Finally I decide to write something on Toad for Oracle and I will try to cover some enhanced option of Toad version 10.

UTF8 support (Multi-Language Support)
If you want to use Toad on Unicode-enabled Oracle databases—or where non-english character sets are used—Toad v10 now supports Unicode.

Unicode support for object names and data Unicode extends to most things in Toad except where certain Oracle utilities do not support it, such as SQL*Plus and SQL*Loader.

Enhanced Data Generation
We introduced data generation as part of Toad for Oracle 9.7. This feature allows developers and DBAs to generate randomised data for one or more tables, respecting referential integrity if it exists. Randomised data, however, has its limitations so Quest felt it was time to revamp it. It now allows you to specify exactly the type of generator you want for specific table columns. Realistic data such as names, addresses, zip codes, social security numbers, etc, can be selected. You can even request that the generator be based on a SELECT statement in an existing table. There is also a new Data Preview button that lets you check what the data will look like in the table(s) before generation. Besides still being able to select random or “real” data, you can also decide—based on the quantity of data you wish to generate—whether the operation happens on your desktop or on the database server for increased performance.  

Data Grid
One of the benefits of the Toad platform upgrade was an opportunity to provide new data grids. These new grids offer far more efficiency than their predecessors and are now applied throughout Toad so that you will have a lot more consistency when it comes to a data grid’s behavior.
You’ll notice a new grouping region above the grid into which you can drag and drop column headers where you want to group and sub-group. The data grid navigator has also been moved to the bottom of the grid to simplify the toolbar. Column selection is made easier via a button in the top left of the grid to select which columns you want to be visible. The right-click menu is also simpler and the ‘Save As’ feature has been renamed as ‘Export Dataset,’ which is more meaningful; the selection of file formats to which you can save is unchanged.

TIP OF THE MONTH
Q: How to enable version control within Toad?
1. Install team coding roles on the server via the Server Side Object Wizard.
- The Server Side Object Wizard is located under Database | Administer | Server Side Object Wizard.
- Follow the steps through.
2. Once the Wizard is finished, disconnect all database session from Toad for Oracle and reconnect.
3. Login as the Toad USER that was created during the Server Side Object Wizard session.
4. Go to Utilities | Team Coding | Team Coding Status.
5. Click on “Setting.”
6. Check “Enable Team Coding.”

Written By:

Shahzad Hussain, Database Specialist, QME Software

Microsoft Exchange 2010 Server was officially launched on November 9, 2009 with some new and enhanced features carried over from Exchange 2007.

Exchange Server 2010 delivers improved performance and supports lower cost storage, which makes larger mailboxes more affordable. Some of the improved and new features are broadly falling under the below categories:

• Protection and Collaboration
• Anywhere Access
• Flexibility and Reliability

Listed below are the features that have carried over from Exchange 2007 as well as improved and new features falling under each of these categories.

Protection and Collaboration

The goal of protection and collaboration is to achieve increased I.T. governance compliance with advanced tools to protect communication and manage the Messaging infrastructure.

Some of the features that have been carried over from Exchange 2007 are:

• On premise and hosted protection from virus and spam
• Compliance to corporate and government regulation
• Mobile device security and management policies 

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are:

• Email archiving and more powerful retention policies
• Automated rights management and protection of email
• Powerful multi mailbox search UI for eDiscovery or Legal reasons 

Anywhere Access

The goal of the Anywhere Access is to help and manage communication load by offering an easy to navigate, Universal inbox with advanced messaging feature.

Some of the features carried over from Exchange 2007 are:

• Outlook experience on Web, Phone and mobile device
• Single inbox for voice mail, email and fax
• Increased productivity with improved calendar experience 

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are:

• Easier inbox navigation with updated conversation view
• Enhanced voice mail with text preview
• Share free busy calendar information with external partners 

Flexibility and Reliability

The goal is to provide flexibility needed to operate a scalable high performing and easy to administer messaging infrastructure.

Some of the features carried over by Exchange 2007 are:

• Improved installation and deployment scenarios
• High Availability through Continuous Replication
• Simplified management console and command line shell 

While some of the features that have been enhanced and new with Exchange 2010 are:

• Choice of solution delivery with addition of hosted service
• Single platform for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
• Role based Administration and User self service

Written by,

Nitin Kulshreshtha, Senior Consultant, QME Software

Stop reading for a moment and have a quick tour around your office, pay special attention to monitors and come back.

Is it covered in sticky notes? Try to gaze over the sticky notes. Trust me; you’ll be amazed of what you can get out of these tiny yellow notes! In addition to irrational childhood fears that still haunt your colleges you will find loads of numbers and meaningless phrases, if you think about it then you’ll know that PINs and Passwords are all over the place!

Users will find it much easier to write down an 8-character word on a sticky ‘Post-It’ note than actually memorizing it! The truth is, Post-It notes are not one of the most secure ways to protect passwords, I’m not telling you to stop buying it, it’s a great product. However, Post-It does very little in the way of information security. And user’s may feel surprised to know that putting another sticky note on top of the original in an effort to shield its contents isn’t enough either. So you should find a way for your users to stop doing it! But don’t go so hard on your users, most people write personal information on sticky papers because they are too difficult to remember, or they are just too many!

Forcing users to use complex passwords specially when you have so many applications within your environment will not give you the level of security you’re looking for, even if you try to lock the sticky notes in a safety deposit box, users will find strange places to write passwords; on margin of a book they keep in their desk, underside of their chairs, even tattoo it on a co-worker’s neck! If you are really concerned about your network security and you want to make user’s life easier consider using a Single sign-on solution.

Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions will help you to apply the most complex password policies while keeping user friendliness in place, user’s will only need to remember one single secure password, and all other application passwords can be generated automatically to the level of complexity you require, the good thing is users do not need to be involved in generating these passwords, the solution will generate, update and securely store these information without any user intervention. Not only that, with SSO it is easier to audit who is allowed to access which applications, who actively uses accounts in which system and who has accessed to which system and when.

Enterprise Single Sign-On solutions are pretty matured now, and it can even eliminate the need for users to remember a single password, SSO solutions can utilize Smartcards with certificates and other credentials stored on tokens, with this users will not be involved in any password-related activities, a true strong authentication with heterogeneous applications and platforms can be easily achieved, no wonder that SSO is becoming so trendy!

SSO is not only a trend, it is a complete solution to a very old problem, raising security level and keeping users away from writing it on a sticky note!! And don’t forget, after implementing such solution check out your Post-It spending, and calculate your savings!!!

Bilal Alhmoud,

Senior Consultant

QME Software

Hello Everyone,

Mohmad Yusuf here, I work with QME Software as a Consultant for Windows Management specialising in Microsoft System Centre Suite.

I face an increasing number of IT managers who are challenged with an ever increasing set of requirements for resolving critical enterprise impacting issues in some very complicated IT infrastructures. Their Businesses and organisations have grown dependent on their IT investments to achieve profitability and meet operational goals, greatly decreasing the room for error in IT reliability.

At the same time, budgetary constraints are pressuring IT managers to provide more services with fewer resources. At the heart of the problem are complex heterogeneous IT implementations that lack consistent centralised support capacities.

The greatest challenge in establishing control over an IT infrastructure is dealing with complexity. As businesses rely more and more on advanced and disparate hardware, software and networking solutions to drive their profitability, IT managers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a high level of reliability and performance in the IT investments by only utilising antiquated methods of manual IT administration. Recognising this critical support challenge, Microsoft introduced Operations Manager to simplify systems management in Windows-based IT implementations.

Although many systems management solutions are on the market today, few provide the breadth of support necessary to enable a truly holistic view of an entire enterprise-wide support stack. Certainly Microsoft has been hailed for providing a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Operations Manager), but until recently it has focused its development efforts on only Windows-based platforms and its recent foray into heterogeneous support can be viewed as limited at best.

At the core of the value provided by Operations Manager is the concept of providing what Microsoft calls, “knowledge-driven IT management” – or the ability to utilise a deep understanding of a particular IT platform to ensure all aspects of its support are covered. Certainly, there can be no question that Microsoft maintains a strong, in-depth understanding of the Windows architecture and Operations Manager has been designed to leverage that knowledge to ease the tasks involved in problem identification, remediation and reporting.

In April of 2008, Microsoft announced its intention to extend Operations Manager support into non-Windows platforms. Although the long-term implications of this announcement are quite exciting, the initial scope of cross-platform support will be somewhat limited. Support will only be extended to five core operating system platforms (RedHat, SuSe, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX) and the breadth of version support available for those environments will be confined to current version minus one (at time of release – which is projected to be early in calendar year 2009). Microsoft has made it clear that they will continue to rely on its partner vendors – like Quest Software – to fill out its non-Windows coverage. Quest currently provides non-Windows support for more than 230 non-Windows systems and devices via Operations Manager.

Achieving end-to-end IT management begins with the implementation of Quest Management Xtensions (QMX). As the name implies, QMX extends Operations Manager support to over 200 UNIX and Linux platforms, SNMP devices, security systems, storage systems, mainframes, application, databases and mobile devices via native integration into Operations Manager. In addition, several Quest Management Packs (QMPs) are available to provide advanced support for specific technologies, such as Oracle and .NET. With these tools in place, an entire enterprise IT infrastructure can now be managed through the single Operations Manager infrastructure and reporting paradigm.

Best Regards,

Shaikh Mohmad Yusuf.

Hello, Bilal Alhmoud here with you,

I find it interesting that in almost every article discussing Identity and Access Management (IDMS) solutions, the operational efficiency and complexity reduction is the winner point when it comes to evaluate implementing such solutions or not. A little emphasis is given to the information protection that such solutions can provide.

“Why should I care?” if you’re an administrator, you probably heard this response one way or another out of your management members when presented with an IDMS solution, especially when you try to glorify how such systems can make your life easier as an administrator. Well, to win your management heart, you shouldn’t mistakenly make it all about you! To present the solution more clearly, it’s more appropriate to think about the IDMS system as a blueprint of a corporate office, it shows the rooms in which each person can enter, what type of keys are needed to gain access into those rooms, and what actions can be performed once a person successfully enters a room. To put it in computer language, the room will represent a file, database or an application. Keys will represent the privileges that administrators decide to hand out to every person (or user). Like this form of building security, IDMS systems are the most important form of information protection that corporate networks can use. Yet, unfortunately it’s the least used security practices and if used, it’s usually improperly implemented.

If you are a management personal, can you really afford having your employees wander through your network virtually unnoticed? Can you really accept having outside invaders to dig into your files and databases? Your sensitive information to end up as candies in your competitors’ inboxes? Trust me it’s not a science fiction, you can never imagine how far people can go to have a sneak preview of your financial or marketing plans for the future. And without proper security technologies and practices you’re just inviting everyone aboard!!

It’s fair to shed a light over other benefits an IDMS system can provide beyond the obvious security enhancements; it definitely improves the business processes and makes it much easier to share information. With such systems in place, employees as well as contractors can access the same information networks with a sense of assurance that the correct type of information is accessed when needed and only by users who need it, and it opens wide doors to have a real integrated environment which can make the idea of single sign-on to have some sense again, which you should know by now, is virtually impossible if you have incompatible systems and networks that lacks the use of standard practices.

With all this, I hope you have one question on your mind: “How do I get started?!” well, if you really want to bring order out of chaos, start with conducting an inventory of your systems, what information do you store, where to do you store it, how do you currently control the access to your systems. But be advised that this will draw some resistance from your systems administrators; they’ll tell you it’s complicated to integrate with any commercial identity management tool. Well, they are not totally wrong, it can take time, IDMS is all about having a consolidated access control. Normally this control is application-based done by fragments all over the environment, which can be a nightmare to manage. The trick is to have a central view of this access, which can be time-consuming at the early stages of implementing an IDMS system, but once in place, IDMS can automate and accelerate the process of authorizing employees against different applications. It will be the single place to create or modify accounts, as well as approve or deny access to those applications. This will make up for all the effort! Having a successful implementation of an IDMS will give you the power to implement a real time monitoring, with a power to remove any improper access. It’s all about having order again!

Bilal Alhmoud

Senior Consultant – Core Infrastructure

QME Software

Hello everyone,

My name is Abas Lazem, I’m a Solution Sales Professional, working for QME Software for over two and a half years.

As we can all see, in these difficult economic times, more and more companies have decided to cut back on budgets across the board - and that includes IT. They want to spend less to be able to sustain the business and that is understandable. What some companies do not realise, however, is that a relatively small investment in certain areas of IT can definitely help save money for the company. This will in turn ensure that the company can sustain themselves and ‘weather the storm’ as it were.  I strongly believe that ’automation’ is the way to do this and companies are becoming increasingly aware that a lot IT processes can be automated. Automation insures smooth and efficient operations as well as minimizes human error that can lead to loss of production and of course - money.

QME Software, provide software and services (from Quest Software as well as Microsoft) that can help streamline and automate IT services in areas of Identity Management, Security, Operations and More…

Thanks,

Abas