Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations. Accelerate packaged (COTS) software implementations, increase returns on investment, and reduce implementation costs and customizations with this book and

Grady Brett Beaubouef

Using packaged software for Customer Relationship Management or Enterprise Resource Planning is often seen as a sure-fire way to reduce costs, refocus scarce resources, and increase returns on investment. However, research shows that the majority of packaged or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations fail to provide this value due to the implementation approach taken.Authored by Grady Brett Beaubouef, who has over fifteen years of packaged software implementation experience, this book will help you define an effective implementation strategy for your packaged software investment.The book focuses on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations, and helps you to successfully implement packaged software. Using a step-by-step approach, it begins with an assessment of the limitations of current implementation methods for packaged software. It then helps you to analyze your requirements and offers 10 must-know principles gleaned from real-world packaged software implementations. These 10 principles cover how to maximize enhancements and minimize customizations, focus on business results, and negotiate for success, and so on. You will learn how to best leverage these principles as part of your implementation. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to put packaged software into action with forethought, planning, and proper execution. Doing so will lead to reductions in implementation costs, customizations, and development time.

Edge Computing with Amazon Web Services. A practical guide to architecting secure edge cloud infrastructure with AWS

Sean Howard

The surge in connected edge devices has driven organizations to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the massive amounts of data generated by these devices. However, adapting to this landscape demands significant changes in application architectures.This book serves as your guide to edge computing fundamentals, shedding light on the constraints and risks inherent in selecting solutions within this domain. You’ll explore an extensive suite of edge computing services from AWS, gaining insights into when and how to use AWS Outposts, AWS Wavelength, AWS Local Zones, AWS Snow Family, and AWS IoT Greengrass. With detailed use cases, technical requirements, and architectural patterns, you’ll master the practical implementation of these services and see how they work in real life through step-by-step examples, using the AWS CLI and AWS Management Console. To conclude, you’ll delve into essential security and operational considerations to maximize the value delivered by AWS services.By the end of this book, you'll be ready to design powerful edge computing architectures and handle complex edge computing use cases across multiple AWS services.

Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook. Over 90 recipes to build and customize AI entities for your games with Unity - Second Edition

Jorge Palacios

Interactive and engaging games come with intelligent enemies, and this intellectual behavior is combined with a variety of techniques collectively referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Exploring Unity's API, or its built-in features, allows limitless possibilities when it comes to creating your game's worlds and characters. This cookbook covers both essential and niche techniques to help you take your AI programming to the next level.To start with, you’ll quickly run through the essential building blocks of working with an agent, programming movement, and navigation in a game environment, followed by improving your agent's decision-making and coordination mechanisms – all through hands-on examples using easily customizable techniques. You’ll then discover how to emulate the vision and hearing capabilities of your agent for natural and humanlike AI behavior, and later improve the agents with the help of graphs. This book also covers the new navigational mesh with improved AI and pathfinding tools introduced in the Unity 2018 update. You’ll empower your AI with decision-making functions by programming simple board games, such as tic-tac-toe and checkers, and orchestrate agent coordination to get your AIs working together as one.By the end of this book, you’ll have gained expertise in AI programming and developed creative and interactive games.

Cracking the Data Science Interview. Unlock insider tips from industry experts to master the data science field

Leondra R. Gonzalez, Aaren Stubberfield, Angela Baltes

The data science job market is saturated with professionals of all backgrounds, including academics, researchers, bootcampers, and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) graduates. This poses a challenge for companies seeking the best person to fill their roles. At the heart of this selection process is the data science interview, a crucial juncture that determines the best fit for both the candidate and the company.Cracking the Data Science Interview provides expert guidance on approaching the interview process with full preparation and confidence. Starting with an introduction to the modern data science landscape, you’ll find tips on job hunting, resume writing, and creating a top-notch portfolio. You’ll then advance to topics such as Python, SQL databases, Git, and productivity with shell scripting and Bash. Building on this foundation, you'll delve into the fundamentals of statistics, laying the groundwork for pre-modeling concepts, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. The book concludes by offering insights into how best to prepare for the intensive data science interview.By the end of this interview guide, you’ll have gained the confidence, business acumen, and technical skills required to distinguish yourself within this competitive landscape and land your next data science job.

Building AI Intensive Python Applications. Create intelligent apps with LLMs and vector databases

Rachelle Palmer, Ben Perlmutter, Ashwin Gangadhar, Nicholas Larew, ...

The era of generative AI is upon us, and this book serves as a roadmap to harness its full potential. With its help, you’ll learn the core components of the AI stack: large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and Python frameworks, and see how these technologies work together to create intelligent applications.The chapters will help you discover best practices for data preparation, model selection, and fine-tuning, and teach you advanced techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to overcome common challenges, such as hallucinations and data leakage. You’ll get a solid understanding of vector databases, implement effective vector search strategies, refine models for accuracy, and optimize performance to achieve impactful results. You’ll also identify and address AI failures to ensure your applications deliver reliable and valuable results. By evaluating and improving the output of LLMs, you’ll be able to enhance their performance and relevance.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to build sophisticated AI applications that deliver real-world value.

PhoneGap for Enterprise. Master the art of building secure enterprise mobile applications using PhoneGap

Kerri Shotts

Visual Studio 2013 Cookbook. Understanding the latest features of Visual Studio can speed up and streamline your projects. And there’s no better learning tool than this collection of focused recipes that gives you the fast, hands-on experience you need

Jeff Martin, Richard Banks, Richard Bruce Banks

Documentum Content Management Foundations: EMC Proven Professional Certification Exam E20-120 Study Guide. Learn the technical fundamentals of the EMC Documentum platform while effectively preparing for the E20-120 exam

Pawan Kumar

This is a complete study guide including study material and practice questions to prepare for the EMC Proven Professional certification Exam E20-120. It can also serve Documentum beginners and practitioners as a handy guide and quick reference to the technical fundamentals that is fully up to date for Documentum 5.3. Beginners are introduced to concepts in a logical manner while practitioners can use it as a reference to jump to relevant concepts directly.EMC Documentum is a leading enterprise content management technology platform that helps enterprises to streamline the capture, processing, and distribution of business information including documents, records, e-mails, web content, images, reports, and digital assets. It can also automate entire business processes in accordance with business rules. EMC Proven Professional is an exam-based certification program, which introduced a new EMC Proven Content Management Application Developer (EMCAD) track in early 2007. The first exam in this track is Content Management Foundations (CMF) Associate-level Exam, with exam code E20-120, which tests knowledge about technical fundamentals of Documentum. This book is a study guide to help you prepare for this exam with hundreds of practice questions and an efficient exam-preparation strategy.

Software Architecture with C++. Design modern systems using effective architecture concepts, design patterns, and techniques with C++20

Adrian Ostrowski, Piotr Gaczkowski

Software architecture refers to the high-level design of complex applications. It is evolving just like the languages we use, but there are architectural concepts and patterns that you can learn to write high-performance apps in a high-level language without sacrificing readability and maintainability. If you're working with modern C++, this practical guide will help you put your knowledge to work and design distributed, large-scale apps. You'll start by getting up to speed with architectural concepts, including established patterns and rising trends, then move on to understanding what software architecture actually is and start exploring its components. Next, you'll discover the design concepts involved in application architecture and the patterns in software development, before going on to learn how to build, package, integrate, and deploy your components. In the concluding chapters, you'll explore different architectural qualities, such as maintainability, reusability, testability, performance, scalability, and security. Finally, you will get an overview of distributed systems, such as service-oriented architecture, microservices, and cloud-native, and understand how to apply them in application development.By the end of this book, you'll be able to build distributed services using modern C++ and associated tools to deliver solutions as per your clients' requirements.

Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration. A practical guide to integrating Line of Business systems with BizTalk Server 2010

Carl Darski, Thiago Almeida, Sergei Moukhnitski, Richard Seroter, ...

Microsoft BizTalk is an integration and connectivity server solution that allows businesses to connect disparate systems easily. In today’s business climate of mergers and acquisitions, more and more enterprises are forced to exchange data across disparate Line of Business systems using integration brokers like BizTalk Server 2010. What is often overlooked when integrating these systems is the pre-requisite knowledge that ERP and CRM systems demand in order to effectively integrate them. No longer is this knowledge locked up in the heads of expensive consultants. Gain an edge within your organization by developing valuable skills in the area of Line of Business integration from this book.This book will show you how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems using practical scenarios. Each chapter will take a Line of Business system, introduce some pre-requisite knowledge and demonstrate how you can integrate BizTalk with that Line of Business system, and then provide guidance based upon real world experience, taking your BizTalk knowledge further.This book will enable you to master how to integrate BizTalk with Line of Business systems effectively. The book starts by highlighting the technical foundation of WCF-LOB adapters and the common steps and important properties pertaining to popular WCF-LOB adapters. You will then move on to an overview of how to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server using the WCF based SQL Server adapter. The book then dives into topics such as integrating BizTalk Server with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, building BizTalk/SAP integrated solutions using IDocs, the differences between IDocs and RFCs/BAPIs, and integrating BizTalk with Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus amongst others.

The Complete Kubernetes Guide. Become an expert in container management with the power of Kubernetes

Jonathan Baier, Gigi Sayfan, Jesse White

If you are running a number of containers and want to be able to automate the way they’re managed, it can be helpful to have Kubernetes at your disposal. This Learning Path guides you through core Kubernetes constructs, such as pods, services, replica sets, replication controllers, and labels. You'll get started by learning how to integrate your build pipeline and deployments in a Kubernetes cluster. As you cover more chapters in the Learning Path, you'll get up to speed with orchestrating updates behind the scenes, avoiding downtime on your cluster, and dealing with underlying cloud provider instability in your cluster. With the help of real-world use cases, you'll also explore options for network configuration, and understand how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot various Kubernetes networking plugins. In addition to this, you'll gain insights into custom resource development and utilization in automation and maintenance workflows.By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the expertise you need to progress from an intermediate to an advanced level of understanding Kubernetes.This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products:• Getting Started with Kubernetes - Third Edition by Jonathan Baier and Jesse White• Mastering Kubernetes - Second Edition by Gigi Sayfan

Building Wireless Sensor Networks Using Arduino. Leverage the powerful Arduino and XBee platforms to monitor and control your surroundings

Matthijs Kooijman

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook. This is the only reference you need to implement and manage Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager in your business. Takes you from design to configuration in logical steps, and even covers basic Certificate Management and troubleshooting

Kent Nordstrom, Kent Nordstr?É?íÂ!?m

Microsoft's Forefront Identity Manager simplifies enterprise identity management for end users by automating admin tasks and integrating the infrastructure of an enterprise with strong authentication systems.The Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook is an in-depth guide to Identity Management. You will learn how to manage users and groups and implement self-service parts. This book also covers basic Certificate Management and troubleshooting.Throughout the book we will follow a fictional case study. You will see how to implement IM and also set up Smart Card logon for strong administrative accounts within Active Directory. You will learn to implement all the features of FIM 2010 R2. You will see how to install a complete FIM 2010 R2 infrastructure including both test and production environment. You will be introduced to Self-Service management of both users and groups. FIM Reports to audit the identity management lifecycle are also discussed in detail.With the Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook you will be able implement and manage FIM 2010 R2 almost effortlessly.

Incident Response in the Age of Cloud. Techniques and best practices to effectively respond to cybersecurity incidents

Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Cybercriminals are always in search of new methods to infiltrate systems. Quickly responding to an incident will help organizations minimize losses, decrease vulnerabilities, and rebuild services and processes.In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with most organizations gravitating towards remote working and cloud computing, this book uses frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK® and the SANS IR model to assess security risks.The book begins by introducing you to the cybersecurity landscape and explaining why IR matters. You will understand the evolution of IR, current challenges, key metrics, and the composition of an IR team, along with an array of methods and tools used in an effective IR process. You will then learn how to apply these strategies, with discussions on incident alerting, handling, investigation, recovery, and reporting.Further, you will cover governing IR on multiple platforms and sharing cyber threat intelligence and the procedures involved in IR in the cloud. Finally, the book concludes with an “Ask the Experts” chapter wherein industry experts have provided their perspective on diverse topics in the IR sphere.By the end of this book, you should become proficient at building and applying IR strategies pre-emptively and confidently.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting. Everything you need to know to work with reports in Dynamics CRM 2011

Damian Hernan Sinay

All of the data entered into a CRM means nothing if it is unable to report the important information to our managers and executives in such a way that they can easily and quickly get the results they need. A better reporting system would enable them to make the necessary improvements to the processes that any business needs in a dynamic business world.For users and developers wishing to take advantage of using the report capabilities of Dynamics CRM, this is the book for you.Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting is a practical and excellent reference guide that provides you with a number of different options you can use to create and empower the Reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM. This will give you a good grounding in using the reports in your Dynamics CRM 2011 implementations.This book looks at all the different options we can use to create reports in Dynamics CRM 2011, starting with SQL Reporting Services and custom reports, created in either CRM Report Wizard, SQL Report Builder, or Visual Studio. It will also show other options we can use such as dashboards, charts, and different ways to optimize and automate reports.We will also learn how to build our own reports either using the different wizards for basic reports or using Visual Studio for more complex reports. We will explore the options mobile CRM users have who want to run and see reports on these mobile devices.

Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. An in-depth scenario-driven approach to architecting systems using Microsoft technologies

Stephen Thomas, Stephen W. Thomas, Mike Sexton, Rama Ramani, ...

Every day, architects and developers are asked to solve specific business problems in the most efficient way possible using a broad range of technologies. Packed with real-world examples of how to use the latest Microsoft technologies, this book tackles over a dozen specific use case patterns and provides an applied implementation with supporting code downloads for every chapter.In this book, we guide you through thirteen architectural patterns and provide detailed code samples for the following technologies: Windows Server AppFabric, Windows Azure Platform AppFabric, SQL Server (including Integration Services, Service Broker, and StreamInsight), BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This book brings together – and simplifies – the information and methodology you need to make the right architectural decisions and use a broad range of the Microsoft platform to meet your requirements. Throughout the book, we will follow a consistent architectural decision framework which considers key business, organizational, and technology factors.The book is broken up into four sections. First, we define the techniques and methodologies used to make architectural decisions throughout the book. In Part I, we provide a set of primers designed to get you up to speed with each of the technologies demonstrated in the book. Part II looks at messaging patterns and includes use cases which highlight content-based routing, workflow, publish/subscribe, and distributed messaging. Part III digs into data processing patterns and looks at bulk data processing, complex events, multi-master synchronization, and more. Finally, Part IV covers performance-related patterns including low latency, failover to the cloud, and reference data caching.