Overview of FIM 2010 R2

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 (FIM 2010 R2) is not one product, but a family of products working together to mitigate the challenges regarding Identity Management.

Microsoft's Forefront Identity Manager simplifies enterprise Identity Management for end users by automating admin tasks and integrating the infrastructure of an enterprise with strong authentication systems.

In this article by Kent Nordström, author of Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook, we will get an overview of FIM 2010 R2.

In this article, we will cover:

• The history of FIM 2010 R2
• FIM Synchronization Service (FIM Sync)
• FIM Service
• FIM Portal
• FIM Reporting
• FIM Certificate Management (FIM CM)
• Licensing

Publishing the project in various formats using Adobe Captivate 6

In this article by Damien Bruyndonckx, author of Mastering Adobe Captivate 6, we will focus on making the project available to the outside world by publishing it in various formats.

Publishing the movie is the process by which we make our Captivate projects available to the outside world. Most of the time, we'll publish our movies in the Adobe Flash format or in the HTML5 format so that any student can enjoy the content of our online course across devices. However, Captivate can also publish the movie in many other formats

Publishing

So far, we have been working in a .cptx file, which is the default native file type of Captivate. The .cptx file format is great when creating and designing our projects, but it has two major disadvantages:

• It can become very large. Consequently, it is diffcult for us to upload the file on a website and for the student to download and view it.
• Opening a .cptx file requires Captivate to be installed on the computer system.

Publishing a Captivate movie is converting (the proper word is Compiling) the .cptx file to a format that can be easily downloaded and viewed by our students. The primary format to publish our projects is the .swf format . swf (pronounced swif) stands for ShockWave Flash. It is the file format used by the free Adobe Flash player plugin installed in more than 98 percent of the computers connected to the Internet. It has two advantages as compared to the .cptx file:

• A .swf file is usually much lighter than its .cptx counterpart, making it much easier to upload and download across the Internet.
• Any browser equipped with the free Adobe Flash plugin is able to open and play the .swf file. This makes it incredibly easy to deploy our Captivate courses.

That being said, the .swf format has some major disadvantages:

• It requires the Adobe Flash Player plugin to be installed. If, for whatever reason, the plugin is not available, the .swf file cannot be played back.
• There is no more Flash Player plugin available for mobile devices. Consequently, a .swf file cannot be played back on a Smartphone or on a Tablet.

That's why other publishing formats are available in Captivate. In Captivate 6, the most effective alternative to the .swf format is to publish the project in HTML5. When published to HTML5, the project can be played back in any modern browser without the need for an extra plugin. HTML5-enabled projects can also be played back on mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch! HTML5 also has its caveats. At the time of this writing, (June 2012) HTML5 is still under development. Consequently, some features of Captivate are not yet supported in HTML5.

In this article, we will explore and discuss the various publishing options at our disposal in Captivate.

Getting Started with Oracle Primavera P6

In this article by Daniel L. Williams and Elaine Britt Krazer, authors of Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management, we introduce Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management or P6 for short. P6 is used worldwide to schedule projects in a range of industries, including construction, energy, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, IT, and finance, to name a few.

In this article we will cover:

• Product history
• What's in the Name?
• P6 Core Concepts
• What's New in P6 Release 8

HBase Administration, Performance Tuning

Performance is one of the most interesting characteristics of an HBase cluster's behavior. It is a challenging operation for administrators, because performance tuning requires deep understanding of not only HBase but also of Hadoop, Java Virtual Machine Garbage Collection (JVM GC), and important tuning parameters of an operating system.

The structure of a typical HBase cluster is shown in the following diagram:

There are several components in the cluster—the ZooKeeper cluster, the HBase master node , region servers, the Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS) and the HBase client.

The ZooKeeper cluster acts as a coordination service for the entire HBase cluster, handling master selection, root region server lookup, node registration, and so on. The master node does not do heavy tasks. Its job includes region allocation and failover, log splitting, and load balancing. Region servers hold the actual regions; they handle I/O requests to the hosting regions, flush the in-memory data store (MemStore) to HDFS, and split and compact regions. HDFS is the place where HBase stores its data files (StoreFile) and write ahead logs (WAL). We usually have an HBase region server running on the same machine as the HDFS DataNode, but it is not mandatory.

The HBase client provides APIs to access the HBase cluster. To communicate with the cluster, clients need to find the region server holding a specific row key range; this is called region lookups. HBase has two system tables to support region lookups—the -ROOT- table and the .META. table.

The -ROOT-table is used to refer to regions in the .META.table, while the .META.table holds references to all user regions. First, the clients query ZooKeeper to find the -ROOT-table location (the region server where it is deployed); they then query the -ROOT-table, and subsequently the .META.table, to find the region server holding a specific region. Clients also cache region locations to avoid querying ZooKeeper, -ROOT-, and .META.tables every time. With this background knowledge, we will describe how to tune HBase to gain better performance, in this article.

Besides HBase itself, other tuning points include Hadoop configurations, the JVM garbage collection settings, and the OS kernel parameters. These are as important as tuning HBase itself. We will also include recipes to tune these configurations, in this article.

In this article, by Yifeng Jiang, author of HBase Administration Cookbook, we will cover:

• Setting up Hadoop to spread disk I/O
• Using a network topology script to make the Hadoop rack-aware
• Mounting disks with noatimeand nodiratime
• Setting vm.swappinessto 0 to avoid swap
• Java GC and HBase heap settings
• Using compression
• Managing compactions
• Managing a region split

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers - Assignments for Students

In this article by William Rice the author of the book Blackboard Essentials for Teachers, we will discuss how to create assignments where the student must submit or upload a material for the instructor to review. You will learn how to review and respond to the files that students submit.

Creating a sample C#.NET application

Citrix XenApp is the leader of application virtualization or application delivery. Citrix was founded in 1989 and they developed the first successful product in 1993 called WinView. It provided remote access to DOS and Windows 3.1 applications on a multi-user platform. Citrix licensed Microsoft's Windows NT 3.51 source code from Microsoft; and in 1995, they shipped a multiuser version of Windows NT based on the MultiWin engine, known as WinFrame. This allowed multiple users to log on and execute applications on a WinFrame server. In 1996, Citrix licensed the MultiWin technology to Microsoft, establishing the foundation of Microsoft's Terminal Services.

This article by Guillermo Musumeci, the author of Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5, will create a sample application to list all XenApp servers in our farm using Citrix XenApp Commands with managed code. Samples contained in this article are developed in Microsoft C# 2010 Express Edition.

Getting Started with LiveCode for Mobile

LiveCode has an English-like programming language, a graphical development environment, and an easy-to-understand structural metaphor. When you create an application, you spend more time thinking about how to implement the different features, and less about the complexities of the tool you are using. But if you've never used LiveCode before, it's still going to be unfamiliar at first.

Before we can do neat things…

Creating stacks that do something that you will find useful or that may become a mobile app that you can sell, is a very gratifying process. Minute by minute, you can be making progress, and instantly see improvements that you have made. Unfortunately, there is a lot of less gratifying work to be done before and after you have made your masterpiece. In this article by Colin Holgate, author of LiveCode Mobile Development Beginner's Guide, we will take you through the before part.

LiveCode makes mobile apps by taking the stack you have made, along with any supporting files you have added, and compiles the application file using the developer kit that you will download from the mobile OS provider – Google for Android and Apple for iOS. In this article we will:

• Sign up for Android Market
• Sign up for Amazon Appstore
• Download and install the Android SDK
• Configure LiveCode so that it knows where to look for the Android SDK
• Become an iOS developer with Apple
• Download and install Xcode
• Configure LiveCode so that it knows where to look for the iOS SDKs
• Set up simulators and physical devices
• Test a stack in a simulator and physical device

Here we go...