Mapping Customer Data

Transcription

Grey Matter
Issue 59 | Spring 2013
Building on 29 years of software know how
Cross-platform development
Tools and technologies for targeting multiple client platforms
Mapping Customer Data
Using maps to visualise how well your business is working
Windows Server 2012
The benefits of upgrading
WIN!
See page 10
for details
Welcome
Editorial
Editor:...................................................................... Matt Nicholson
Technical Editors:... Sean Wilson, Paul Edwards
News Editor:....................................................... Paul Stephens
Publisher:................................................................... Andrew King
Contributors:......... Tim Anderson, Simon Bisson,
Mary Branscombe, Kay Ewbank, Jon
Honeyball, Graham Keitch, Paul Stephens
Design and layout:...................................... Jason Stanley
Illustration:.............................................................Sholto Walker
Web Design:......................................................... Jason Stanley
Advertising & Circulation
Marketing:....................... Anna Roach, Emma Cottle,
Ash Khagram
Tel: 01364 654100
Email: [email protected]
HardCopy is edited for Grey Matter four
times a year by Matt Publishing of Bristol. It
is printed by Pepper Communications Ltd. of
Plymouth and requested by 9,000 readers.
Copyright © 2013 Grey Matter Ltd. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form without prior
consent of the copyright holder.
All trademarks acknowledged.
HardCopy is a trademark and Grey Matter a
registered trademark owned by Grey Matter
Limited. While all reasonable attempts are
made to ensure accuracy, Grey Matter and
Matt Publishing disclaim any liability
whatsoever for any use of information
herein. Prices exclude VAT unless specified.
Cover Image illustration: Jason Stanley
Advertisers Index
2Flexera
7
Quest Software (Dell)
8Oracle
11Symantec
15 Bing Maps
18DataCore
19 Windows Server 2012
22Intel
25Infragistics
29Aspose
31JetBrains
33MAPCITE
35 Visual Studio 2012
36Adobe
Contents
Over the past decade or so, those involved in the distribution
of intellectual property (IP) have had their worlds turned
inside out by the Internet. First it was the music business getting to
grips with the illegal download of music through services such as
Napster. More recently the film industry has had to watch DVD sales
plummet as online streaming sites such as Netflix steal business away
from high-street shops. Meanwhile there’s panic in the bookshops as
they attempt to compete with Amazon and the downloadable eBook.
About the only IP industry not affected is that of invention. As far as I
know, patents continue to be licensed and sold in much the same was
as they’ve always been.
The reason for this revolution lies in the fact that the Internet has
all but eliminated the cost of distribution. Prior to the Internet,
distributing IP such as music, film or books cost serious money. Vinyl
records, CDs and DVDs had to be manufactured; paperbacks and
hardbacks had to be printed and transported. But underneath it all
was just raw data, and with the Internet, the incremental cost of
distributing data is virtually nothing.
Of course one of the first industries to get to grips with the
Internet was the software industry. Even before the Internet,
distribution costs were fairly low, and it quickly became obvious that
the value lay in the intellectual property - in other words the code
itself - rather than in the medium by which it was distributed, which is
why you buy a licence to use software, rather than the software itself.
This is of course also true of films and music and books, but here it is
readily accepted that customers can sell the DVDs and CDs and
paperbacks they have bought to their friends, because this is a clear
transfer of use from one person to another.
Which makes the recent case of Usedsoft vs. Oracle particularly
interesting. Like most software companies, what Oracle sells is a
perpetual licence to use its software, rather than the software itself.
German company Usedsoft, on the other hand, are in the business of
buying and selling unused software licences. Despite vigorous
argument from Oracle, the European Court of Justice has ruled that
anyone in possession of a perpetual licence to use a computer
program has the right to sell the licence on, even if they had originally
downloaded the software from the author’s Web site. The ruling
effectively puts software on the same footing as paperbacks and
DVDs, so going against the generally accepted view that a perpetual
licence cannot be transferred.
For the industry, volume licences which are renewed every year
or so provide a measure of defence against the decision. However
software distribution is already learning lessons from elsewhere.
Services such as Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office 365, where
software is sold on a monthly or annual subscription service, bear
comparison with Netflix, which serves much the same purpose.
Grey Matter Limited
Prigg Meadow,
Ashburton,
Devon, TQ13 7DF, UK
[email protected]
4
Software News
Adobe, Embarcadero,
Red Hat and more.
6
News in brief
and competition winners.
9
Inside Data
How Oracle and Microsoft
support geographic data.
10Competition
Win an iPad Mini!
12
Mapping customer data
Using maps to visualise
how well your business is
working.
16
Windows Server 2012
Why you need to upgrade.
20Cross-platform
development
Tools and technologies.
23
Working with HTML5
What it can do for your
applications.
26
Who are you?
Techniques for combating
identity theft.
30
Straight talking
Tim Anderson on
Microsoft Office 2013.
32
And Another Thing
Jon Honeyball reports
from CES, Las Vegas.
34
Short Cuts
Views from the edge.
Register Now!
HardCopy magazine is published four times
a year. Make sure you don’t miss out by
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www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/register
Read HardCopy online
Matt Nicholson
Editor, HardCopy
To view buyer’s guides, news, blogs and
forums go to HardCopy online at
www.softwareknowhow.info
Grey Matter • 01364 654100 • HardCopy
3
News
Software News
Adobe puts the Cloud first
Adobe • www.greymatter.com/adobe/
Adobe has put its subscription-based
Creative Cloud application service
ahead of its boxed Creative Suite alternative
with the introduction of a dozen new
Photoshop features plus enhancements to the
Muse Web site builder, all of which are exclusive
to the Cloud version. The company has also
released a new Team version of the service,
along with a new file sync utility and
in-application training resources. Support for
MacBook Pro Retina displays has been added to
Photoshop and Illustrator in both Cloud and
boxed versions.
Photoshop enhancements include Smart
Object (non-destructive editing) support for the
Blur Gallery and Liquify tools; conditional
actions based on user-defined rules; and
refinements to the Crop and Pen tools. Also
provided are quick CSS code generation from
text and objects, and colour swatch import
from HTML, CSS and SVG files. Named type
styles plus 3D shadow and illumination
improvements are included, and maximum
JPEG size is more than doubled to 65K by 65K
pixels. Adobe’s Muse no-coding Web site
designer, meanwhile, gains the ability to
define unique layouts for desktop, iPhone,
iPad and other mobile devices. Adobe has
made no announcements on when or if the
new features will find their way to non-Cloud
CS6 customers.
Creative Cloud for teams is a new
package which Adobe says offers easy
management of virtual workgroups helped by
centralised admin and licence management
plus additional support services. Team users get
100GB of cloud storage each, compared to
20GB for stand-alone licences. The new Creative
Cloud Connection app, available to all Cloud
subscribers, provides a Dropbox-like interface
between local and cloud storage. Creative
Cloud Training provides tutorials and trial
courses from partners including video2brain
and Attain.
Adobe Creative Cloud, launched last April,
offers all the Creative Suite 6 applications,
including Photoshop, Dreamweaver and
Illustrator, as a monthly subscription service. In
December the company announced that the
service had reached one million members, of
which 326,000 are paying subscribers.
IntelliJ 12 embraces the Darker side
JetBrains • www.greymatter.com/JetBrains-s-r-o/
It’s just a year since Prague-based tools
vendor JetBrains released version 11 of
its multi-platform IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE,
complete with a “rethought and reworked” user
interface. Now it’s rethought and reworked it
again for version 12, coming up with a
redesigned UI complete with ‘Darcula’ theme,
plus a long list of new features including
background compilation, Java 8 support, an
Android UI designer and compatibility with the
Spring and Play 2.0 frameworks.
The sombre grey Darcula UI is, JetBrains
says, designed to be “more clean and
functional”, allowing developers to “focus more
on the code and less on the IDE.” It is, however,
fully customisable for those who’d prefer
something sunnier. Compilation strategy has
been “completely rebuilt”, moving the compiler
to a separate process with optional auto
recompilation after every source update. Class
dependency management has been rewritten
for greater performance and accuracy.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 supports Oracle’s Java 8
standard, complete with lambda expressions
and method references, and has “significantly
improved” support for the Spring framework,
4
Sping 2013 • Issue 59 • HardCopy
including XML configurations and a drag and
drop dependency diagram. Play 2.0
applications can be created using the Java or
Scala languages, with advanced code
assistance and templates support.
For those who like to develop for Android
in its native Java, IntelliJ IDEA now offers a
full-integrated Android UI designer with the full
range of component types and UI layouts,
multi-component properties editor and
multiple device profiles. Databases can now be
created directly from the IDE, while other
improvements include better J2EE server
management tools and Cucumber for JVM
support. IntelliJ IDEA 12 is available for
Windows, Mac and Linux.
The Dark side – the IntelliJ IDEA 12 Java IDE features a built-in Android user
interface designer and new ‘Darcula’ UI theme.
News
Red Hat keeps its promise with Enterprise Linux 5.9 release
Red Hat • www.greymatter.com/red-hat/
Two years after the launch of the
high-scalability Enterprise Linux 6, Red
Hat has kept up its commitment to a ten-year
lifecycle for the previous version with the
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9. The
release includes improvements to hardware
compatibility, developer tools, security,
subscription management and compatibility
with Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualiser. It also
marks the end, after some five and a half years,
of the new-features ‘Production 1’ phase of
RHEL 5’s life.
Red Hat says only that the new release
includes support for “some” of the latest CPUs
and chipsets, although informally it has
described its goal as making hardware support
between RHEL 5 and 6 “very close”. Driver
enhancements include support for fibre
channel adaptors from Broadcom and others,
and for Intel’s QLogic InfiniBand network
adaptors.
Developer tools are improved with the
OpenJDK 7 Java environment and
improvements to the SystemTap trace/probe
tool. Updated security features include support
for the latest (US) government password policy
requirements, and FIPS (Federal Information
Processing Standard) mode activation on
dmraid root devices.
Built-in drivers allow RHEL 5.9 to run as a
guest OS on top of Microsoft’s Hyper-V
hypervisor (a move described as “great news” by
Microsoft Hyper-V product manager Ben
Armstrong), while version 3.6 of the Samba
Windows print and file server emulator includes
SMB2 support plus print and security
improvements.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 now enters the
one-year Production 2 phase of its lifecycle, still
with technical support plus bug and security
fixes but no more software enhancements,
before seeing out its time in Production 3 with
no minor releases. RHEL 6 is due to follow the
same lifecycle.
Embarcadero goes Clang for 64-bit C++ Builder XE3
Embarcadero • www.greymatter.com/hc/embarcadero-shop
Developer tools vendor Embarcadero
has released C++Builder XE3, including
a new 64-bit compiler capable of generating
code for Windows 8 and Mac OS X, with iOS and
Android scheduled for later this year.
In a major departure for the company the
new tools are based on the open source LLVM
(Low Level Virtual Machine) compiler and Clang
front end, signalling an end to a line of in-house
C/C++ compilers which stretched as far back as
the days of Borland C.
The new compiler is fully integrated into
the Embarcadero IDE, and equipped with the
company’s own Agile Development C++
extensions. Standards supported include
C++98, C++TR1 and C++11 plus ANSI C, ISO C,
C99 and C11, with support for the Dinkumware
STL 5.3 and Boost 1.5 libraries.
The compiler also provides full support for
Embarcadero’s Windows 8-like Metropolis UI
toolset and FireMonkey FM2 cross-platform UI
framework. C++Builder XE3 runs on Windows
XP onwards, and target platforms are currently
Win XP or later and OS X including Retina
displays.
Embarcadero warns that there are some
incompatibilities between its 32 and 64 bit
compilers, due to factors such as Clang’s stricter
ANSI compliance and type conversion handling.
The 32-bit compiler continues to ship in
C++Builder XE3, while the new 64-bit compiler
is being supplied as a free upgrade to
customers who bought early copies of RAD
Studio XE3 (see HardCopy issue 58 page 5).
Embarcadero has indicated that it plans to use
Clang/LLVM in a future 64-bit implementation
of its Delphi language.
For more on C++Builder XE3, see Tim
Anderson’s article on page 20.
Symantec System Recovery 2013 launched
Symantec • www.greymatter.com/symantec/
Security vendor Symantec has
launched Symantec System Recovery
2013, an update to its image-based disaster
recovery product line. Heading the new features
list is compatibility with Windows 8 and
Windows Server 2012. Other enhancements
include 64-bit support, UEFI (Unified Extensible
Firmware Interface) compatibility, a new
lightweight monitoring tool, more efficient
reconciliation, and incremental backups from
Linux servers.
Symantec System Recovery provides a full
range of recovery options, including restore to
bare metal and dissimilar hardware, and
granular recovery of files, folders and
application objects. It also provides crossplatform Physical-to-Virtual (and vice-versa)
recovery, which Symantec says puts it ahead of
other technologies.
As well as the new Windows releases, the
2013 edition also supports VMware vSphere 5.0
and 5.1, and can now boot via UEFI as well as
from a BIOS. Symantec System Recovery
Monitor is a new console for managing up to
one hundred nodes, which the company
describes as “extremely simple to use” thanks to
its graphic user interface. New ‘Smart
Reconciliation’ tracks changed blocks,
improving backup times by up to 750 per cent.
Linux users can also now arrange scheduled
backups.
Symantec System Recovery 2013 comes in
five editions, namely Desktop, Small Business
Server, Server, Linux and Virtual. The new
release is available free to existing System
Recovery customers with active maintenance
contracts.
5
News
News in brief
HardCopy updates its online guide to Visual Studio 2012
We have updated our online Visual Studio 2012 Guide to include the new
features introduced with VS 2012 Update 1, released in November. The
site contains a series of articles by
Tim Anderson covering the key
aspects of VS 2012 including User
Interface, Targeting Windows Store,
Language Updates, Web
Development (including ASP.NET
4.5), Cloud Development, Database
tools, Debugging, Lifecycle
Management and Licensing Options.
There’s also a page dedicated to the
new features in Update 1, to bring
you quickly up to speed.
The Guide, which includes links
to in-depth MSDN pages, is an
essential first stop for anyone
wanting to understand how Visual Studio 2012 integrates with Microsoft’s
technologies. You can find the guide online at
www.greymatter.com/mcm/visual-studio-2012-guide.
Grey Matter showcases Bing Maps apps
Microsoft has added 121 Terabytes of new satellite and high-resolution
Global Ortho to its Windows 8 Maps app and Bing Maps service. The
update provides 15 million square kilometres of new data, principally in
South America, Africa, Asia and Europe, while the Global Ortho project,
providing 30cm resolution (one foot = one pixel) now covers 100 per cent
of the United States and 83 per cent of Western Europe.
There’s also a new Hurricane Sandy app showing affected areas
before and after the devastation, and updated U.S and Europe desktop
themes for Windows 7 and 8.
• Grey Matter is working with a range of publishers who offer solutions
based on the Bing Maps platform. See www.greymatter.com/bingmaps
for examples.
Embarcadero releases ER/Studio XE3
Developer tools vendor Embarcadero has released ER/Studio XE3, billing
it as “the fastest, easiest and most collaborative way for data modelling
professionals to build and maintain enterprise-scale databases and data
warehouses.” The suite contains Data Architect (data modeller), Repository
(collaborative modelling), Portal (metadata query and reporting tool),
Business Architect (business process modelling), Software Architect
(UML-based software analysis), MetaWizard (cross-platform metadata
sharing) and a distributable data model Viewer. The package supports 22
database product lines from IBM DB2 to Oracle from 7.3 onwards.
VMware updates management tools and launches app marketplace
VMware has updated two key components of its vCloud Suite cloud
management bundle. vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6, the
suite’s performance, capacity and configuration management tool,
features new compliance dashboards, customisable group-based views
and application-level monitoring via VMware vFabric Hyperic. Meanwhile
the vFabric Application Director 5.0 deployment tool now supports
6
Sping 2013 • Issue 59 • HardCopy
Competition Winner
The winner of our issue 58 competition is Tom Edginton of the
National Oceanography Centre. His prize is an ASUS Zenbook
courtesy of Intel. Congratulations Tom!
multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures, including Amazon EC2,
plus auto-scaling of applications. Both tools are included in vCloud Suite
5.1. VMware has also launched the VMware Cloud Applications
Marketplace with over 100 vFabric systems, middleware and application
components.
Microsoft Office 2013 full release
The Microsoft Office 2013 application suite, which has been available to
MSDN, TechNet, Office 365 Enterprise and Volume Licensing customers as
a download for some time, can now be bought as a boxed retail product.
ComponentOne ships Windows 8/RT controls
ComponentOne has released Studio for WinRT XAML and Studio for
WinJS, two control suites aimed at developers building Windows Store
apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT. The XAML suite shares its API with
ComponentOne’s Silverlight and other XAML controls, and contains 14
controls including Chart, Grid, PDF Viewer and Calendar. The WinJS set is
based on the company’s HTML5 tools, and currently features a gauge
control and seven varieties of charts. Both suites are included in
ComponentOne’s Studio Enterprise 2012 v3 super-bundle.
Infragistics launch new Prototyping tool – and version 1 is free
Infragistics has launched Indigo Studio, an interactive application and
user experience prototyping tool for Web, desktop and mobile apps. The
product features storyboarding with over 100 pre-built scenes (“man
looks up nearby dealer locations”), quick screen design with themed UI
elements, interaction simulation with no coding required, a timeline with
animated transitions, interactive sketches and shared online
demonstrations via Infragistics’ servers.
Indigo Studio is available for Windows and Mac, and version 1.0 is
being offered as a ‘free forever’ download from infragistics.com. It’s also
included in the company’s NetAdvantage Ultimate and NetAdvantage for
.NET control suites.
Intel ships Xeon Phi ‘Supercomputer on a chip’
Users of Intel’s Parallel Studio 2013 XE and Cluster Studio 2013 XE (see
issue 57) now have some highly parallel hardware on which to run their
optimised apps, as Intel begins shipping its first Xeon Phi co-processor,
based on its ‘Knight’s Corner’ Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture.
The Xeon Phi 5110P is a passively-cooled, 225-watt PCIe board
designed for dense computing environments. Its processor has sixty 1GHz
cores supporting 240 threads, with 8GB memory and 320GB/s bandwidth.
Built using 22nm process technology, it features the world’s first 3D
Tri-Gate transistors, providing up to 1 TFLOPS peak performance. As well
as functioning as a conventional accelerator, the unit can run Linux and
operate as an IP-addressable HPC compute node with its own
applications. The 5100P costs $2,649. Next in the family, due in the first
half of 2013, will be the 300 watt, 57-core, fan-cooled 3120A, costing
around $2,000.
Database
Inside Data
Graham Keitch takes a closer look at spatial
support in Oracle MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
Geographic information is important
for businesses that need more efficient
ways to handle logistics, communications and
processes that involve scientific data such as
weather or demographic information. Database
provider Oracle has been a leading innovator of
technologies that support spatial data types, as
we discussed in our February 2011 issue (page
11). Oracle Database first supported spatial data
as long ago as 1984. With the acquisition of Sun
Microsystems in 2010, Oracle became the new
owner of the open source MySQL database
default InnoDB engine. In common with other
providers, MySQL implements spatial extensions
that follow the specification of the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This describes a
set of SQL geometry types and functions that
allow you to create and analyse geometric data.
MySQL implements a subset of the OGC
‘SQL with Geometry Types’ specification which
defines a SQL environment that has been
extended with a set of geometry types. Some of
these hold single geometry values such as Point
and LineString. Others hold collections of values
such as MultiPoint and
MultiLineString which
restrict collection members
to those with a particular
geometry type. A collection
of objects of any type is
catered for by
GeometryCollection.
To put things into
practice you create spatial
values using Well-Known
Text and Well-Known
Binary functions that take
either a text representation
or binary large object
integrating Microsoft SQL Server data with Bing Maps services.
(BLOB) as arguments and
which has been equipped to handle spatial data
return the corresponding geometry. In both
since 2004 and continues to be enhanced in this
cases, an optional spatial reference system
area. Microsoft added spatial support in SQL
identifier (SRID) can be added to the equation. A
Server 2008 and this has been extended with
geometry capable SQL column is implemented
the new 2012 release.
as a column that has a geometry type.
Let’s start with a recap concerning Oracle
Database 11g. Oracle Locator handles location
The Microsoft story
data as a standard feature in the free Oracle
For Microsoft, the story begins with SQL Server
Database Express Edition (XE) and across both
2008 which introduced support for a wide
Standard and Enterprise editions of the 11g
variety of spatial objects but didn’t include
database range. Developers can use Locator to
everything in the OGC standard. Features such
build geographic information into their systems
as circular arc support had to wait for the 2012
and extend existing Oracle tools and
release which introduced the CircularString,
applications. Projects that involve complex GIS
CompoundCurve and CurvePolygon data types.
and location-based solutions need Oracle
These facilitate a simpler and more accurate way
Database Enterprise Edition with the separately
of representing an arc than the previous vector
licensed Spatial Option.
technique.
Oracle MySQL is a cross platform database
SQL Server 2012 also introduced full global
management system that has a number of
results whereas 2008 could only return search
different storage engine options. Version 4.1 first
results for a single hemisphere. Other valuable
provided spatial tools for MyISAM tables only
enhancements include Spatial Index which
while version 5 extended this to bring in other
allows you to narrow searches to likely
storage types including the more sophisticated
candidates. Auto-grid and compression
technologies are now included to improve
search efficiency and 48-bit precision can be
used for more accurate calculations and
renditions.
The geometry and geography data types
are implemented as .NET common language
runtime (CLR) data types in SQL Server.
Geometry represents data in a flat earth
coordinate system while geography represents
data using a round earth model. A number of
features that were previously only available as
‘community’ add-ons, such as aggregate
methods on geometry and geography classes,
are now built into SQL Server 2012.
Aggregate methods allow you to work
with multiple shapes to create a union or a
collection and define a single envelope that
encapsulates them. The shapes could be
countries or other territorial boundaries as
might be defined by a sales operation. A
shortest path method allows you to establish
the shortest route to assist with more efficient
logistics. Previously, there were fewer methods
available to geography objects than geometry
but both are now treated more equally. The
spatial tools are available across all editions of
SQL Server 2012, including Cloud deployment
(previously SQL Azure).
For Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
developers, spatial support became available
with the release of Entity Framework (EF) 5 and
.NET 4.5. EF Spatial provides developers with
the ability to build location-aware applications
that save and retrieve location data. Cloud and
Web developers can also benefit from these
spatial features now that Windows Azure
Web Sites supports .NET 4.5.
i
Find out more
Graham Keitch is the database pre-sales specialist at Grey
Matter and has worked in IT for over 20 years. You can find
out more about the spatial support in these products by
emailing him at [email protected] or you can
speak to him or his colleagues on 01364 654100.
9
WIN an iPad Mini from Symantec!
What could be cooler than an iPad? An iPad Mini, of
course! And it’s even better if you’ve won it as a result
of entering our fabulous competition! The iPad Mini gives you
all the benefits of the iPad but in a package half the weight
and with 16GB of memory, there’s plenty of room for all the
apps you could need!
#
Competition
We will also accept entries submitted online at
www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition
To enter our competition, answer the question below, fill out
the rest of the form and send it to:
Symantec iPad Mini Competition
Grey Matter Ltd
Prigg Meadow
Ashburton
Devon TQ13 7DF
entry form
issue 59
iPad Mini 16GB
A: Protection, backup and recovery across your virtual machines.
B: Secure access to networks and integration with existing network infrastructures.
#
Symantec Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray Edition provides:
C: Guidelines for correct posture when sitting at a desk.
Answer:
Your details
Name_______________________________________________________
Company____________________________________________________
Address_____________________________________________________
____________________________ Postcode_______________________
Telephone___________________________________________________
Email_______________________________________________________
q I would like to receive HardCopy magazine.
q Please send me information on products or services that I might find
useful (note that we keep your information private and will not sell or rent
your data for marketing purposes)
Has your company virtualised it’s network infrastructure?
q Yes
q No
q Currently in the process of virtualising
Who is your current backup provider?
q Symantec
q Acronis
q Quest
q Norton
q CA
q Veeam
q Vranger
q Other _______________
Number of PC’s and laptops in my company?______
Number of servers in my company?______
1. 2. 3. 4. No purchase necessary for entry to this competition.
The prize is one Apple iPad Mini (16GB). There is no cash alternative.
Completed entries must be received by Friday 5 April 2013.
Entries submitted online at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition or completed on a
photocopy of this page will be accepted.
5. Only one entry will be accepted per person.
6. Winner is decided by random draw from correct entries received by the closing date.
7. Winner will be announced on Monday 8 April 2013 and notified by email or telephone.
10
Spring 2013 • Issue 59 • HardCopy
8. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the
decision.
9. Employees of organisations connected with this competition are not eligible for entry.
10. Symantec and Grey Matter reserve the right to use the winner’s name in promotional
materials.
The competition promoter is Grey Matter Ltd, Prigg Meadow, Ashburton, Devon TQ13 7DF.
#
TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF ENTRY
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Business
Mapping
Customer Data
Discover new business opportunities and spot problem areas. Mary
Branscombe looks at how maps can help you visualise your business.
MARY
BRANSCOMBE
Mary is a freelance IT
writer who’s worked
on both sides of the
fence, from writing
manuals to developing
a technology area for
a major online service.
She’s also the editor
of IT Expert magazine.
maryb@
hardcopymag.com
12
Do you know where your customers
are? Do you know why you have
customers where you do? Yes, you have their
addresses, but looking at addresses as text is
like looking at sales figures as numbers in a
spreadsheet; it doesn’t give you the real picture.
To understand your sales figures and costs,
you put them into graphs and charts and pivot
tables. To understand your customers, you need
to put them on a map. Just as looking at a
graph helps you see the pattern of sales and
expenses, looking at customer data on a map
helps you see the opportunities and the
problems.
Perhaps the most famous example is John
Snow’s cholera map of London. By plotting the
cases of cholera in the 1854 epidemic against
the water pumps in central London on a map,
he was able to identify a water pump in Broad
Street as the source of the infection – and when
the handle was taken off the pump, cholera
deaths in the area dropped dramatically.
When you look at Snow’s map it’s
immediately obvious where the problem is, and
the same is true when you look at your
customer and sales data on a map. Because the
map adds features like roads, towns and other
businesses you can see if sales look unusually
high or low for a specific location, or if there’s an
unusual pattern.
This isn’t just a handy tool for planning
customer visits – although if you have a spare
hour and you can see which of your customers
in driving distance have recently started buying
less or raising more support calls then it’s far
easier to plan your trip than if you’re just
looking at a list of addresses and postcodes.
Look at your data on a map and it’s
obvious when you have a lot of sales in a
surprisingly small town, or if your sales in an
area are evenly distributed or clustered in
specific places. Animate your data over time
and you can see sales rising, falling and moving
to new areas. If you’re a business bank and you
see that you’ve got growth in one territory from
vets and in another from undertakers, then you
want to target undertakers in the first area and
vets in the second to keep growing. Such
opportunities come to life more easily when
you see them on a map than if you just look at
the data in Excel.
Add in demographics and boundaries and
information about other businesses in those
places and you can start answering questions
like, “What are we doing in Banbury that’s
generating so many sales?” or, “Is there
something wrong with the delivery routes in
west Oxford that’s giving our competitors an
edge?” With a map, you can take a massive data
set and get relevant information – and start
asking useful questions.
Even a small business that sells online can
get useful information from seeing customers
on a map. If 90 per cent of your sales are in the
UK, plotting the rest on a map will tell you if
there’s one country where you’re becoming
popular – in which case it’s worth devoting
some marketing to reaching more customers
there – or if demand is evenly spread between
several countries and you can rely on organic
growth.
Expensive GIS systems and complex
Business
Information everyone trusts
Using maps without making sure you have all the relevant information is as bad
as using charts with misleading axes. Peugeot tried using basic geographical information to set
the territory for franchised car dealers as a 30-minute drive from the showroom, but local road
conditions and traffic meant that was far from accurate and dealers repeatedly complained that
their area was wrong. Peugeot switched to the DriveTime version of MapInfo and used TomTom
Speed Profile Data to get accurate driving times based on the average of actual daytime journeys
by TomTom sat navigation users. The results were good enough to completely stop the dealers
arguing, and the company now uses the traffic-based information for planning new franchise
locations and responding to tenders for enterprise fleet leases.
geospatial development tools used to mean
that such solutions were only for large
companies with specialist geospatial
developers. Even building a mash-up on Bing
Maps requires programming knowledge, but
the latest mapping products make it far easier
to take customer data from Excel or a CRM
system and view that on a map – even a sales
director can do it in minutes.
This is the same thing that’s been
happening with business information tools.
Once you had to wait for someone in IT to build
a report before you could analyse the data. Then
you could generate canned reports on demand,
but if you wanted a different analysis you had to
wait for a custom report – and that probably
had you asking for another one as soon as you’d
looked at it. Now BI tools are so simple and
affordable that you can answer most of those
questions yourself in Excel straight away. That
same democratisation is now happening to
maps.
Mapping solutions
MapPoint Europe 2013 is the latest version of
Microsoft’s venerable data mapping software.
This is a standalone package with demographic
information as well as routing and journey
planning, so you can import your customer list
or sales leads from Excel, Access or SQL Server
and see them on a map together with
information about businesses and services
taken from Bing Maps. At the most basic level
you can use the result to plan efficient routes, or
to explore different strategies for allocating
areas to your sales and marketing teams.
However you can also use the demographic
information to understand more about your
existing customers. If you run a car valet
business, for example, do you do better in areas
with more households that own a second car, or
where more than one person in the family has a
job? Knowing that can help you decide between
a marketing campaign that concentrates on
your premium service, or one that emphasises
the time you save the customer.
You can also use the demographics to
uncover opportunities. If you want to find the
best place to open a new furniture store, you
can add the demographics for households that
spend more than average on furnishings and
import the addresses of competing stores to
find areas where there are potential customers
who don’t live close to a shop run by your
competitors. You can also map the habits of
households in an area, to get ideas for new
products and services that might appeal to
them.
Similarly, MapInfo Professional from Pitney
Bowes gives you demographic information like
population density overlaid on multiple styles
of map, and you can have your own information
from Excel, Access, Oracle and SQL Server
displayed as layers on the map, including heat
maps and labelled pushpins.
MapInfo is a powerful tool that can be
complex to learn. There are other tools that can
more simply help you find the insights hidden
in the information you already have. Add-ins like
Power View or MAPCITE for Excel 2013 let you
visualise data from Excel or Dynamics CRM.
Mapping with Excel
information, you can access anything that’s in
the Azure Marketplace.
If you want to see maps in 3D, for example
with bars showing sales figures rather than
coloured dots or pie charts, Microsoft will be
releasing the free GeoFlow add-in for Office
Professional Plus 2013 later this spring. This has
richer mapping visualisations including heat
maps and 3D representations of data, and you
can animate your data over time. You can add
map layers using data imported from SQL
Server as well as from Azure. When you find
something interesting, you can export straight
to a PowerPoint slide, or create animations of
how the data changes and share them as
videos.
MAPCITE for Excel adds a ribbon of
mapping commands right into Excel that’s even
easier to use than Power View. You can see any
data in Excel that has addresses on a map, and
you can view both heatmaps and map layers
such as administrative or sales territories. You
can import data to show on additional layers
from SQL Server, from Azure Marketplace or
from KML files you create on sites like Google
Earth or Scribble Maps.
The heatmaps are live so they update as
you zoom in and out, and you can animate
them to see growth or changes in customer
distribution.
Furthermore, once you’ve found
something interesting on the map you can
share it with colleagues; either by saving to
Word or PDF, or using MAPCITE’s SharePoint
Web part or Web application which lets you
share a read-only subset of your data for the
area of the map you choose. They can zoom in
and out and interact with the map but they
can’t add, change or delete your data.
Excel 2013 integrates the Power View tool from
Mapping from CRM
SharePoint and adds maps from Bing to the
If you’re dealing with customers and leads then
visualisations you can create. This is extremely
the best place to do it may well be inside your
easy to use: you just drag geographic fields on
Customer Relations Management system.
the Power View sheet and choose to display
MAPCITE is developing a plug-in for Microsoft
them as a map. Add numeric fields to your
Power View table and they
show up as dots, or pie
charts if there’s a series of
data. You can cross-filter
maps and charts together;
select a bar in a chart or
filer by searching and you’ll
see just that data on the
map, click a location on the
map to see information for
that location in your chart,
so you can drill down from
one country to one county
to a single city. If you want
John Snow’s classic cholera map overlaid on ArcGIS Explorer Online.
to add demographic
13
Business
mapping for yourself and to get some ideas for
how you might use it.
Not so bracing in Skegness
GPs in the UK write hundreds of thousands of prescriptions; in fact the database of prescriptions within
the NHS adds about a million rows each month. That’s far too big a dataset to look through by hand so extracting the
insights that doctors need requires business intelligence tools. Alongside more familiar BI tools, the NHS Information
Center is using MAPCITE to make this data more accessible.
If you look at
the prescription
rates for Prozac
and Viagra as a
heat map, you see
the expected high
numbers for places
like London, with
large populations.
But you also see
unusually high
prescription rates for Skegness; far higher than you’d expect for the population. That would be hard to spot by looking at
graphs and charts, but it’s immediately obvious when you see the data on a map. Add in demographics like
unemployment and other deprivation indexes and you can see there’s still something skewing the data.
Like any other good BI tool, mapping gives you an idea of the questions you need to be asking: in this case, why is
one surgery in Skegness writing so many more Prozac prescriptions and how much does that cost? Excel could show you
the figures, but it would be a lot of work to correlate that with local population figures, and Excel wouldn’t give you a
handy list of surgeries within 15 miles so you can compare their prescription levels, which are far lower.
i
Dynamics CRM with similar features to its Excel
tool.
If you’re just looking for simple mapping
features then MyCRM eMap adds mapping
tools based on Bing Maps to a hosted version of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011that you can buy
monthly, without a fixed term contract. This
geocoding plugin can show a map of all your
leads, with driving directions, or filter current
customers by area. That lets you get a list of all
customers within 50 miles of Edinburgh, for
example, so you can plan sales visits.
Drag to select an area on the map and
eMap shows a table of all the entries in that
area. This a much quicker way of picking
customers in the same area than digging
through their addresses, and you can turn it
into a targeted marketing list, assign them to a
specific user, run one or your CRM workflows on
them, or copy the list into Word or Excel.
You can create multiple maps in eMap so
you can have one for customers and another for
high-value opportunities, or divide areas into
ESRI is one of the big names in geospatial
information and its ArcGIS software is used by
US government agencies for major projects like
assessing the danger of wildfires and planning
reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. The free
desktop and online versions of ArcGIS Explorer
are particularly useful for making your own
professional-looking maps. You can use the
‘base maps’ (including satellite imagery for the
whole of the UK) and a number of layers of
mapping data from ArcGIS like UK population,
fuel prices, wind farms locations, driving test
pass rates, road accident statistics, census data
and other demographic information that might
be useful. You can search within the ArcGIS
databases or look for geospatial information on
the Web to include on your map.
You can add your own data to maps in
ArcGIS Explorer, including photos and videos as
well as datasets of addresses, and analyse your
data: for example drawing a shape on the map
to find data within a specific geographic area.
ArcGIS Explorer is quite a sophisticated
tool. You can select locations within irregular
shapes as well as circles and rectangles, and
you can measure distances as well as getting
routes and directions. If you’re sharing the map
with other people, you can add bookmarks,
charts or even a presentation. However the
professional GIS background does show
through. If you want to query information in a
map layer, for example, you’ll be working with
values on database tables, and there’s no
integration with your other business tools.
ArcGIS Explorer is ideal if you need really
detailed geographical information on your
map, but other mapping products offer
better business tools.
Find out more
You can check out the growing number of Bing Map Apps available at
www.bing.com/maps/?appid=0. If you’d like to find out more about
how mapping can help your business then phone 01364 654100 or
email [email protected]. You can find further details of all
the products mentioned in this article on the Grey Matter Web site at
www.greymatter.com/bingmaps.
14
territories. It’s also useful to just explore the
map and see pushpins for accounts, leads and
contacts. Click on a pin to add it to a route or to
start any standard CRM activity.
You’ll see a lot of services like eMap and
MAPCITE built on top of the Bing Maps API and
SDK. It’s not just that Bing Maps has similar
functionality to the Google Maps API (with the
choice of Silverlight, AJAX, REST and SOAP
interfaces) while being easier to integrate with
Microsoft products like Excel and Dynamics: it’s
also that the commercial terms for working
with Bing Maps are better. That means there is a
growing number of Bing Map Apps that let you
view your own data on Bing Maps as pushpins
or heat maps, which is a good way to try out
Make your own maps
The 3D options in GeoFlow mean that not only can you see where your customers are, but
the data bars show you how much they’re spending.
Systems
Windows Server 2012
Kay Ewbank reports on the benefits you can achieve by upgrading
to the most recent version of Microsoft Windows Server.
KAY
EWBANK
Kay is a database
consultant specialising
in EIS, financial
analysis and GIS
systems. While much
of her work is based
in London, being
a consultant gives
her the freedom to
sail, travel and help
out as a part-time
sheep farmer.
kaye@
hardcopymag.com
When a new version of any operating
system is released, it can be difficult to
know when to bite the bullet and upgrade. This
is particularly true of a server operating system.
If your current servers are running reasonably
well and your users are reasonably happy, you
have to be faced with pretty strong evidence of
major advantages before you are going to be
prepared to face the inevitable upheaval that a
migration involves. However Windows Server
2012 does have improvements that can save
resources and money.
Of course, you may already be fully
occupied migrating Windows XP desktops in
advance of the removal of support in Spring
2014, but even in those circumstances, take a
careful look at Server 2012 as the changes in
licensing and support for virtualisation could
save you substantial amounts in money and
infrastructure.
Hyper-V
Ask people who have already made the move
to Windows Server 2012 what the best thing
about it is and its provisions for virtualisation
will undoubtedly come top of the list. Windows
virtualisation has been improving in recent
Changing your Hyper-V replication options under Windows Server 2012.
versions but has still been catching up with
VMware. The version of Hyper-V in Windows
Server 2012 has been dramatically improved
with support for up to 64 processors and 1TB of
memory for each virtual machine, alongside up
to 16TB virtual disk space per virtual hard disk.
Efficiency gains for hosting provider Fasthosts
Windows Server 2012 also supports up to 320
logical hardware processors and 4TB of RAM for
each host.
The raising of these limits makes it possible
to virtualise even machines that are heavily
used and in need of a lot of computing power.
In addition, the ability to virtualise machines
can reduce licensing costs.
Private Clouds
Fasthosts is a British hosting provider serving more than 400,000 customer from facilities that house
more than 6,500 dedicated servers. Lee Harrison, Lead Virtualization and Storage Engineer on the Infrastructure Team
at Fasthosts, was particularly impressed by the new Hyper-V technology that comes with Windows Server 2012: “The
more we heard about it, the more excited I became. The new version of Hyper-V offered us the scalability and
flexibility that we needed.”
For Harrison, Hyper-V Replica is a highlight: “Someone really thought out this feature. It’s a simple and elegant
solution for disaster recovery.” Windows Server 2012 also opens up business opportunities for Fasthosts, as Chief
Technology Officer Jonathon Royle explains: “There’s a real opportunity to ‘productise’ the Hyper-V Replica feature, for
example, to offer a ‘replication as a service’ offering.”
Overall, Fasthosts is confident that this new version of Windows Server will bring considerable benefits. “We are
still evaluating the savings in a production environment, but I am confident that we will lower the cost to manage
our platform, and we will have fewer custom management tools to maintain,” says Royle. “By using Windows Server
2012 and System Center 2012, we should be able to support a 25 per cent growth in business without growing our
data centre staff.”
16
The improvements to Hyper-V go further than
hardware support, with new features including
multi-tenancy, shared storage resource pools,
and network virtualisation. It also has much
improved replica support, so you can set up a
virtual machine that is resilient to hardware
failure, replicating it from one Hyper-V host at a
primary site to another Hyper-V host at the
replica site.
The multi-tenancy support is particularly
important because using it with the shared
storage lets you set up your own private cloud,
giving you the benefits of a cloud service
without exposing your data to the outside
world.
Systems
London Boroughs set up private cloud
Chris Losch, Enterprise Architect at the London Boroughs of Newham and
Havering, cites the virtualisation support in Windows Server 2012 as the main benefit: “In
Windows Server 2008 there were limitations on the number of processors, and it was difficult to
maintain separate security when using machines with multiple tenants. In 2012 those limitations
have effectively gone; the current limits are higher than we ever anticipate using, and that means
we can virtualise more of the machines with heavy computing requirements.”
Multi-tenant separation of clients has also been a benefit: “The new multi-tenant capabilities
mean separate virtual machines really are separate from the viewpoint of security when running
on the same hosts, and that means we can consolidate servers.” He continues: “By using the
multi-tenancy features, along with storage pools and network virtualisation, we’ve been able to
set up our own private cloud. We’ve also been able to reduce our disaster recovery costs by
£30,000 per year by backing up systems such as databases and line of business apps to a second
site using native replication.”
Losch reckons they have achieved a two-thirds reduction in the number of licences required,
and a three-quarters reduction in overall licensing cost, as a result of upgrading.
Multi-tenancy
Network virtualisation
The support in Windows Server 2012 for
multi-tenancy means you can run a single
instance of software on the server for multiple
client organisations or departments. The server
software virtually partitions its data and
configuration, and the clients each have their
own customised instance of the virtual
application.
Windows Server 2012 also supports network
virtualisation. This means you can set up
apparently separate networks on a shared
network infrastructure without needing to use
virtual local networks (VLANs). What happens is
that you assign a virtual network identifier that
says which virtual network a machine belongs
to. Other machines on the same physical
network can be assigned to other virtual
networks, and the separate virtual networks are
invisible to each other. You can move virtual
machines as needed without changing their
virtual network assignments, and you can even
move an entire virtual network onto another
Shared-nothing Live Migration
The multi-tenancy support is backed up with
‘shared-nothing’ live migration so you can move
virtual machines as well as data. Virtual
machines can be moved from one physical
server with direct attached storage to another
physical server, either in the same cluster of
servers or between clusters. This flexibility
allows network managers to minimise or
completely avoid down-time for virtual
machines. Combined with more flexible ways to
manage storage, this can improve the
experience users have of network availability.
physical network without changing IP
addresses, so the users see no change and can
continue working uninterrupted.
This technique overcomes the traditional
problem of having a rigid VLAN where virtual
machines can either be fighting for scarce
resources, or where the physical infrastructure
is underused.
Data Deduplication
This is an area where Microsoft has worked hard
to improve the facilities in Windows Server
2012. Files are segmented into small variable
sized data chunks of between 32KB and 128KB,
and where multiple copies of data are found,
duplicates are removed. The single chunk that is
kept is then compressed. Deduplication can be
carried out on NTFS volumes and is tightly
integrated with BranchCache – the system
whereby content from file servers on a wide
area network (WAN) can be cached on
computers at a local branch office.
The savings that can be achieved using
data deduplication can be considerable. Chris
Losch reckons the London Borough of Newham
has seen individual reductions on file servers of
between 18 and 64 per cent in space used,
allowing the council to allocate one terabyte in
every four to other uses. Some of the machines
he manages are leased which has allowed the IT
department to avoid step costs where the
leasing cost increases as limits are reached.
Take backups into consideration and the
storage reduction because of data
deduplication is even greater. If you need to
Storage Spaces
Expensive SANs (Storage Area Network) make
shared storage easy but have been out of reach
for many smaller businesses. Windows Server
2012 lets you achieve the same results using less
expensive off-the-shelf disk drives.
Storage Spaces let you create a shared pool
of hard disks that can be treated as virtual
storage, and you can even set the virtual drive
to be larger than the actual physical space
available (if you run out of space you add more
to the existing pool). The pooled drives can be
made more resilient by mirroring the drives, or
by using parity striping where data is split into
blocks and then spread across partitions on
different disks.
Windows Server 2012 presents you with a straightforward user interface for setting up a storage pool.
17
Systems
retain data for a specific length of time, then the
reduction is multiplied by each backup image.
Having less data also means that the time
required for the backup window is lower, and a
final benefit comes from the fact that reducing
the number of file servers needed also saves
power.
Cluster-Aware Updating
i
Many of the improvements to Windows Server
2012 are designed to reduce the upheavals
involved when making changes. Cluster-Aware
Updating (CAU) is a good example of this. Using
CAU, you can update clustered servers while
keeping the servers on the cluster available.
CAU transparently takes one node of the cluster
offline, installs the updates, performs a restart if
necessary, brings the node back online, and
then moves on to the next.
Find out more
To discuss upgrading to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with our
experts, call 01364 654100 or email [email protected]. You
can find further details on our Web site at www.greymatter.com.
18
The smaller business view
Sometimes when you look at new software, it
seems that everything was designed with large
enterprises in mind. However Windows Server
2012 offers real advantages for smaller
companies, too.
For a start, you can use it to provide a more
robust system, or at least a system that’s more
available. The virtual machine support means
users can continue working even if you move
things around, while virtual machine replication
and ‘shared nothing’ migration lets you move
resources around without needing to be very
technical, so cutting down on IT costs. The more
robust storage in the form of the storage spaces
feature means you can take cheap storage and
group the individual components like a SAN.
This shared storage is then available through
the native network features without the cost
overhead of a ‘real’ SAN.
Some of the features that Windows Server
2012 offers come under the heading of ‘light
touch administration’. A good example of this is
the addition of support for DHCP failover. You
can set up two servers so that if the active
DHCP server fails, the standby server
automatically takes over. This means the users
IP addresses just carry on working. It may seem
a small improvement, but anyone who’s ever
rushed around trying to get a system back
online with users screaming that their machine
can’t get onto the network will know just how
good a change this is.
The need to plan
While Windows Server 2012 offers some real
advantages, if you want to get the best out of it
you need to plan what you’re doing and
potentially re-design your network to maximise
benefits. For example, if you want to use
multi-tenancy in the virtual networking
features, or if you want to make use of the
ability to create a small SAN using shared
storage, you can’t just upgrade and get those
benefits. You need to design from the bottom
up to make the features work.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, but you
need to do the planning. For example, if you’re
configuring a file server and want to use
Windows Server 2012’s dynamic access control
lists, you’ll soon discover that it’s a completely
different way of working. The features are there,
but you need to work out how you’re
going to make the transition.
WINDOWS SERVER 2012 LETS YOU
VIRTUALiSe your NETWORKS.
Bring the agility of cloud computing inside your datacentre with
Windows Server 2012, the only server built from the cloud up.
With the power of software-defined networking, you can run
multiple isolated networks on a single network infrastructure.
Step up to Windows Server Datacenter before the 31st March
2013 from Windows Server Standard and save up to 20%.
Find out how call 01364 654100 or visit
www.greymatter.com/hc/windows-server-promo
Development
Targeting
multiple platforms
Embarcadero’s Delphi and C++Builder XE3 are designed
for cross-platform development. Tim Anderson finds out
how they achieve it.
TIM
ANDERSON
A freelance journalist
since 1992, Tim
Anderson covers
a wide range of
technical topics and
is well versed in
modern programming
tools, techniques
and technologies.
His recent work
has appeared in
publications including
Guardian Technology,
The Register,
Computer Weekly,
Hardcopy, vnunet.
com, IT Expert and
ITJOBLOG, as well as
his own popular blog
at www.itwriting.com.
20
The pressure for cross-platform
development has never been greater.
Windows remains important, but in scenarios
other than tightly controlled corporate
environments it is not enough; and even there
the trend towards mobile and ‘bring your own
device’, where employees can use their own
computers, tablets and smartphones, means
demand for non-Windows clients. Indeed the
truth is that Windows is now running on a
minority of client devices, with a larger share
going to Android and Apple iOS devices.
This makes cross-platform development
tools increasingly attractive. Single-platform
tools are still important of course, and
allocating dedicated development teams to
each target platform may be the best approach
for organisations with sufficient resources,
although maintaining consistency between
clients under such a regime is a problem. On
the other hand, maximising the amount of
shared code makes sense both for quality and
economy, and there is an obvious appeal for
tools which can target multiple platforms.
Should that be an HTML tool, using Adobe
PhoneGap or similar to create native
executables on each platform? The debate
continues: in some cases this is an ideal
solution; in others, the performance of native
code and its ability to access device features
makes it a better choice.
With its latest set of tools, Embarcadero is
supporting both approaches. The centrepiece
of its RAD Studio product is Delphi, long the
favourite choice of canny Windows developers
but now repositioned as a cross-platform
development tool. Cross platform development
was introduced in RAD Studio XE2 with Mac OS
X support, and iOS in a rough and ready form
using the open source Free Pascal compiler.
The recently released RAD Studio XE3
supports Windows and OS X out of the box.
Impressed by 64-bit support
Anthony West is a developer at The Analytical
Group which makes Windows software such as WinCross for
statistical analysis. He also has his own small software company.
Products are built using C++Builder, and he has been testing
C++Builder XE3 for some time.
The big feature for him is 64-bit support: “WinCross 10 has
the potential to open up some sizeable databases. We’ve had
occasions when we get close to 2GB of memory, and 32-bit dies
at around 1.8GB. 64-bit gives us the ability to let our customers
work with much larger databases.”
How is code compatibility between the C++Builder XE3 and earlier versions? He told us that
there were some issues towards the beginning of beta testing, but most are resolved. “About 75
per cent of my applications are already compiling into 64-bit, and the ones that aren’t are just
some minor issues.”
West is looking with interest at FireMonkey for cross-platform work in “new projects, and
possibly a couple of existing ones. I have some customers asking for Macintosh versions. I’ve
already tried messing around with FireMonkey. It is quite different from the VCL with a bit of a
learning curve, but yes, I do have plans to do cross-platform development with FireMonkey.”
What does he think of the new release overall? “I’m currently using XE2 for my main
products, and the XE3 release is pretty solid for 32-bit applications to move over. But it’s the
64-bit that is really exciting. It’s brand new and a huge undertaking, and I’m impressed that
they’ve pulled it together. There are some issues, but I’m a programmer myself, and it’s very
difficult not to have issues in a first release of another version.”
Support for Apple iOS and Google Android is
coming in an add-on pack – iOS in the first half
of 2013 and Android to follow by the end of the
year. The Android add-on will generate native
code rather than Java. The mobile add-on will
not be free but Embarcadero says it will be
low-cost and included automatically for
customers with Software Assurance. No
announcement has been made as regards to
Windows Phone 8.
Although this could be viewed as a step
back from RAD Studio XE2, which already
targets iOS, the reason for the delay is the big
changes to the developer tools architecture
used by the latest C++Builder and future
versions of Delphi, starting with the iOS release.
This new architecture is based on a language
engine which forms a front-end to the open
source LVVM compiler. Much of Embarcadero’s
effort has been to make the property-methodevent programming model used by Delphi and
C++Builder work correctly with LVVM.
There are several advantages to LVVM,
including the ability to generate code for both
Intel and ARM processors. Another aspect is
CLANG, the LVVM C/C++ compiler, which
provides 64-bit and C++ 11 support. LVVM is
used by Apple for its own OS X and iOS
development tools.
Note that currently it is only the 64-bit
Development
Targeting mobiles with HTML5 Builder
Also part of RAD Studio XE3 is Embarcadero’s HTML5 Builder, the latest version of the product
previously called PHP Builder.
HTML5 Builder has four project types: Client Mobile, Client Web, Server Mobile, and Server
Web. The ‘Server’ projects are the most complete and includes PHP code that runs on the
server. You can still compile the Mobile project as an app, or deploy as a browser-based mobile
app if you prefer. By contrast, a Client project is essentially a JavaScript project which may run
standalone, although you can still link it to remote data or Web services.
HTML5 Builder has its own IDE which is to some extent inspired by Delphi (and built with
it). This is a visual tool allowing you to drag controls and components onto a form, and
double-click to open an event handler. One convenient feature is the installation of its own
instance of Apache so that PHP debugging is seamless.
Database components are included and you can use Delphi-like Database, Query and
Datasource components and bind to visual controls such as combo boxes and lists. There are
also DataSnap client components for connecting to Embarcadero middleware.
The deployment wizard prepares your project for installation on a mobile device. The final
stage includes a link to Adobe’s PhoneGap Build service which lets you compile a mobile app
using a cloud service. This is a commercial service that requires a separate PhoneGap account.
The advantage is that you do not need to have the various mobile SDKs installed locally, or to
develop on a Mac for iOS deployment. Alternatively, you can install the required SDKs and
package the app locally.
C++Builder that uses the new compiler. The
32-bit compiler is a minor upgrade of the
existing one, making it good for compatibility
but inconvenient if you need to build the same
application in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
FireMonkey versus VCL
A longstanding issue for cross-platform
development using Delphi and C++Builder is
that the VCL (Visual Component Library) is
highly Windows-specific. A decade ago, when
the team built a version of Delphi for Linux
called Kylix, it did create CLX (Component
Library for Cross-Platform). However Kylix never
caught on and so it was abandoned.
The solution today is a framework called
FireMonkey which was designed for crossplatform from the outset. This is an abstraction
layer which provides visual controls such as
buttons, menus, pickers, list boxes and grids for
all the platforms it supports. FireMonkey also
supports 3D applications with lighting, textures
and animation, and the framework takes
advantage of hardware acceleration if available.
FireMonkey includes familiar controls and
components including data controls like
TDataSource and TClientDataSet, but it is not
compatible with the VCL and there are many
differences. FireMonkey controls are
predominantly custom-drawn rather than
rendered using native controls but the
framework supports both methods, as
Embarcadero Senior VP Michael Swindell
explains: “It’s a hybrid approach. If it is a simple
control like a button, it is simple for us to draw
and style. If it is a control that is more complex
and very important to that device, like the
spinning picker wheels in an iOS device, then
we use native controls.”
While the VCL is still supported and will
continue as a Windows framework, FireMonkey
is the future focus and is required for
cross-platform development.
Going cross-platform
Although RAD Studio is a cross-platform tool,
there are no immediate plans to have the IDE
itself run outside Windows, as Swindell told me:
“This is a Windows-only tool but the vast
majority of developers that use this are running
this on Macs, inside of VMware Fusion or
Parallels. That allows you to target Windows,
Mac, and when available iOS and Android, on
the same machine.”
You can also run RAD Studio on a separate
PC and connect to a Mac over the network. In
both cases, you need to install a utility called
Platform Assistant (paserver) on the target Mac.
This has a dependency on the Java runtime
which the setup will download and install if
needed. Once installed, you run paserver from
a terminal window and optionally assign a
password, noting the port on which it is
running. On the Mac you also need the Xcode
development tools and the Xcode command
line tools (a separate download from Apple).
You can then create a remote profile that
specifies the Mac where paserver is running.
The remote profile editor lets you pull the
necessary library files from the Mac onto the PC
so that the compiler can find them.
Once everything is set up, you can run the
project in Windows and see it automatically
deployed and opened on the Mac. You can set
breakpoints in the code in C++Builder XE3 (or
Delphi) and debug the application as if it were
running locally. When it comes, Android and
iOS support will work in a similar way.
The key advantage is what Delphi and
C++Builder have always offered: rapid
application development but with the
performance and the flexibility of true
native code.
i
A typical Mac development setup with RAD Studio XE3 running
inside a Windows virtual machine under OS X.
Find out more
For help finding the right tools for your cross-platform development
projects, call 01364 654100, email [email protected] or
visit www.greymatter.com.
21
Development
Working with HTML5
Is it time to switch? Simon Bisson finds out
what HTML5 can do for your applications.
The Web is an important part of any
developer’s toolkit, providing a blank
canvas for desktop, mobile and tablet user
interfaces. It’s a lingua franca that crosses
operating system divides and offers the nearest
thing to a write-once, run-everywhere
development model we have. At the end of
December 2012, the latest version of the core
Web standards, namely HTML5, became a World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Candidate
Recommendation, the last step on its long road
to standardisation.
It’s not surprising it’s taken this long. What
we call HTML5 isn’t one specification; it’s a
whole raft of different technologies that need
the support of companies across the industry.
Things are made more complex by the different
corporate philosophies of browser developers.
What works for Microsoft may not for Mozilla,
while Apple and Google could have a
completely different set of positions. In the end
though it’s the user that matters, and what’s
being delivered in HTML5 is a set of standards
that should form the basis of the next decade of
the Web.
Three pieces come together to make
HTML5. The first is HTML5 itself, the latest
generation of the Web’s markup language.
That’s linked to both CSS3 and to
JavaScript, with APIs that make it easy to
control a site from code. CSS3, the latest version
of the Cascading Style Sheets specification, is
also important as it allows improved styling of
pages, separating design from layout and from
code – as well as supporting media queries that
simplify the construction of sites that work
across all sizes of screen.
One key result of the open HTML5
standardisation programme is that you are most
probably already using an HTML5 browser. The
three key browser engines and their associated
JavaScript interpreters have all been developed
using drafts of the standard – with different
levels of support for certain features. However,
with a Candidate Recommendation agreed
upon, WebKit (as used for Safari and Chrome),
Trident (Internet Explorer) and Gecko (Firefox)
can all finish the jobs their developers began:
delivering a Web where the same piece of
markup delivers the same result, no matter what
browser you’re using.
You can simplify HTML5 application
development using any of a wide selection of
open libraries. Some, like Twitter’s Bootstrap,
are focused on front-end development and on
CSS; others, like the popular jQuery, give you a
framework where you can build and deploy
complex applications that work across a wide
selection of browsers thanks to support from
most major browser and IDE developers. The
jQuery library also offers a mobile alternative
which can significantly simplify development
and includes a templating language that allows
developers to put a site together and then
designers to quickly add customisations.
The features
HTML5 builds on the work done in previous
versions, refining elements and attributes and
adding new features. The most obvious are
support for inline multimedia in the shape of
new <video> and <audio> tags that avoid the
need for plug-in players. Similarly a new
<canvas> element allows JavaScript code to
manipulate onscreen content, allowing HTML
pages to contain 2D animated content.
One of the most important HTML5 features
comes from CSS3. CSS Media Queries allow a
page to quickly get details of the capabilities of
the rendering browser so that content can be
adapted and formatted on the fly. It’s an
approach that’s easier to use than browser
detection, and more suited to working with
ever-changing browser user agent strings.
BISSON
Simon is a
freelance IT writer
and technology
consultant who has
worked on large scale
Web architectures,
mobile Web projects
and XML solutions
for clients in both
the private and the
public sector.
simonb@
hardcopymag.com
The tools
“HTML5 is a set of standards
that should form the basis of the
next decade of the Web.”
Responsive Web designs built on Media Queries
are an effective way of delivering content and
applications, reordering <div> sections on the
fly to layout pages so they look their best on the
viewing device. Other CSS features simplify
animations and transitions, as well as providing
design elements that used to require separate
image content.
While much of HTML5 relies on JavaScript,
some elements do reduce the need for scripting.
New form elements allow your browser to
validate form contents before submitting them
to remote servers. There’s no need to write code
to parse telephone numbers or email addresses,
for example: it’s all handled by the browser
when the user clicks the submit button.
SIMON
While HTML5 is an important component of the
modern Web, it’s also finding a role outside the
browser in a new generation of desktop and
mobile user interfaces. Good quality HTML5
tooling is increasingly common. While much
code is written in familiar text editors and IDEs,
specialist HTML5 design tools are addressing
specific features and situations. Similarly, while
most browsers support HTML5
debugging and property inspection,
using an IDE allows you to tie debugging
directly to code editing.
Microsoft has made HTML5 a key
component of Windows 8 as an
alternative to its own XAML UI markup
language, so you can use HTML5 and JavaScript
to build the user interface of a Windows Store
app. A set of custom JavaScript APIs give access
to low level Windows functions that aren’t
supported by browsers. It’s not the only
platform that’s chosen this approach: RIM uses
it to power WebWorks apps in BlackBerry 10,
and Adobe uses it as the heart of its crossplatform mobile development tooling in
PhoneGap. HTML development is a useful
on-ramp for UI designers approaching new
platforms, and in conjunction with the
‘model-view-controller’ design pattern, can
significantly reduce development times.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2012 adds
23
Development
improved HTML5 support as part of its
Windows 8 development features, even in its
free Express editions. As JavaScript is now a
first-class language in Visual Studio there’s full
IntelliSense support, as well as improving the
code editor and preview tools (based on the IE9
and 10 browser engine). Other HTML5 tools
include improved markup editing and
using media queries, along with CSS3 design –
it’s also rolling out task specific HTML5 design
tools to Creative Cloud subscribers under its
new Adobe Edge brand. Edge Animate is a
design tool that uses the familiar Flash timeline
user interface to help designers build complex
HTML5 animations. While HTML5 doesn’t have
all the features of Flash, it does allow you to
Using Embarcadero HTML5 Builder with Steema Software’s TeeChart for HTML5.
i
debugging features (including the ability to
mark breakpoints on lines that include multiple
code elements), and you can test pages in any
installed browser as well as quickly seeing the
effects of changes to CSS. There’s also the
option to extract sections of markup and
convert them to user controls, simplifying code
reuse.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio LightSwitch rapid
application development suite also supports
HTML5, delivering ready-built HTML5
applications that can be used in any modern
Web browser. There’s no need to know HTML
design – it’s just a matter of dragging and
dropping components onto a design surface
and writing the appropriate business logic.
Adobe is in the process of transitioning
much of its developer platform away from Flash
to HTML5. While Dreamweaver CS6 remains at
the heart of its HTML development strategy
– with tooling for building responsive sites
Find out more
build animated content using CSS and the
<canvas> tag.
Sencha is best known for its HTML5 mobile
app development framework, Sencha Touch.
Using its tools and frameworks you can quickly
build touch mobile apps that work across most
popular devices and browsers. Sencha has now
also brought out its own HTML 5 development
environment, Sencha Architect. A visual HTML
development environment, Architect lets you
drag and drop components on a screen and
then wire them up with JavaScript code. Tools
in Architect aim to guide you into using best
practices, and it’ll work with your usual IDE.
Embarcadero also offers an HTML5
development tool in HTML5 Builder. As well as
a markup and JavaScript editor it includes tools
for working with CSS3, and with common
JavaScript libraries like JQuery. With a focus on
mobile application development there’s also
integration with Adobe’s cloud-based
PhoneGap build service so that you can deliver
your Web applications as mobile apps.
Working with HTML5
Full details of the W3C Candidate Recommendation for HTML5 can be
found at www.w3.org/TR/html5/. To discuss any of the tools or
technologies covered here, phone us on 01364 654100 or email
[email protected]. Alternatively you can check our Web site
at www.greymatter.com.
24
With HTML5 now considered stable, it’s time to
start getting sites ready for the final release. A
lot of Web developers, especially those working
with the mobile Web, are using experimental
prefixes in their code. These are no longer
necessary now that HTML5 has reached
Candidate Recommendation, particularly as
browsers continue to improve in leaps and
bounds, even on mobile devices.
Many developers are using the WebKit
prefixes in mobile applications. With Mozilla
launching a Gecko-based mobile OS and with
Microsoft’s Windows Phone picking up market
share, this is a dangerous practice that looks
likely to do the same for the mobile Web as
Internet Explorer 6 did for the Web back in the
early 2000s. Designing for just one browser,
even if it does have a significant proportion of
the available market share, risks turning the
Web into a monoculture.
Building an HTML5 site requires more
thought than earlier versions. CCS3 and
JavaScript are key elements of any HTML5
content which means designers, developers
and content creators need to collaborate in
new ways. Template-based designs simplify
content-only sites (with HTML5 navigation
features), but with Web applications using
HTML5 user interfaces there needs to be
significant development – especially if
developers are using Web Workers to handle
asynchronous communications with a server.
Developers will need to become
increasingly familiar with asynchronous design
and development techniques. JSONencapsulated data has been at the heart of
RESTful design, and remains crucial to HTML5
development. Callbacks and other techniques
are essential to modern site design, and while
handled by many HTML5 JavaScript libraries,
need to be considered carefully when
designing sites and when displaying content.
Users need to understand that data is being
delivered, otherwise there’s the likelihood
they’ll switch to a different site. Web workers
simplify this, effectively multi-threading the
single threaded Web programming model.
However this too needs to be thought of as a
major change in the way sites are designed
and developed.
With both Flash and Silverlight facing
uncertain futures, and plug-in free mobile
platforms taking an increasingly larger share of
the overall end-user market, it’s clear that
developers and designers need to focus on
cross-platform alternatives. HTML5, with its
improved JavaScript support and additional
video and audio capabilities (as well as built-in
form validation) is that alternative, supported
by all the desktop operating systems and the
major mobile platforms. With HTML5 and
responsive Web design it’s even possible to do
something that wasn’t possible with Flash:
deliver one user interface that works across
everything from mobile to tablets, TVs
and PCs.
Security
Who are you?
Identity theft can be devastating for both individuals and
companies. Matt Nicholson finds out how you can combat it.
MATT
NICHOLSON
Matt has been editor
of HardCopy magazine
since 2003. Prior to that
he published Developer
Network Journal, ran
the Visual Basic User
Group (VBUG) and has
edited more computer
and hi-fi magazines than
he cares to remember.
http://blog.mattmags.com
[email protected]
26
1958 saw the publication of a short
novel by science fiction writer Algis
Budrys called Who? in which a Cold War
scientist by the name of Dr Lucas Martino is
caught in a devastating explosion at a secret
research centre. He is ‘rescued’ by the Soviets
who, in response to increasing diplomatic
pressure, return him to the Americans several
months later. However the man they return has
undergone not only lengthy interrogation but
also extensive surgery, to the extent that he is
now unrecognisable. The rest of the book is
devoted to the efforts taken by intelligence
agent Shawn Rogers to determine whether this
is actually Martino, who is vital to the Allied war
effort, or a Soviet spy impersonating Martino, in
which case he needs to be kept well away from
Martino’s work. The task proves extremely
difficult.
Although written over 50 years ago, the
novel goes to the heart of an increasingly
important problem: how we establish and
protect our electronic identity. For most of us
the solutions we adopt are laughably insecure,
but the effects of identity theft can be
absolutely devastating.
In August 2012 Mathew Honan, a journalist
at Wired.co.uk, experienced them first-hand. It
started with his iPhone powering down and
then refusing to recognise him when it booted
up. Within just a few minutes his iPad and the
hard disk of his MacBook were remotely wiped
using the Apple iCloud ‘Find My’ service, his
Google email account deleted, and his Twitter
account hijacked. In the process, he lost more
than a year’s worth of irreplaceable
photographs.
As a journalist, Honan was able to get to
the bottom of how this had happened, and
even communicate with one of the hackers. It
turned out that high-powered software was not
involved. Instead the hackers had used simple
search techniques to uncover enough personal
information to convince AppleCare to issue a
new password – basic information such as an
email address, a billing address, and the last
four digits of his credit card (which is printed on
most receipts). This gave the hackers access to
his iCloud account, from which the rest
followed. Honan admits in hindsight that he
made some basic mistakes that made the hack
possible, but his report concludes, “I’m also
upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so
much of my trust in has let me down so
thoroughly.”
The underlying problem is that the more
effective the password, the harder it is to
remember. In these days of cheap computing
power, the only effective passwords are those
made up of a nonsensical combination of not
only upper and lower case letters but also
numbers and even punctuation marks. As a
result we either write complicated passwords
down, usually on bits of paper that are openly
visible to colleagues and visitors, or we choose
something easy to remember but hopelessly
inadequate. An annual study by SplashData,
reported in the Daily Mail, reveals that the most
popular passwords in 2012 continued to be
password, 123456, abc123, qwerty, monkey and
letmein.
Sometimes we don’t even bother to use
password protection when it’s offered. The
recent phone hacking scandal, for example, did
not in the main revolve around journalists
employing high-powered hacking tools to
break into the voicemail services of their
targets. Voicemail can be accessed very easily if
you know the target’s mobile phone number
together with a PIN supposedly known only to
the phone’s rightful owner. Most phones are
issued with a default PIN which the instruction
book advises you to change to something of
your own choosing at the earliest opportunity.
However few of us bother to read the
instructions and so the PIN remains set to its
The RSA SecurID 700 Authenticator fits
on a key ring – press the button and it
generates a unique six-digit code.
Security
The GriIDsure authenticator in action on a
mobile device – gain entry by typing the
digits that match your chosen pattern.
default value which is easily discoverable, and
indeed may well be listed on the mobile phone
company’s Web site.
Secure solutions
Any authentication procedure boils down to
three factors: something you know, such as a
password or a PIN; something you have, such as
a passport or a key; or something you are, such
as a fingerprint or an iris scan. This goes to the
heart of Rogers’ problem as anything Martino
may have known could have been extracted
during his interrogation, and anything he had
would certainly have been confiscated. These
days we might be able to confirm his identity
through genetic fingerprinting, but such
technologies weren’t an option 50 years ago.
The more factors employed the more
secure the system, so two-factor authentication
(TFA or 2FA) is inherently more secure than a
single factor solution involving just a password.
At present biometric solutions, such as those
based on fingerprints or iris scans, tend to be
more expensive and less reliable, so most TFA
solutions are based on you not only knowing a
password but also proving that you have in your
possession a particular physical device, usually
referred to as an authenticator or token. We use
TFA every time we put a debit card (the
authenticator) into a cash machine and enter
our PIN.
Authenticators can be either hardware or
software. A typical hardware solution involves a
small gadget with a button and a digital display.
In addition to your PIN you have to enter the
number displayed by the gadget when you
press the button, so proving that you have it in
your possession. This number is referred to as a
one-time password (OTP) because it can only be
used once. The gadget generates a different
number each time in either a unique sequence
(event-based), or as a result of a calculation that
involves the time at which the button was
pressed (time-based). The authenticating
software knows how the OTP was generated
and so can validate the user, although it does
have to allow for accidental button presses or
clocks that might not be perfectly synchronised.
It is usual for time-based OTPs to remain valid
for a certain period, for example.
A variation adds a USB connector to the
device so that you don’t have to actually enter
the OTP yourself. Instead you plug it into your
laptop or desktop and simply enter your PIN,
which is automatically combined with the OTP
generated by the authenticator before being
submitted. Such devices can include encrypted
storage which is unlocked once you are
authenticated.
Increasingly popular are software
authenticators that run on smartphones, many
of which can be downloaded free of charge.
Google Authenticator is available for Android,
iOS and Blackberry, for example, or there is the
Authenticator app for Windows Phone 7.
Software authenticators are also available for
Windows or Mac OS X which are designed to
run on a laptop or desktop. With these the
second factor – the thing you have as opposed
to the thing you know – becomes the laptop or
desktop itself.
The authenticators described so far require
hardware or software that is in the possession of
your users. This can pose a security risk if these
are temporary workers or contractors as you
have to ensure that they hand back or uninstall
their authenticators when their time with you is
finished. Here a more suitable solution might
be an out-of-band (OOB) authenticator where
the user is sent an SMS or an email containing
the OTP. This is managed from the server and
doesn’t require any specialist software or
hardware for the user.
The other important component in a TFA
system is the in-house system where
authenticators are registered and managed.
Most of the major suppliers have authentication
managers that run on Windows Server. Quest
Defender, for example, is built on top of Active
Directory and can be managed either through a
Web browser or an MMC (Microsoft
Management Console) plug-in. RSA
Authentication Manager, as supplied by EMC
which acquired RSA in 2006, is available not
only for Windows Server but also for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and 64-bit Solaris. EMC can
also supply RSA Authentication Manager
Express, a rack-mountable box that is designed
for companies with up to 2,500 users. Another
option is the SafeNet Authentication Service
which can be delivered both as an Enterprise
Cloud Service and in a Private Cloud Edition.
SafeNet supports the Initiative for Open
Authentication (OATH) which means its
authentication products will work with any
OATH-compliant authenticator. Quest Software
also supports OATH which means that any
SafeNet authenticator can be managed by
Quest Defender, as indeed can Google
Authenticator and Authenticator for Windows
Phone 7, which are also OATH compatible.
One company that does not support OATH
is EMC. Its RSA products uses techniques which
Password Manager XP from CP Lab gives you a secure place to store
and manage your login details.
27
Security
Coding for security
Techniques for developing a secure application or Web site could fill several books (and indeed
have). However here are a few tips:
l Modern development platforms support a wide range of security features that have been
extensively tested. Don’t be tempted to roll your own.
l No matter what anyone advises, people continue to use the same password across multiple
sites, so take security seriously even if your particular application is relatively trivial.
l Never store passwords in plain sight. Most development platforms support strong encryption,
but at the very least you should concatenate each password with a random string before
hashing (the nature of hash algorithms means that you can store each string alongside the
hash without compromising security).
l Many Web development platforms maintain an illusion of flow through the application.
However the Web is stateless so test whether the user is authenticated on every page.
l Validate any data entered by the user before passing it on to the application, and only allow
the application to access a database through stored procedures.
i
EMC argues are stronger than OATH’s, and also
points out that an initiative like OATH can only
be as secure as the weakest link in the supply
chains of member organisations.
Another option is the GrIDsure
authenticator. To register with a GrIDsure
system the user chooses a pattern of cells from
within a grid. When it comes to authentication
the user is presented with a grid populated by a
random set of digits (see previous page), and he
then enters the values displayed in the cells
that match his chosen pattern. The user’s
pattern remains the same, but the values he
enters are different every time. GrIDsure was
liquidated in 2011 and its patents acquired by
Cryptocard, which is now part of SafeNet. The
technology is licensed to other companies
including Quest.
A recent development is risk-based
authentication. This involves evaluating the risk
posed by each authentication attempt and
adjusting the procedure accordingly. A log-in
from a laptop in the company canteen, for
example, is a rather less risky proposition than a
log-in from a smartphone connected to the
public Wi-Fi system of a hotel in another
continent. A risk-based system makes an
evaluation according to known information,
perhaps allowing the user in the canteen to log
in with a simple password while requiring the
Find out more
ElcomSoft’s report is available at www.elcomsoft.com/PR/
PK_120316_en.pdf. Further details of many of the products
mentioned here can be found on the Grey Matter Web site at
www.greymatter.com. If you would like to discuss your security
needs further then call us on 01364 654100 or email
[email protected].
28
smartphone user to also enter a OTP. Risk-based
system are available from a number of suppliers
including RSA and CA Technologies.
Although TFA solutions represent a
considerable investment, they can still prove
cost effective. For a start, the Help Desk Institute
has stated that nearly a third of all help desk
calls are requests for password resets. Then
there is the potentially enormous cost incurred
by a security breach, which could easily extend
into the millions, to say nothing of the loss of
trust and the damage to your reputation.
Password managers
That said, there are many situations where
passwords are the only option, in which case it
makes sense to ensure that they are as secure
as possible. This is particularly important given
the computing power available to the hacker. A
four-digit PIN can take one of only 10,000
values which the modern desktop can crack in a
matter of milliseconds. Just a few minutes
searching the Web will reveal toolkits for
recovering smartphone PINs that come with
friendly user interfaces and require no
understanding of what they’re actually doing
behind the scenes.
To be really effective a password needs to
be made up of at least eight random characters
which can be both numbers or both upper and
lower case letters, so presenting the hacker with
some 218 trillion possible combinations.
Furthermore you should use a separate and
unrelated password for each system that you
need to access, so that cracking your password
for Facebook does not give the hacker access to
your bank account. Most of us find it difficult
enough to remember more than one such
password, so the only realistic solution is to use
something that stores all your passwords in a
single encrypted database that can only be
accessed through a single master password.
A typical example is Password Manager XP
from CP Lab which can store not only
usernames and passwords but also credit card
details and other confidential information. It
can be set up to auto-fill Web pages and log-in
dialogs, entering account details and
passwords directly into the correct fields
without you having to copy-and-paste or type
them in, which can defeat the key-logging
software used by hackers. It can automatically
generate passwords that have a high degree of
security, so removing the need for you to
dream up nonsensical character strings. It also
supports multiple users, each with access only
to specific parts of the shared database.
Like many such utilities, Password
Manager XP comes in a version for
smartphones, although in this case only
Windows-compatible devices are supported up
to Windows Mobile 6.1. It also supports
installation to a USB memory stick which gives
you access to your passwords in a secure
manner from any computer without having to
install any software.
A similar package is offered by Moon
Software in Password Agent. This does not
support multi-user access or smartphones, but
it can be installed on a USB drive. It also comes
in a free Lite version that offers all the features
of the full version but limited to just 25 entries.
Then there is KeePass, an open source
alternative that is available not only for
Windows but also for Mac OS X and other UNIX
variations including Linux. There are also
variants such as MiniKeePass for iOS,
KeePassDroid for Android and 7Pass for
Windows Phone 7.
There are quite a number of password
managers available for smartphones, however
forensic expert ElcomSoft has reported that few
make use of the facilities provided by their
target platforms for securing passwords,
preferring to ‘roll their own’ which are
inherently less secure. One that did come out
well is Ascendo DataVault which supports
Android, iPhone, iPad and Blackberry, as well as
Mac OS X and Windows (but not Windows
Phone).
However it is important to remember that
none of these tools will prevent a hacker from
persuading a call centre to reset your password
if they have access to the right information. Far
more important is that you take precautions to
protect your personal data – information such
as your date of birth, your mother’s maiden
name, your billing address. Foregoing a few
birthday greetings on Facebook is a small price
to pay if it avoids the nightmare of
identity theft.
Back End
Straight talking
Tim Anderson explains why the changing landscape
means that Office developers face difficult decisions.
According to its last set of financials, to
the end of September 2012, Microsoft
makes more money from Microsoft Office than
from Windows client. Revenue from Office was
$5.5 billion, versus $3.2 billion for Windows,
while profit was $3.6 billion versus $1.6 billion.
A bumper quarter for Windows following the
launch of Windows 8 could change that, but the
indications are otherwise.
While most of us care little about
Microsoft’s earnings in themselves, it does
illustrate the importance of Office.
It is now widely accepted that the
Windows PC is in decline, although slowly and
from a huge base, thanks to the influence of
smartphones and tablets. That is not a bad
thing: tablets and the app store deployment
model simplify computing for users; and for
those who do not need the heavyweight
applications that run only on PCs or Macs, a
tablet makes sense.
“Tablets have dramatically changed the
device landscape for PCs, not so much by
‘cannibalizing’ PC sales, but by causing PC users
to shift consumption to tablets rather than
replacing older PCs. Whereas once we imagined
a world in which individual users would have
both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we
increasingly suspect that most individuals will
shift consumption activity to a personal tablet,
and perform creative and administrative tasks
on a shared PC,” says Gartner analyst Mikako
Kitagawa.
While this remark is mainly focused on
consumers, there is a parallel trend in business,
whether it is Bring Your Own Device – using a
personal machine for work as well – or simply
rolling out iPads to meet a business need.
What then will happen to Office? Microsoft
Office of course continues to be excellent at
what it does. I was reminded of this recently
when analysing some data traffic statistics. I
selected the table in Excel 2013, clicked
Recommended Charts, and there was my data
30
beautifully visualised. There is surprisingly little
enthusiasm for alternatives like Open Office or
Libre Office, despite significant cost savings.
The force for change is now different,
based on the shift towards cloud and device,
and it has obvious implications. Here are a few:
Traditional file shares no longer meet
business needs. In a Microsoft world, SharePoint
is the solution, whether implemented
on-premise and published to the Internet, or
through Office 365 or Skydrive, or hosted by a
third-party. Non-Microsoft solutions include
Dropbox, Google docs and Apple iCloud.
Users need to edit and create documents on
tablets, which for most people means an iOS or
Android device. Given that Microsoft Office is
only available on non-Windows tablets in the
form of Web apps, that is an opportunity for
rival document editing apps.
The way businesses store and exchange
information is changing. Attaching an office
document to an email is still the most common
way, but Web-based approaches like a link to a
SharePoint, Slideshare or Google doc make
more sense in a world of diverse devices.
Microsoft is not standing still: along with
SharePoint itself, and the associated Office Web
Apps which deliver limited Office viewing and
editing in the browser, it has made changes
both to the Office product and to its business
model with the future in mind. Office 2013 is
being offered to users by subscription as well as
with traditional perpetual licenses. A
subscription includes Office 365, Office
•
•
•
The OneNote Wheel: is this what a touchfriendly Office app looks like?
applications, and additional rights depending
on the package. Most intriguing is that Office
365 Home Premium covers use on ‘selected
devices’, meaning not only PCs and Macs, but
also Windows Phone 7.5 and higher, with
‘additional devices’ to be added in future.
Might that include Apple iOS and Google
Android? A company spokesperson said that
“Office will work across Windows Phone, iOS
and Android,” though exactly what this means is
not clear at the time of writing, and other
rumours say that Apple and Microsoft disagree
on the subject of revenue sharing from Office
365 subscription fees.
Another new feature in Office 2013 is
better support for touch control. This was
hyped considerably by Microsoft at the preview
launch, but the feature does little more than
space out the icons on the ribbon so they’re
easier to target with a finger. Combine that with
pinch to zoom and it does make it easier to edit
a document with touch control, but it falls short
of the deep redesign Office needs to make it
truly touch-friendly. Open a dialog, for example,
and you are back to Office as it has looked for
years, with no concessions for tablet users.
The exception is OneNote MX, which is a
Windows Store app available alongside Outlook
2013 for Windows 8 users. This has an
innovative user interface featuring a contextual
wheel control in place of ribbons and icons. It is
not perfect, and some features like audio
recording are missing, but it shows that
Microsoft is able to think radically about how to
transform Office for mobile devices.
Windows 8 itself is also part of Microsoft’s
Office strategy. The suffering that Microsoft is
experiencing as its customers struggle with the
Windows 8 ‘modern user interface’ is a measure
of how determined the company is to have a
presence in the tablet market. No doubt the
intention is to make a Windows 8 tablet the
obvious choice for businesses who would
otherwise be enticed by iPads. It is not working
yet, but Microsoft has its new tablet platform
and it is too soon to write it off.
However the tablet wars plays out, some
predictions look safe. One is that Office has to
work well across diverse devices and with touch
control, if it is to avoid declining towards
Back End
irrelevance. It also follows that Office
applications which depend on desktop
Windows are at risk, since they will not work
across all these clients. Even on Windows RT,
trusty old Visual Basic for Applications was
omitted from the versions of Word, Excel and
PowerPoint built for the ARM processor.
Apps for Office
The earliest Office apps were based on VBA and
COM, where the code lives in the document or
template. Next came Office development using
.NET and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO),
where Office applications host the .NET runtime
and applications communicate with Office
documents using COM Interop.
In Office 2013, Microsoft has done its all too
familiar trick of asking developers to forget the
past and use a new and different approach. In
mitigation, the old apps do continue to work –
even VBA apps, although there can be issues
converting 32-bit VBA to 64-bit.
The new model is called Apps for Office.
These are essentially Web pages embedded
either in the task pane, or in the document itself.
The former are called Task Pane Apps and the
latter Content Apps. Outlook supports a third
type called a Mail App. This is similar to a Task
Pane App in that it opens alongside an email,
and again is based on an embedded browser.
Apps for Office are sandboxed and cannot
use ActiveX controls. The key feature is a
JavaScript API which lets the app interact with
the current document. You can query document
content, write to the document, and handle
events such as DocumentSelectionChanged.
A user installs an App for Office simply by
adding a reference to an XML manifest. Another
advantage is that an App for Office works
inherently in Office Web Apps as well as in the
desktop client, and therefore works on iPads
and Android tablets as well as on Windows PCs.
Unfortunately the scope of Apps for Office
is limited in this first release. The only app types
that currently work in the Web Apps are Excel
Content Apps and Outlook Mail Apps. Task Pane
Apps only work on the desktop. Nor are the
apps uniformly supported throughout the
Office suite. Content Apps only work in Excel.
There may be a few bleeding-edge
businesses which upgrade all their users to the
latest Office shortly after release, but others are
more cautious. It is a big ask of developers that
they should abandon existing skills in Office
apps for the sake of a new type of app that only
works with the latest version.
The App for Office concept actually works
best in the context of SharePoint 2013 and
Office 365 as a technology for Office Web Apps.
It is therefore a shame that the Task Pane Apps
do not yet work there, although Microsoft says
they will at some future date.
Where next for Office?
Office will be big business for Microsoft for the
foreseeable future. The productivity of Word
and Excel, and the sheer usefulness of Outlook
despite its poor user interface, will ensure that.
But can Office avoid slow decline in the tablet
era? Judging by what Microsoft currently has
on offer, it will be hard to avoid, though growth
in SharePoint and Office 365 will mitigate that,
and the Office team will be hard at work
improving its tablet story. As for Office
development, the two paths that make sense
are either to forget the new stuff and continue
with old-style projects for clearly defined sets of
users on Windows desktops, or to focus on
SharePoint and Office Web App development
where the client no longer matters.
As with Windows 8, there is a lot to like in
Apps for Office, but it is late arriving and a hard
sell for developers familiar with a
different platform.
31
Back End
…and another
thing
Jon Honeyball descends into the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas where he
encounters portents of the world to come.
on an Internet click-through based real-time
soccer match. This year their behaviour stooped
to even lower levels than before. Queuing
politely for an hour and half for the Samsung
You can describe a trip to CES, the huge
press conference was largely a waste of time
Consumer Electronics Show held in Las
when these juveniles decided it would be far
Vegas at the beginning of January, in many
better for them to just ignore the queue and
different ways. It can be a descent into the pit of
barge in at the front.
Hell, because jostling for position in the huge
It could be Hell simply because of the
convention centre surrounded by hundreds of
sheer enormity of the event itself. Each day
thousands of other people is far from pleasant
while walking the show, I could easily chalk up
– a modern day Hades by any standards. It
half a dozen or more miles. And that’s just
could be called Hell because here you are in Las
within the city-sized Las Vegas Convention
Vegas, a place which I can tolerate for about
Center itself. Add in the other satellite events
four days, but if I stay longer I become a
happening at various hotels up and down the
gibbering idiot ready to be carted off to the
strip and you find yourself in the middle of a
funny farm.
tsunami of impossible meeting deadlines,
It can get even worse, if you dare venture
where the person you want to meet is always in
there as a member of the press. The Press Days
the wrong place.
are a seething riot of barely pubescent
Against this, it’s the best place on the
teenagers from an assortment of Internet news
planet to see what the underlying trends are.
and blogging sites, all of whom have the
Just about everyone is here, from every
manners of a cornered rat, and for whom
company everywhere in the world. Even those
getting the story right now – irrespective of
who don’t have much, or indeed any, official
content, meaning or even relevance – is
presence are there in force. Microsoft pulled out
secondary to timeliness because they live or die
of doing the keynote last year and yet their staff
were everywhere both
on and off the strip.
Apple, despite having
no stand at all, were
here in force. And then
the big guns like
Samsung had stands
the size of city blocks,
filled with staff from all
over the globe.
Was it worth
going? Oh yes. The
underlying trends were
inescapable. Netbooks
have gone, vanished
These Re-Timer glasses don’t just make you look like a geek, they’re also designed to reset your
from the surface of the
body clock - just the thing for the jet-setting executive before that all-important meeting!
planet. Ultrabooks are
32
still out in force, with some vendors deciding to
add touch capabilities to their screens in a
somewhat gasping (or perhaps grasping) effort
to make them work better on Windows 8.
Windows RT is really only found in the Microsoft
Surface line-up, and its sales figures are a
closely guarded embarrassment by Microsoft
who are simply not talking real numbers. Other
vendors, including Samsung, have announced
that they are just not going to bother with their
RT-based tablets for the North American
market. Microsoft is either late to market or
being canny with its Intel-based Surface Pro,
depending on who you ask. I would have been
impressed if the delay allowed them to use a
leading edge processor, but no – it’s just the
same as all the other vendors who launched
their product back in the Autumn. The reason
for the later launch? Who can tell?
Of course, there was the usual raft of
iPhone related devices, and more Android than
you can shake a stick at. This even reached the
levels of the mildly absurd with the Samsung
fridge that runs Evernote on its touch screen
panel mounted on the front of the fridge.
Another vendor turned a fridge into a
loudspeaker unit, connecting over Bluetooth.
If all of that sounds confusing, it’s because
it is. The market is clearly in a state of catatonic
shock. The arrival of Windows 8 hasn’t been the
market kicker that many hoped, and a
significant number of customers, both
businesses and home, have looked, said “neh”
and moved on. If you are a true believer, then
you too can convince yourself that what you
really need is a cut down operating system with
a neutered copy of Office, missing even the
most basic of capabilities like Outlook. And you
can revel in the UI which switches from
four-year-old finger-painting Metro on one
screen to fiddly old-style Windows desktop on
the other. At least with Windows 8 Pro, to be
found on Surface Pro, we will have the full
Back End
capabilities of Office and Windows to work with.
Maybe that will entice the corporations to deal
out the product rather than just sitting on
Windows 7 for the foreseeable future.
There is no doubt in my mind that the
market is judging Microsoft harshly, but fairly, in
its touch work. Windows 8 on touch is too little
too late, and Windows Phone 8 seems to roll
forward almost like a Gilbert and Sullivan farce,
especially when it comes to essential security
and OS updates.
I don’t, and won’t, underestimate the
almost unstoppable force of a company like
Microsoft in the marketplace – it has almost
unlimited resources, both in human and
financial terms, and can still act like the bully in
the playground. But I cannot help feeling that
this CES represented a tipping point where it
started to get a slightly bloody nose in the
marketplace.
What were the big trends? Well, don’t
underestimate the push that will be coming this
year on Smart TVs. I know that the Smart TV has
always been something of an oxymoron, but
there is serious work going on to make the TV
the cornerstone of the home environment.
There are many reasons for a vendor to do this
– they have new shiny 4K TVs capable of
absolutely stunning clarity, even when working
with an up-scaled Blu-ray image. On native 4K
material, it is beyond stunning.
Of course, there is effectively no 4K
material around for the home and domestic
user, and this situation won’t change any time
soon. But I defy anyone to look at one of the
myriad 4K TVs on show and not want one
immediately. Naturally, I gravitated towards the
biggest – the 4K 110-inch panel from Samsung
which lifts the TV to a piece of architectural art
form. But the OLED displays really took my
breath away for picture quality. There is a
significant and growing market out there for
apps that run on both smartphones, tablets and
now TVs. It’s a more fragmented market that
the tablets, but there are a few leading vendors
like Samsung and LG who define the
marketplace. If I was an app developer, I would
be looking to ensure I had something in place
here, even if it was really a placeholder to judge
the future market.
However, I accept that this is not helpful. To
really have good coverage, you need to go for
iOS, Android and maybe Windows Phone 8 for
the mobile space; Android, iOS and Windows 8/
RT for the tablet space; and now I am
suggesting there might be a business case for
developing for TVs too. Much work will be
cross-platform, of course, but never
underestimate the cost, both in time and
equipment, to ensure you have a full set of test
platforms.
If the Smart TV market is really going to
expand in 2013 and beyond, then now is the
time to get there. It might be worthwhile trying
to do deals to get your apps pre-loaded if at all
possible, because I am far from convinced that
there is a vibrant and worthwhile app store
market for Smart TVs. Certainly not in the same
way that there is for phones and tablets.
Maybe there is a space for some special
4K-supporting applications? The very best
picture quality here is really like looking
through an open window to the outside. Maybe
that’s the next big app market? But I can
certainly see some gameplay benefitting from
such a capability.
Apart from that, I want an armoured
scooter, maybe a Segway, on which to roam the
halls of CES - preferably armed with a cattle
prod to keep the ‘yoof’ at bay. Where do I
place my order?
Grey Matter • 01364 654 100 • HardCopy
33
Back End
Short cuts
Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT.
Stranger than fiction
Long-term readers of Short Cuts will know that we have, from time
to time, focussed on the more characterful CEOs in the IT industry, from
Sun Microsystems’ all-blogging Jonathan ‘No-Role’ Schwartz to Oracle’s
Glamorous-But-Slightly-Scary Larry Ellison and Safra Katz, and (of course)
Microsoft’s incomparable Steve ‘Mad Dog’ Ballmer.
It seems, however, that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree all
along, since without doubt the industry’s most colourful, wildest-living and
basically frightening CEO is (or at least was) anti-virus pioneer and alleged
assassination target John McAfee, currently residing in Oregon but recently
of Belize and Guatemala. What’s more, he’s half British, having been born in
England but raised in Salem, Virginia.
To be fair, McAfee hasn’t actually been a software CEO since 1994,
when he resigned from the anti-virus company he’d founded. But his name
lives on in millions of boot partitions (although new McAfee owners Intel
may well be trying to play that association down at the moment). And
when we say ‘colourful’ we do mean colourful.
We’re reluctant to write too much about Mr McAfee, mainly because
we’re scared of him. However The Sunday Times, clearly made of sterner
stuff, neatly summarised his recent adventures as involving “Guns, call girls,
death, drugs, a lost or possibly hidden £60m fortune, laboratories deep in
the jungle, espionage, terrorists, government corruption, a faked heart
attack, poisoned dogs...”
It seems that, having moved to Belize and built an organic
pharmaceuticals lab on what turned out to be a major drug trafficking
route, McAfee was then accused of murdering his neighbour over a
poisoned dog. He escaped to Guatemala but a journalist uploaded a
picture of him complete with GPS coordinates, leading police to make
possibly the world’s first Flickr-assisted arrest.
Facing deportation back to Belize, he faked a heart attack (as you do)
and used the delay to get himself shipped to the United States instead,
where he now lives in fear of Belizean hit squads. Somehow it all makes
standing on a TechEd stage bellowing “Developers, developers, developers”
until you’re hoarse seem rather tame.
Second lives
John McAfee’s antics got us wondering whether other IT industry CEOs
might have back-stories they’d rather keep quiet about. Our investigations
revealed some arresting tales:
•
Larry ‘Pirate of the Caribbean’ Ellison. The Oracle CEO’s sailing
expertise is, it turns out, a legacy of his days as a maritime outlaw working
the West Indies and Central America region with an unequalled record of
21 ships sunk, 3 billion doubloons (plus stock options) seized and 438
technology acquisitions made, subject to FTC approval.
“I based my character of Jack Sparrow entirely on Larry,” said actor
Johnny Depp, “right down to the Keith Richards impersonation and
ruthless integration of captured vessels into my fleet’s technical ecosphere.”
34
•
Marissa ‘Boudicca’ Mayer. Advanced Past Life
Recognition software running on an early-shipment Intel
Xeon Phi has revealed that the flaxen-haired Yahoo!
supremo was in fact Boudicca Queen of the Iceni
between AD 43 and 60. She fell foul of the region’s
owners, the Roman Empire, after issuing free food and
slate tablets to every soldier while failing to gain market
share against arch-rivals the Gauls. As one Gaul insider
cruelly put it, “Is that where she went? I didn’t know the
Iceni were still in business.”
•
Artist’s impression of Yahoo! CEO
Marissa Mayer in her former life as
Queen Boudicca.
Steve ‘Mad Canute’ Ballmer. Advanced Past Life
Recognition Software spotted after Yahoo! executives
searched for it on Bing has revealed that the Microsoft
CEO was also a figure from history – Danish/English international King Canute, who in 1028
attempted to hold back the tide of mobile operating systems using only the Divine Right of Kings
and three versions of Windows. In a related development the CEOs of four Windows RT tablet
manufacturers are now claiming descent from Ethelred the Unready.
•
Tim ‘Last Samurai’ Cook. Before taking over from Steve Jobs, the Apple chief was the last of
Japan’s Samurai warrior class, continuing a 1,000 year old tradition of getting Chinese children to
make shiny trinkets then selling them at enormous margins to style-obsessed Westerners. He was
eventually challenged by Korean upstart Sam Sung, who cunningly offered cheaper trinkets with
bigger screens and easier file transfer. Despite a series of titanic battles in friendly courts, the Last
Samurai’s market share went on a downward spiral.
• Gordon ‘Three Wafers’ Moore. (That’s enough back stories – Ed)
Led Astray
We’re used to police forces telling the
public not to approach dangerous
criminals, but December saw possibly
the world’s first official police warning
not to approach a life-threatening app.
The product was, of course, Apple’s
catastrophic new mapping app, and the
force, in Victoria, Australia, warned that
iPhone users looking for the town of
Milura were being sent on a 70km
detour into a national park where cars
get bogged down in sand, temperatures
Apple’s iOS 6 map app: not quite as bad as this.
reach 45 degrees and there’s no water
supply (we bet there’s no 4G signal either).
The app cost two senior Apple execs their jobs, and no doubt resulted in double smoothies all
round at Google HQ after its hastily-authorised iOS 6 map app (complete with special ‘Maps That
Show Places Where They Actually Are’ feature) was downloaded 10 million times in its first two days.
Unable to decide between this and the tale of John McAfee, we’ve had to make them joint winners
of this month’s Short Cuts ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’ award.

Mapping Customer Data

Transcription

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