, which it uses as the basis for generating functional J2EE code - in total over 3,000 Java and JSP files - for each iteration.  Using XMLSpy's XML Schema and Grid views made it simple to reconfigure the layout of the application, turn features on and off, and specify behaviors without any concern that the look and feel of the application would become inconsistent. 

 

A small section of the MetaTeam framework definition shown in XMLSpy's XML Schema view

The MetaTeam application definition is contained in an XML instance file that specifies the behavior of the application. Using XMLSpy's XPath Analyzer with intelligent XPath autocompletion, the developers were able to create a library of XPath 2.0 expressions to check for defects and validate that required fields were handled correctly.  For example, the simple XPath below finds all input elements that do not include a description attribute.

XPath Analyzer in XMLSpy

Report Templates

With the working application in hand, the developers then created an XML model of an example workgroup mapped to the domain model used in MetaTeam. Using the workgroup model they created report templates with Altova StyleVision, including a default team charter.  Not only does the stylesheet template provide multi-channel output to HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word, but it also gives eVisioner employees an easy way to work with customers to create and upload customized versions of the reports.

Report design in StyleVision

PDF output generated by StyleVision

XML Differencing

Because of the considerable emphasis on XML development, DiffDog, Altova's XML-aware diff/merge tool, became an integral part of the application development and testing process. In particular, DiffDog provided critical XML differencing capabilities during testing of the code generation framework.  Since the framework let developers re-use common components such as tabs, forms, and other UI features in multiple parts of the application, it was necessary to prove that these replicated structures were identical to their source.  Serializing the in-memory model back to XML allowed DiffDog to visualize the differences so that the developers could catch slight variations before they caused problems.

Testing code using XML differencing in Altova DiffDog

The Results

eVisioner's choice to use XML as the basis for building its Web application has made MetaTeam a truly modular team governance solution that can be scaled up or down as needed.

Using its XML-based infrastructure alongside of the Altova MissionKit, eVisioner is able to generate a full working copy of MetaTeam in less than two minutes with 100% confidence that the application will perform as defined.  Moving tabs, adding forms, or changing a page layout requires just an incremental generation taking seconds.  This speed and reliability allows eVisioner to make minor updates to the application in less time, thereby being more reactive to customer feedback.  With the additional ability to offer customers a way to easily customize their reports using StyleVision, eVisioner gains a unique capability that increases the value of MetaTeam to its customers.

Delivering legendary service is something the Atlassian Support team is constantly striving for. At Atlassian Summit 2010, Andrew Rallings, our Support Director, shared the three ways we try to achieve this goal and some of the innovative tools we have created to better serve our customers.

In the following video, check out Andrew Rallings's keynote (approximately 10 minutes in length) about Atlassian's Legendary Support. (Starts at 48:59).

Firstly, how do you know if you are delivering Legendary Support?

The only true way of knowing if you are delivering legendary support is by asking your customers. Each month we send out a Customer Satisfaction Survey to a randomly selected group of customers who have raised support issues that month. We roughly get a 40% response rate which is around 4 times the industry average (thank you to all our customers for such an awesome response rate, you guys rock!).

Measuring our support quality is one thing but how do we go about achieving it? We identified three ways to achieve legendary support...

1) Build products with no issues

When it comes to support, the best service you can get is the one you never need. Development, Product Management, Quality Assurance, Performance Engineering and Support work closely together to deliver not only a great product, but a high quality product with as few bugs as possible. As a result we have a number of large improvements scheduled to be delivered over the next 3-6 months such as the Universal Plugin Manager, improved user management and LDAP integration, and a dramatically improved Rich Text Editor for Confluence. Also, in the last year alone, we have fixed approximately 3,500 bugs across all of our products. There is still a long way to go, in particular we want to make installing and upgrading even easier, but we are heading in the right direction.

2) Provide great tools and online help

When you do have issues, we want to provide you the best online help and tools available that can help you find the answers to your issues quickly any time of the day.

Some of the things we have done to do just that include:

• Revamped The Knowledge Base: by making known issues easily findable, we're empowering customers with the knowledge they need to prevent known issues from occurring in the first place (see our Confluence Knowledge Base as an example);


• Released Hercules the Atlassian Support Bot: our friendly Hercules Support bot scans logs and support issue descriptions to display, in seconds, related known issues from within our knowledge base and/or public JIRA instance (Hercules was actually created by Atlassian's support engineers);


• Released Our Support Tools Plugin: available for Confluence (and soon JIRA) our support tools plugin allows you to scan your instance to detect known issues before you even knew you had a problem. Over the next 6 months we will release similar plugins for the rest of our products.
  

3) Deliver best-in-class service

When you do need to file a support issue, we want to provide you with the best service we possibly can. In your customer satisfaction surveys you said that you wanted two things: (1) you wanted us to answer your issues for your product in your time zone and; (2) you needed our service to be reliable.

To achieve this we needed to make some pretty big organisational changes. We recently opened a new office to cover the US East Coast and grew our entire Support team by more than 50%. What this means is that by October 2010, you will have a support engineer for your product (i.e. all products) in your time zone.

In terms of reliability, we have already published our target Initial Response Times but over this next 6 months we will publish exactly how we are doing against these targets. Providing transparency to our response times is a great way to demonstrate increasing reliability. We also created a highly customised Shared Support Queue that helps us better prioritise our incoming issues, to ensure the most efficient and effective delivery of support.

Related Links

• Hercules the Atlassian Support Bot by Jeremy Largman


• Shared Support Queue by Tony Atkins


• Support Tools Plugin for Confluence


• Our Support space


• How to use Confluence for a Knowledge Base and check out the Knowledge Base Survey Plugin.

With the Excel Plug-In (Beta) it is now possible to automate the content of an Excel work sheet. This plug-in is not designed solely for getting data from Excel sheets (please read Data Driven Testing here), instead it offers you the opportunity to automate the cells, rows and columns of an Excel document. For example, if you want to validate the impacts of your add-on on Excel, then the Excel plug-in is definitely the correct tool for you. In addition to access to the Excel UI elements, there are also new adapters available:

• ExcelApplication
• ExcelOleObject
• ExcelRange
• ExcelShape
• ExcelWorkBook
• ExcelWorkSheet

Through these adapters it is also possible to interact with the objects provided by the Excel object model.

Set up the Excel Plug-In

1. Please close all Ranorex tools
2. Download and extract Ranorex-Office-Plug-in.zip to following location
   “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Ranorex2\Plugins” (for Windows XP) or “C:\ProgramData\Ranorex2\Plugins” (for Vista, 7)”
3. Start Ranorex Spy and check if the Plug-in was successfully loaded. Therefore, please open the About Dialog by clicking the Ranorex Logo.


Excel Plug-In successfully loaded
4. Start your Excel and it should be possible to track the elements of the worksheet.

Creating a new Project

We now create a new project, which will show briefly what’s possible with the new Excel Plug-In. In the example we perform a calculation (implemented in user code) and use one of the formulas (actions recorded by Ranorex Recorder) which should simulate an Add-On.

1. Please create a new solution called ExcelPlugin_Test
2. First we have to add a new reference to the project. The reference is necessary to use the adapters of the Excel Plug-In in our project. Please use following location to navigate to the Ranorex.Plugin.Office.dll
   “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Ranorex2\Plugins” (for Windows XP) or “C:\ProgramData\Ranorex2\Plugins” (for Vista, 7)“

   

   Adding the new reference

3. After we successfully added the new reference, we now create a new class called SimpleCalc
4. In this class we create two new methods: SetValuesCalc() and CheckResults(). These two methods should look like the following.
   SetValuesCalc

   /// <summary>
   /// Sets the values of the cell and carries out the calculation.
   /// </summary>
   /// <param name="sheet">The worksheet which should be used</param>
   /// <param name="value">The calculate value</param>
   /// <param name="resultCell">Your cell for the result</param>
   /// <param name="cellNames">Your cells are filled with a value. For example '"A1",A2"'</param>
   public static void SetValuesCalc(ExcelWorkSheet sheet, int value, string resultCell, params string[] cellNames)
   { int result= 0; Cell excelCell; foreach(string cell in cellNames) { //Searching for the cell excelCell = sheet.FindSingle<Cell>(".//cell[@address='" + cell +"']"); excelCell.Click(); //Enters the value by using the keyboard Keyboard.Press(value.ToString()); Keyboard.Press(Keys.Enter); //Calculates the result of all cells result= result+ Convert.ToInt32(excelCell.Text); } //Searching for the result cell excelCell = sheet.FindSingle(".//cell[@address='" + resultCell+ "']"); excelCell.Click(); //Uses the SUM Formula or Excel Keyboard.Press("=SUM(" + cellNames[0] + ":" + cellNames[cellNames.Length - 1] + ")"); Keyboard.Press(Keys.Enter); //Checks if the result of all cells equal the result cell. CheckResult(result, excelCell); }

   CheckResult

   /// <summary>
   /// Checks the result of the calculation
   /// </summary>
   /// <param name="expectedResult">Result of all cells used</param>
   /// <param name="result">The result cell of the calculation by Excel</param>
   private static void CheckResult( int expectedResult, Cell result)
   { Validate.Attribute(result, "Text", expectedResult.ToString());
   }

5. When these two methods are done, we now need to call our calculation from the Program.cs file. For this we need the path to our worksheet. Start the Spy and track the first worksheet of our Excel book.
   
   As you can see, the new adapters are also visible in Spy. Now copy the path of the worksheet for our method.

   /*****************************************************
   * Parameter 1: Path or element for excel sheet
   * Parameter 2: Value shall be calculated.
   * Parameter 3: The address of the result cell
   * Parameter 4: The cell addresses which should have a value
   * ***************************************************/
   SimpleCalc.SetValuesCalc("/form[@processname='EXCEL']/element[@class='XLDESK']/workbook/table[@name='Sheet1']", 12, "A5", "A1","A2","A3");

6. Let’s execute our calculation by compiling and running the whole project. (Press F5 or press the Run button)

Now we create a recording where we calculate the average value of several numbers and format the result. Thereby we show how easy it is to test an Excel Add-On with the Recorder.

1. Create a new recording named Formula.
2. Start recording and click the worksheet.
3. Enter some values to the worksheet. If you finished select the “Average Formula” from the “Formulas/Recently Used” menu.
4. Mark the values of which the average should be calculated.
5. Right click on the result cell and select “Format Cell” of the context menu.
6. Format your cell now.
7. When you finished formatting your cell, validate if the result was calculated correctly.
8. Last but not least, call the recording in the Program.cs file and execute the whole project

   //Execute recording
   Formula.Start();

You can download the sample project (Excel Project) which includes all the steps we performed in this blog. Please, don’t forget this Plug-In is still a Beta version and there is the possibility that some things might be changed.

Please send us your feedback and your suggestions to improve the Excel Plug-In.

Integrated suite combining innovative best practices analytics with agile development team tools marks official commercial launch

Waltham, MA, July 27, 2010 – Telerik, a leading vendor of development tools and user interface components for .NET, today announced the immediate commercial availability of TeamPulse. Resulting from collaborative efforts between Telerik and consulting firm, Imaginet Resources Corp., TeamPulse is an integrated suite of agile scheduling, planning, and tracking tools designed to enrich team dynamics, bridging the boundaries between different stakeholders by providing greater insight into project context.

Developed on the popular Silverlight 4 platform, TeamPulse introduces a number of new technology advancements such as its industry-first Best Practices Analyzer and the new Persona Management view. It also incorporates an array of innovative team-oriented tools addressing critical agile project management needs, including iteration planning and scheduling, team collaboration, requirements management, and real-time project tracking. The intuitive user interface (UI) maintains a natural action flow for development teams, optimizing the decision-making process, minimizing redundancy and reducing waste.

“Telerik and TeamPulse are at the forefront of technology innovation – our Best Practices Analyzer raises the bar for application quality, while the Persona Management view takes the art of human-centered application design and development to the next level,” said Joel Semeniuk, Executive VP, Telerik Team Productivity Tools Division. “TeamPulse unleashes the inherent power of agile software development teams by elevating the overall development process. It is a strong demonstration of our role as a change agent for the software development industry.”

The Best Practices Analyzer is a pioneering technology not found in other team productivity solutions on the market. Leveraging a unique framework developed by Telerik, the analytical tool automatically evaluates then reports on which project elements are divergent from best practices standards. The suite includes a set of pre-determined best practices, however, the Best Practices Analyzer is built to allow the addition of new best practices based on a team’s particular organizational or project requirements.

TeamPulse’s Persona Management view provides teams with a rich editor for identifying application requirements, such as needed features and functionality, as well as defining end-user characteristics. The innovative human-centric tool gives developers a clearer picture of how end users will interact with and use their application, thereby allowing them to better capture, understand, and leverage vital end-user requirements and expectations.

In addition to its Best Practices Analyzer and Persona Management view, the commercial launch of TeamPulse includes a range of other new features and enhanced functionality:

• Requirements management – facilitates the planning process by providing tools addressing critical elements like story management, estimation, and prioritization
• Planning and scheduling – allows project requirements to be divided and decomposed into separate tasks which can then be scheduled into iterations
• Project tracking and analytics – provides a transparent, real-time view of project health, including up-to-date information on individual and team progress, via integrated analytics and streamlined dashboards
• Traceability – enables accurate tracking of business value during the course of the development cycle

TeamPulse Standard Edition, which includes one user and an unlimited number of projects, is immediately commercially available at $249 USD per license. Also available is TeamPulse Community Edition, a free full-featured edition limited to five users and one project. For additional information about TeamPulse, please visit www.telerik.com/team-productivity-tools.aspx. To learn more about Telerik and get the latest breaking company news, please follow @Telerik on Twitter.

About Telerik
Telerik is a leading vendor of development, automated testing, and team productivity tools, as well as UI components and content management solutions for Microsoft .NET. Created with passion, Telerik products help software development teams every day to be more productive and deliver reliable applications on time and under budget. Tens of thousands of organizations in over 90 countries rely on Telerik products. Telerik customers include many Fortune 2000 companies, as well as renowned educational, governmental and non-profit institutions.

Black Duck Announces SAP's Selection of Its Black Duck Suite To Help Developers Manage Increasing use of Open Source Software

Planned worldwide implementation to automate management and use of open source software; validate and improve developer efficiency

WALTHAM, Mass., July 27, 2010 - Black Duck Software, a leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today announced that SAP (NYSE: SAP) has selected to implement the Black Duck™ Suite. The comprehensive suite provides a platform for managing the use of open source software in a multi-source development process. It will help development teams at SAP improve productivity by further automating the company’s open source approval processes. SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*).

SAP, which previously used complex, time-consuming and partly manual processes for handling open source approvals and the legal compliance aspects of open source use, sought a scalable, enterprise-strength platform to further automate the management, compliance, and integration of open source software into its development life cycle. After researching available tools and platforms, SAP chose the Black Duck Suite to support SAP developers worldwide with the suite’s automated, developer-oriented, multi-function platform, which supports scanning, early detection and management of open source used in software development.

“When we established the open source approval process at SAP in 2001, we assumed we’d receive only a few open source requests per month,” said Francis Ip, head of SAP Global Technology Legal Compliance. “However, with the continuously increasing importance of open source globally and SAP’s recent strategic change towards systematically utilizing benefits that come with open source, it was necessary for us to scale our open source process through further automation. We conducted an exhaustive search of applications on the market, and the Black Duck Suite was the best solution we tested. The Black Duck Suite will help us further automate and scale our open source process in order to support our open source strategy.”

“Using the Black Duck Suite will help SAP developers reduce the amount of code that needs to be developed while increasing the velocity of development,” said Peter Vescuso, executive vice president, Black Duck Software. “Automating the use and management of open source software also will yield the benefits of compliance with software license obligations, reducing risk and improving developer efficiency.”

For more information on the Black Duck Suite visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications.

About Black Duck Software
Black Duck Software is the leading provider of products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process. The use of Black Duck™ solutions enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development costs while mitigating the management, security and compliance challenges associated with open source software. Black Duck Software powers Koders.com, the industry’s leading code search engine for open source, and is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, Calif., London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

Black Duck, Know Your Code and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Koders is a trademark of Black Duck Software, Inc.

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

SAP Forward-looking Statement
Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “predict,” “should” and “will” and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

Press Contacts

Peter Vescuso
Black Duck Software
press@blackducksoftware.com
+1 781-891-5100

Ann Dalrymple
TopazPartners
adalrymple@topazpartners.com
+1 781-404-2432

Prudential UK Launches IT Transformation With Progress FUSE

Delivery of multi-layered contract-based design methodology, HRC meta-model and SPEEDS Bus see goals achieved

Sybase today announced that, in connection with the closing of the acquisition of Sybase by Sheffield Acquisition Corp, pursuant to a "first-step" cash tender offer for all outstanding Sybase common shares at $65.00 per share...

Introduction

At the recent Atlassian Summit 2010, we demonstrated the homegrown tool that Atlassian's global Technical Support team uses to manage our shared support queue. In part 1 of this blog series, we'll cover why we needed a new tool, and the concepts behind the shared view we built. In part 2, we'll break down how we turned our best practices and ideas into a working tool that we plan to eventually release as a JIRA plugin.

We just released NCover 3.4.12. It's a regular bugfix release but also includes an exciting reduction to NCover's memory usage when running applications that spawn lots of subprocesses. You can read all about the release in the release notes.

Download NCover 3.4.12

Please join us in 2 weeks to learn more about Ceptah Bridge.

Ceptah Bridge links MS Project with JIRA and provides bi-directional synchronisation between the systems. It streamlines the project management process by making Microsoft Project tasks available to JIRA users for browsing, modifying and reporting progress. A rich interface gives the user full control over the changes made during the synchronisation.

REGISTER NOW: Tue, Aug 10, 2010 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM PDT (California Time)

Progress Software Survey Says: Over 50% of Capital Markets Firms Do Not Use Real Time Market Surveillance and Monitoring Tools

HL7 is an international standard for transmitting clinical and administrative information within healthcare domains such as hospitals, pharmaceutical, medical device, and insurance entities.

Altova has just released a new MapForce course as part of its line of free online training modules. This course focuses on HL7 integration using both the EDI (version 2.x) and XML (version 3.x) formats. Each of the three modules include step-by-step tutorials, evaluation exercises, and a chance to work with real HL7 files and functions.

Go on, join the EHR revolution! Download a free 30-day trial of MapForce, go to our training page, and check out powerful HL7 mapping from Altova!

What's hotter then Orlando, FL in August? Agile 2010 in Orlando in August! Seriously though, this is the second year Atlassian has been a sponsor of this awesome show, and we're excited to be back. We're pining to reconnect with folks in the agile world to find out what's the latest and greatest, as well as share what we've been working on.

Our JIRA and GreenHopper gurus will be manning our booth and showing off the latest from GreenHopper and JIRA, as well as all of Atlassian's development tools. As you may have heard at Summit, over 10,000 customers use GreenHopper -- in just one year our customer based grew by a 10x magnitude. Making GreenHopper one of the most popular agile planning tools out there.

This year we'll not only be at Agile 2010 in Orlando, from August 9-13, 2010, but we'll also be sponsoring Agile Australia in September. If you're planning on going to either of these shows, don't miss an opportunity to stop by and talk to the guys that make Atlassian get jiggy wit agile ;-).

Imagine… You are away from office, no laptop or no Ethernet access, but you urgently need to approve release builds, requirement specifications, or project change requests. Polarion’s plug-in for Mobile Devices will help you out Everyone who uses Polarion Requirements or Polarion ALM now has a nifty plug-in for mobile devices – whatever web enabled [...]

Get the Most Advanced UML Features - And Save 50%, 70%, or Even 90% Over Competing Tools!

For a limited time we’re offering special savings on Altova UModel. Combining a rich visual interface with superior usability features, UModel also includes high-end code engineering functionality to empower you with the maximum benefits of UML software development.

Starting at just $149, Altova UModel delivers the most advanced UML modeling features in the industry - at a fraction of the cost of other UML tools.

The same powerful functionality and ease of use that you've experienced in other Altova tools is packed into an affordable, intuitive UML modeling tool. UModel supports:

* All 14 UML 2.3 diagrams

* SysML and BPMN

* Code gen and reverse engineering of Java, C#, and VB .NET

* Round-trip engineering

* XMI import / export

* Visual Studio and Eclipse integration

* 32- and 64-bit versions

* And much more

Cool off with an additional 20% discount Enter code JULY10 during checkout in the Altova Online Shop for 20% off UModel. Act fast - this sizzling offer expires July 31, 2010.

*Savings calculated by comparing published single-user prices of Sparx Enterprise Architect Engineering Edition, Magicdraw Professional Edition, and IBM Rational Software Architect Standard Edition including Rational Modeling Extension for Microsoft .NET, with equivalent UModel Enterprise Edition configured with comparable bundled software maintenance plans.

Introduction This document offers a high-level description of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) DO-178B certification standards for aircraft equipment, arguably one of the world’s most stringent manufacturing standards, and explains how Polarion customers manufacturing software and hardware for airborne equipment rely on Polarion solutions to help them comply with FAA regulations and manage the complexities of [...]

A Busy Week, But a Good One