Cisco unveils learning community for networking professionals along with enhanced CCNA portfolio

Cisco announced the launch of Cisco Learning Network ( www.cisco.com/go/learnnetspace) allowing networking professionals worldwide to discuss, share and exchange IT related ideas and skills.

The company further announced expansion of its CCNA portfolio with the commencement of three specialized concentrations namely CCNA Security, CCNA Voice and CCNA Wireless to provide relevant guidance to individuals eyeing success in IT sector.

Commenting on the initiative, Milind Gurjar, Director, Learning@Cisco said “With the expansion of the CCNA portfolio and the launch of the Cisco Learning Network, we have added two more critical components to our company-wide initiative to address the global IT talent shortage, accelerate the development of the information economy and improve the productivity of this vital technical community.”

The Trouble with Excel

Excel inspires devotion in the hearts of everyone from your financial folks to your interns. And why not? It’s readily available, it’s easy to get started with, even if you’re not a techie, and when you get stuck, you can ask your fellow Excel lovers for help.

Do you believe everything you read in a spreadsheet? Break yourself of that habit right now. Too many haven’t, even though they may not know who created it, modified it or made it look so dazzling. Just like Googling yourself doesn’t make you a techie, knowing a bit about how to use a spreadsheet doesn’t make you a proficient spreadsheet designer.

Excel bugs like this one, discovered last fall in Excel 2007, aren’t nearly the half of it. As with most applications, when trouble arises, it’s not because of the technology, it’s what users do with it. And what users are doing with Excel is not pretty.

Take, for example, the recent findings of Grenville Croll, chairman of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group, spreadsheet management and compliance specialist for Trintech, and self-described as the UK’s “leading specialist in spreadsheets, spreadsheet applications, research relating to spreadsheets, and the tools and techniques required to identify, remediate, and control organizational spreadsheets.” The man knows what’s going on with spreadsheets.
Examining operational spreadsheets submitted by a small number of companies in a variety of industries, Croll found that one company’s submissions were well constructed and error-free. Now, that was quite an achievement, considering that the remaining 20 spreadsheets examined contained 79 errors that caused no financial impact, and 98 errors with a financial impact of more than $259 million. These spreadsheets were created at companies within the past year and are being used in daily operations.

As a suggested plan of action, Croll has devised what he calls the Clean Sheet Test, which involves discovery, risk assessment, remediation and control processes in pursuit of accurate spreadsheets and financial data.
“Organizations which pass the Clean Sheet Test,” his study report concludes, “could be said to be exhibiting Spreadsheet Excellence.”
The road to spreadsheet excellence is a bumpy one, however. This CFO.com piece outlines many of the most common abuses of Excel by financial executives and their staff, from lumping together both data and algorithms, to structures that make it too difficult to make changes — and too easy to make mistakes. The article led to this piece, which includes only a handful of the many reader e-mails and comments about the Excel problems that they’ve encountered at work.

Not surprisingly, most readers wrote in about how everyone else is doing everything wrong in Excel (while the readers are doing everything right, presumably). A bit of Excel etiquette training, perhaps, seems to be in order to eliminate at least some of the most basic mistakes, though it’s clear from this article that differences between departments and companies will remain and drive everyone up the wall.
If your organization is dedicated to working internally to beef up training, standardization, testing and control processes to keep errors out of Excel spreadsheets and productivity high, that will go a long way toward reducing mistakes. Indeed, they will be necessary to get value out of the tools available to root out human error. Regulatory compliance efforts, in particular, have brought about more organized oversight and risk assessments for spreadsheets, some of which can certainly be used by staff other than assigned auditors.

Red Rover Software, for instance, offers auditing, detection and navigation solutions, and Lyquidity’s ComplyXL offers versions of its software package specifically tailored for power users.
Sadly, at least according to research at the University of Hawaii, anywhere from 20 percent to 90 percent of examined spreadsheets — which is quite an error rate in itself, I will admit — contain errors of various magnitudes. Since Excel isn’t going away any time soon, it seems it’s way past time to clean it up

Customers Take Advantage of Latest Release of Oracle(r) SQL Developer

• Organizations are adopting Oracle(r) SQL Developer, a free database development and migration tool, to simplify development cycles and reduce the need to buy third-party tools for developing and debugging SQL and PL/SQL code.
• Oracle today also announced the general availability of Oracle SQL Developer Release 1.5. New product features and enhancements include:
• Source Code Control Integration - Oracle SQL Developer Release 1.5 introduces tight integration with source code control systems such as CVS and Subversion enabling database developers to navigate through their repositories of versioned objects and edit those files with Oracle SQL Developer;
• Expanded Migration Workbench Support - the new release now features Migration Workbench support for Sybase ASE (Releases 12 - 15) in addition to Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, and MySQL, offering users a single tool and environment that helps to reduce the time, costs and risks involved with moving third-party databases to Oracle;
• Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database - Oracle SQL Developer Release 1.5 enables users to connect to their Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Databases to browse, create, edit, and delete Oracle TimesTen In-Memory database objects, run SQL statements and scripts, execute built-in procedures and utilities, manipulate and export data, view and produce reports; and,
• Support for Oracle Database 11g Features - The PL/SQL Hierarchical Profiler provides users with a report to see where time is spent in PL/SQL code and the PL Scope features provides an extended search capability. Users with access to the licensed Oracle Diagnostics Pack can run Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and Active Session History (ASH) reports.
• The latest release of Oracle SQL Developer also delivers feature enhancements across the board including enhanced schema copy and compare wizards that allow database developers to copy objects and data from one schema to another as well as compare schemas in databases they have access to.
• Available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows platforms, Oracle SQL Developer is free of charge and is supported for any customer with a supported Oracle Database license. Terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. Oracle also offers a free online forum for registered users to discuss Oracle SQL Developer topics.
• Oracle SQL Developer is available for Oracle Database 11g and is certified to run against Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One. The tool is also available for all editions of Oracle Database 10g and Oracle9i Database Release 2.
  

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