Great Expectations: Best Practices for Ensuring a Successful Client Engagement

In my experience, one of the most important and challenging tasks for any project is to set and manage the expectations of the customer from project initiation to delivery. Throughout the project life cycle, expectations should be monitored and managed to ensure a successful engagement. 

I know that sometimes it’s hard not knowing exactly what to do and it can take some trial and error to figure out what works best.  I’ve realized that the first thing to figure out is when these disconnects can occur.  Once that is ironed out, one can work through ideas on how to prevent them in the...


Solving the Doctype Filter Insufficiency in Oracle WebCenter Sites

I bet that you have once created an asset, with a doctype filter, uploaded a file as an attribute, and noticed that the filetype and mimetype were not getting pulled. You checked the file once again to see that it had an extension and was actually not corrupted either. Everything seemed ok. You edited the asset. Re-saved it. Shook your head. Sweated a bit. Checked the asset definition to make sure that the doctype filter was still associated with the definition. Checked the doctype filter's attribute names. Well, you never know... a typo here and there... Nope. Nothing. You just don't know...


Fighting Financial Fraud with Splunk

Introduction

It comes as no surprise that as the banking industry is increasing its online presence, financial organizations are making fraud detection and prevention a top priority. Fraud can have a significant impact to organizations both financially and operationally. Of course, in addition to large monetary losses, damage to reputation and customer relations can also occur that further highlight the impact of fraud.

The ability for organizations to perform advanced analytics on their data is necessary to recognize and respond to patterns of fraud. Simply stated, quicker...


Raising the Usability Ante with Card Sorting

If your company has a website, you've probably heard the “Usability” buzzword (your site's ease of use) thrown around a lot with the popularity of user-center design – with studies showing its direct correlation to increased ROI.

The objective of any website is to facilitate marketing conversions, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or lead generation via email/web form (to name a few). In order for your target audience to complete these conversions, it’s...


Rallying the Troops: Getting Your Team Ready for WebCenter Sites

Making the decision to migrate your platform over to WebCenter Sites is a big decision. It takes a great deal of research, planning, and time to ensure a smooth transition. Often times Web Experience Management teams, like ours at Function1, are brought in during these transition times to provide the expertise, experience, and skill necessary to customize the platform to the organization's needs. As the project nears the point of hand-off, clients are faced with a new challenge: Utilizing and Managing WCS on their own.

Like being tossed the keys to your first car after passing your...


Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Tips on Effectively Managing Virtual Teams

Telecommuting is becoming the new norm and there is a lot of upside to working remotely for you and your team, however there are still some challenges some people face in a virtual environment.

In most virtual workplaces, entire teams are separated from their project manager, which can lead to feelings of disconnection and isolation. The most important thing to do is maintain regular, consistent communication with each other.

I started working with Function1 two years ago and have learned a lot about managing and working with virtual teams effectively and hope my tips below...


Drupal Commerce

Recently I had the opportunity to setup a bilingual Drupal eCommerce site for a client.  My immediate reaction was to use Drupal Commerce for this project. After all, it's architectural design and codebase are more inline with Drupal's best practices, especially with the use of entities for each product variation (size, color, etc. where each variation would have its unique SKU) whereas UberCart treats each product as a separate node all together. I find the former approach more...

CSDT Tips

CSDT can have a tendency to be "delicate", especially the 7.6 version. At Function1 we recently completed an upgrade from Fatwire 7.6 to WebCenter Sites 11g for a client, and we used quite a lot of CSDT to get the data migrated. Below are some of the lessons we learned along the way, which we bring to you in this blog as useful CSDT tips.

Tip #1: The "toSites" Catch

Say for example that you have exported Site1's assets to a datastore "Site1" using the "fromSites" parameter and supplying "Site1" as the value. That means of course that the datastore "Site1" contains...


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