Column

A must-read for DX promoters! Get your e-learning in place first!

Must Read for DX Promoters! First of all, introduce e-learning! I am Yoda, a member of the Tokyo team who recklessly joined Tatsuno Information Systems with zero IT knowledge. Recently, I have frequently seen the term "Digital Transformation (DX)" on the Internet and in books. I have a vague understanding of the concept of DX, but I am often asked questions such as, "What is the difference between DX and conventional IT utilization? or "Why is DX being promoted in Japan now? and "Why is DX being promoted in Japan now? In this article, we will introduce "Digital Transformation" from among the latest IT trends, and some of the terms may be familiar to those who work in IT-related fields, but we hope you will bear with us. Click here for the Table of Contents What is Digital Transformation (DX)? 2. what is the relationship between digitization and digitalization? 3. let's start promoting DX by introducing e-learning training! 4. Conclusion What is Digital Transformation (DX)? Do you know the term Digital Transformation (DX)? As someone with "zero IT knowledge," this is the first time I have learned about it. I looked up the term and found that it was a concept proposed by Professor Erik Stolterman of Umeå University, Sweden, 15 years ago. He proposed that "the penetration of IT will change people's lives for the better in all aspects. In other words, it is described as "the transformation of a company's culture, organization, and structure into one that can respond with speed to changes in business and society using IT (digital, data, etc.). Change...? Transformation...? It may not ring a bell. To briefly summarize the terms here, DX is the concept of creating new value in existing business processes and business models by utilizing new digital technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, AI, and big data. Specifically, it is as follows. Concept of DX Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Companies are expected to break away from existing businesses and create new value by leveraging new digital technologies, indicating that DX is not only about transforming products and services, but also about changing corporate culture and the resolve to tackle this issue. The following is an introduction to the methods used by companies that have successfully implemented DX initiatives. Have you ever heard of Amazon? There are probably few people who do not know the name of Amazon, the largest Internet retailer. Amazon is cited by most as "a company that combines speed and disruptiveness (change). Amazon was founded in 1994. This was before the release of Windows 95. Although Amazon originally started as an online bookstore, it has seamlessly transformed various operations into IT and IT into operations. Amazon continues to expand its customer contact points both online and in the real world by developing various services based on its customer-first philosophy. Amazon has been so successful that it has been called a model of DX. Source: [Illustration] From "Amazon," the company closest to DX that can be understood in a single chart. The Relationship between Digitization and Digitalization The terms "digitization" and "digitalization" are also used to describe digitization, and it is easy to understand that these two terms can be thought of as one of the stages leading up to DX as a goal. There is a big difference between the two terms in terms of local and global digitization, but the fundamental idea and goal are the same. The names are confusing, so please be careful not to confuse which is which. Here is an explanation of the difference between digitization and digitalization. Digitization Digitization is often described as "digitization," i.e., increasing the efficiency, rationalization, and added value of operations through the use of digital technology. For example, customer lists that used to be managed by paper-based systems can now be converted to databases, and the vast amount of copy/paste work that used to be done manually by humans can be converted to RPA (Robotic Process Automation). The goal is to digitize the company's business processes through the use of digital technology to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. Digitalization Digitalization is the use of digital technology to create new value and profit. In other words, we can only work on digital transformation (DX) if we can achieve digitalization. Digitalization is necessary to achieve digital transformation (DX). Digitization: This refers to local improvements that digitize analog equipment and information. Digitization・・・It refers to improvements that create high added value for the entire organization through digitization, including processes. Digital transformation: Refers to changes that utilize digitization and digitalization to generate innovations that affect society and the economy. Start promoting DX by introducing e-learning training! Today, various digital technologies such as cloud computing, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and IoT (Internet of Things) are evolving, and many companies are moving toward the realization of DX accordingly. Recently, more and more companies are shifting from analog to digital education by utilizing e-learning for their own internal training and training of new employees. E-learning is now attracting a great deal of attention as a new learning format that will change the future of training and education. By utilizing digital technology, employee training can be conducted efficiently and effectively, playing a major role in corporate growth. Paper- and document-intensive organizations are definitely less productive. By converting training materials to digital content, it becomes easier to create video materials. The benefits of going paperless go beyond simply reducing the amount of paper used. By actually watching and learning the scenes and operations, it becomes possible to intuitively understand content that is difficult to understand with words and materials alone. Many paper-based materials are rarely read again after being used once in a training session. If they are stored on a device as digital content, you can immediately refer to them when you encounter a part you don't understand, and you can review them at the time you want to learn without worrying about what others will think. learningBOX offers a full range of features necessary to achieve digital transformation! learningBOX is an LMS that has been introduced in various industries and business sectors. Click here to read about learningBOX case studies The University of Tokyo Disaster Preparedness Training Center ⇒ Training personnel who can act in the event of an actual disaster by utilizing systematic knowledge of disaster countermeasures Wants Japan Corporation ⇒ Providing "learning to live and learning to make use of Conclusion In this article, we introduced "Digital Transformation" among the latest IT trends. We hope that we have been able to add to your IT knowledge about digital transformation (DX), even if only a little. Regarding DX, the digital environment is rapidly improving with the evolution of AI and the spread of 5G and IoT. Now is the time to get in on the DX bandwagon. That's all for this issue! Please stay tuned for the next installment. Reference: Illustrated Guide to the Latest IT Trends Book: Masayoshi Saito
thumbnail (i.e. miniature image)

Duplication of items during user registration

Duplication of items during user registration When registering a user, if there is a duplicate of an item used in another owner-manager's environment, the message "This 00 is already in use. is displayed. Duplicate items include "Login ID," "Display Name," and "E-mail Address. The following is an explanation of duplicate conditions and how to deal with duplicates. Table of Contents 1. reasons for duplicate user registration 2. duplicate conditions and solutions Reasons for duplicate user registration If you are using a shared server, duplicate entries may occur. The reason for this is the structure of the shared server. Shared Server Structure A shared server is a type of rental server where one server is shared by multiple owner-managers. It is like renting a room in a condominium, but with multiple users sharing a single server, similar to a "shared house" service. Therefore, there is a possibility of duplicate entries when registering users. Duplicate conditions and how to deal with them Login ID Login IDs must be unique. Login IDs used in other owner-manager environments cannot be registered. The following letters and symbols can be used, so please create a mixture of numbers and special characters to prevent duplication. Character and symbols that can be used One-byte alphanumeric characters (a-z 0-9), special characters (! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? [ \ \frz24}^ _ `) Supplemental information: If you subscribe to the "Customize" paid option, you can use duplicate login IDs from other owner-manager environments when registering users. *Only users can be duplicated. Owner-administrator login IDs cannot be duplicated. If you wish to use this feature, please follow the procedure below. (1) Select "Site Customizer" from the side menu. (2) Click on "Basic Settings. (3) Open the "Login Form Settings" tab, turn off the "Login from other than the user's main URL" toggle, and save the settings. Open the "Basic Information" tab, turn the "Allow duplicate login IDs for general users under other subdomain owners" toggle to On, and save the settings. Display Name The following letters and symbols can be used as well as login IDs, so please create a mixture of numbers and special characters to prevent duplicates. Character and symbols that can be used Half-width alphanumeric characters (a-z 0-9), special characters (! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? [ \ \frz24}^ _ `) *If you are using Ver. 2.20 or higher, you can duplicate your registration with one already registered in another owner-manager's environment. E-mail address To deal with duplicates, you can create aliases for E-mail addresses using the "+" symbol. For Gmail, type "+00", and for non-Gmail, type "++00" before the "@". Note that all e-mail will be received at the original e-mail address before the "+00" is added. Example) 0000++user1@learningbox.co.jp・・・① 0000++user2@learningbox.co.jp・・・② All e-mails received at ① and ② will be sent to "00000000@learningbox.co.jp". *If you are using Ver. 2.20 or higher, duplication is possible under the following conditions.  In the environment of other owner-managers,  E-mail address registered as a user account ・・・ Duplication OK  E-mail address registered as an owner account ・・・ Duplication is not allowed  

Building a development environment with Proxmox

This is Nishimura from the development team. We have been using an instance of AWS (Amazon Web Services) for the development of learningBOX, but we are about to switch to development on our in-house server because of some inconveniences. Click here for the table of contents. 1. inconvenient truth about aws 2. considered commercial PCs... 3. assembled it 4. installing ProxmoxVE 5. steps to speed up the drive on Proxmox 6. moving an instance from an existing proxmox environment 7. so, did it get faster? 8. future plan Inconvenient truth about aws Convenient aws for operation, but not for development environment... Actually, it's not very fast. We mainly used T3 instances for development, but to be honest, T3 instances are not very fast, are they? If you use C5 series or Z1d, you can accelerate up to 4GHz, but honestly speaking, it is expensive. If you want to use multiple cores, the cost will be several times higher. Large instances are expensive. In fact, it may not be very fast, but using an instance with a large memory and fast CPU will cost you several tens of thousands of yen per month. There are no instances that are just right. If the memory required for development is 2.1 GB, you need an instance with 4 GB of memory. Isn't this wasteful? You may be able to get around this by using virtual memory or something, but the moment it no longer fits in the real memory, the processing capacity will drop by an order of magnitude. I want to use an instance of just the right size. I considered a commercial PC, but... I thought about buying a commercial PC and virtualizing it, but I just didn't have the right one. I don't need Windows. I don't need it. I can't remove it, or even if I do, it's not nearly as cheap. I don't need a GPU. Most PCs with fast CPUs have a high-performance GPU. You don't need one. (It may be necessary if desktop virtualization is installed, but this has not been tested.) I don't need a mouse or keyboard. I don't need it. I put it together. If you don't have just the right one, build it! So I assembled a PC for the first time in a year. The parts I used are as follows. All parts are shown except the case. For some reason, the case of a ping-pong racket is shown, but it has nothing to do with the case. Description of main parts Motherboard No particular preference CPU Core i9 10900 I chose this CPU for its single-threaded performance. I considered 10900K, but I thought 0.1GHz was not worth the 20,000 yen difference in price, so I decided to go with 10900. DRAM I installed 32GB of DRAM which is reasonably fast. I will add more if it is not enough. SSD I installed 1TB of a reasonably fast SSD (3GB/s). Power supply I chose a good power supply, as I was told by God that I should buy a good one. GPU Not included for now. Install ProxmoxVE Using an entire PC may be the fastest way, but that is not an effective use of equipment, so we built a virtual environment with ProxmoxVE. On the virtual environment, we are running Amazon Linux 2. The procedure for running Amazon Linux 2 will be introduced in another article. I thought the installation would be a piece of cake, but I wasted a lot of time because of a defective block on the USB flash drive I created for the installation. It would be better to make a habit of checking for bad blocks when making installation media. Steps to speed up the drive on Proxmox This is the one that good kids should not imitate, but you can improve disk IO on a virtual environment by enabling disk caching as much as possible. It will probably be faster than reading/writing directly without the virtual environment. However, good kids should not imitate this procedure, because if the power goes down before the write is completed, it will break. Moving an instance from an existing proxmox environment I got into a lot of trouble, but I won't go into it here because it would take too long to explain. If you read the error messages carefully, you will be able to manage most of the problems. If you don't understand what is wrong even after reading the error messages, you can usually figure it out by reading the source code. Do your best. Migration is not possible if the VM is linked to other VMs. You can't migrate if you are using a physical drive or mounting a device for CloudInit. Remove the device. If you haven't already created a Cluster in your company, create one in your existing Proxmox environment and add a new virtual environment to it. Frankly, I'm not very good at infrastructure, so we're looking for engineers who can manage this area for us! (Working at the head office in Tatsuno City, Hyogo Prefecture) So, did it get faster? We compared the time taken to test our learningBOX (automated backend testing with PHPUnit). Comparison results AWS environment (t2.small): 2.63 minutes Old Proxmox environment (Core i5 9600K): 1.22 minutes New Proxmox environment (Core i9 10900): 1.1 minutes The difference between the two environments below is not big, but the difference between the aws environment and the Proxmox environment is obvious. c5 and others improve a little more, but the difference between the Proxmox environment and the aws environment is still big. Operating frequency during auto-test When there is no load, it is stable at 2.8GHz, but when a load is applied, it instantly rises to around 5GHz. Faster auto-testing directly affects work efficiency. Whether or not strict TDD is performed, automated testing is indispensable for development above a certain scale. If a test results in an error, or if a new test is created, you cannot proceed to the next task until the automated testing process is complete. On a typical day, we may run a test 20 or 30 times per day, and if we can save a minute per test, we can save that much time to develop new features or improve code quality. Future Policies With the construction of the Proxmox environment, we now have two hardware units to support the virtual environment, and we have also achieved migration between virtual environments. However, three servers are required to build a HA (High Availability) environment, and we intend to build a third environment to realize a stable private cloud, even when the Zen3 generation of Ryzen is released.
How can we help you?