OracleAppsBlog

Thursday, December 16, 2004

OAUG Connection Point 2005 - Call for papers now open

If you’re planning on speaking at or attending OAUG Connection Point 2005 the call for papers is now open.

OAUG Connection Point 2005 Conference is taking place in Dallas, Texas from June the 13th - 16th of June, 2005. The conference will be held at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Conference Center, Dallas, Texas, USA. According to the conference web site: -

OAUG Connection Point 2005 will provide you with an unparalleled networking and educational environment and will be attended by users of Oracle Applications who are seeking to maximize their knowledge, experience and understanding of the applications that they use to run their organizations.

The call for papers closes on the 7th of February 2005. I’m certainly hoping to make this conference as the OAUG events are normally very well attended.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Finally!! - Oracle Buys Peoplesoft

Well, I guess it’s good news if you are an Oracle Consultant or Implementor like myself. If you’re a JD Edwards or Peoplesoft Consultant or Implementor it could be interesting times.

After a long and protracted take over battle, Oracle has finally bought Peoplesoft. I remember thinking at the beginning of Oracle’s take over efforts that it was going to happen one way or the other and so it has. Fortunately, Oracle in taking over Peoplesoft has also managed to swallow up J.D. Edwards so now they only really have SAP, Microsoft and the Open Source Movement to contend with. You can check out the official press statement here. I noted with interest the following lines in the press statement: -

This merger works because we will have more customers, which increases our ability to invest more in applications development and support. We intend to enhance PeopleSoft 8 and develop a PeopleSoft 9 and enhance a JD Edwards 5 and develop a JD Edwards 6. We intend to immediately extend and improve support for existing JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers worldwide.

I guess this offers some relief to Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards customers in the short term but knowing how difficult it could be to integrate these products
into Oracle E-Business Suite I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle decides to kill both of them and just retain the customers and some of the skills and infrastructure used to build, distribute, market and sell these products.

Also check out the Oracle Peoplesoft Page for more in depth information on the deal.

Monday, December 13, 2004

Enabling Timezone feature in Oracle 11i

Timezone (with day light savings!) feature is available in Oracle 9i Release 2 onwards. This post attempts to describe the steps required to enable Timezone functionality in Oracle Service module.

Recently I was at a client site and the client is desperately looking for this feature mainly to handle increasing number of client calls from multiple timezones. When customer support personnel attend a client call, it is important to know the client’s timezone and talk in terms of their timezone. It is also helpful to see all the date/time information in local timezone to better perceieve about the actual start time or scheduled start time for any activity. The database timezone is setup as GMT but the user wants to setup their own timezone based on their work location. This is exactly what Oracle 11i provides ( with Oracle database 9i Release 2 onwards).

After playing with the setups for few hours with some help from the dba I was able to make the timezone feature work in the client’s test instance (11.5.9). We also noticed that new functionality has been added in the calendar popup window to convert date/time into a different timezone. Here is how the new calendar window looks:

The following are the setup steps:

Oracle Environment variable Setup ( DBA Setup)

Please make sure that timezlrg.dat file exists in the database $ORACLE_HOME directory.

[1]. Add ORA_TZFILE environment variable in SID_hostname.env file present in database and application $ORACLE_HOME directory.

Example:
a) enter the following command in Unix:
ORA_TZFILE=$ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo/timezlrg.dat
export ORA_TZFILE

b) save the SID_hostname.env file in the in the database $ORACLE_HOME directory

c) shutdown and restart the database.

[2]. Run the following query in Sqlplus to verify that the v$timezone_names view is populated:

>select count(*) from v$timezone_names;
COUNT(*)
----------
1286
The number of count should be increased due to new environment variable.

[3]. Try to login to Applications again with the client timezone set.

System Profile Options( Apps sysadmin setup)

Responsibility: System Administrator
Navigation: profile > System

Client Timezone : (GMT -06:00) Central Time
Enable Timezone Conversions : Yes
Server Timezone : (GMT +00:00) GMT
Service: Default value for Service Request Timezone type List Item:  Agent

User Preference( User setup)

Navigation : E-Business Suite Home > Preferences

• Sergio Leunissen
• Torsten Reichert
• Mark Rittman
• Pete Finnegan
• Don Shade
• Steve Muench
• Steve Anderson
• Bob Watkins
• Jonas Jacobi

I enjoyed reading all the contributions but in particular though Mark Rittman’s effort was really good.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Discoverer Viewer and Portal Integration Demonstration

I recently came across two online video demonstrations of Oracle Discoverer Viewer and its Integration into Oracle Portal on Oracle’s Discoverer Page. This post contains the links to the videos.

According to the Oracle Discoverer Page: -

Discoverer is an intuitive ad-hoc query, reporting, analysis, and Web-publishing tool that empowers business users at all levels of the organization to gain immediate access to information from data marts, data warehouses, online transaction processing systems and Oracle E-Business Suite.

Online demos are here: -

• Discoverer Viewer
• Discoverer Portal Integration

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 - Vision Instance

This post contains details of a publicly accessible Oracle Application 11.5.10 Vision instance.

When I met Karen Brownfield at an Atlanta Oracle User Group meeting two weeks ago she mentioned that Solution Beacon (who currently host a freely accessible 11.5.8 and 11.5.9 Vision Instance) would shortly be hosting a publicly accessible 11.5.10 instance. I noticed over the weekend that this instance is now available. I think providing this type of facility for public access is extremely cool. All you have to do is fill out the free registration and you are allocated a user name and password.

I’ve noticed there’s quite a few new modules and a slightly new look and I hope to be writing on these over the next couple of months. You can access this instance here and you will need to run through the installation of the new version of Jinitiator (1.3.1.18). I would advise you to de-install any existing Jinitiator versions you have. I performed the install on my new IBM X40 laptop (which came with my new job) and since there were no prior versions of Jinitiator I haven’t run into any issues. Also remember that if you have any pop up blocking software installed, you should allow pop ups for the Vision Instance URL as the Jinitiator software install will not start with popup blocking on the URL.

Well done to Solution Beacon for providing this instance and I hope readers enjoy accessing this system and taking a look at what’s new.

ExpressionEngine - Upgrade to Version 1.2

My site has been up and down for the last couple of days due to a technical problem which I’m still in the process of resolving. I took the opportunity to upgrade to version 1.2 of Expression Engine which has recently been released - this post contains details of what’s in the new version and an analysis of the blogs recent performance.

Despite my lack of attention to the blog in the last 2 months I still seem to be getting fairly good traffic and the membership is growing. When I last reported on blog performance after my upgrade to EE v1.1 on the 23rd of August, I had 159 members. Since then the membership has grown to 321 members. My web stats for the month of November 2004 were as follows: -

• No. of Unique Visitors - 2,071
• Total No. of Visits - 7,381
• Page Views - 100,143
• Hits - 114,388

According to the Expression Engine site the main improvement between release 1.1 and 1.2 is the photo gallery which enables users to organise and display their digital photos on the web. To see a detailed listing of what’s in the new version check out the change log. 

Release 11.5.10 Financials - New Features

Two weeks ago I spoke at the Atlanta Oracle Applications User Group meeting and also attended a breakout session headed up by Karen Brownfield of Solution Beacon which discussed the new features in 11.5.10. This post contains the presentation which Karen kindly agreed for me to upload and also has links to other sources of information on 11.5.10. 

The presentation in question was presented at the OAUG Connection Point 2004 Conference and I thought it would be useful to share it with readers of the blog. It covers the following areas of Financials: -

• Payables
• Internet Expenses
• Cash Management
• Property Manager
• Assets
• iAssets
• Receivables
• Bill Presentment
• Advanced Collections
• iReceivables
• General Ledger
• Enterprise Budgeting and Planning

Credits for the preparation of this presentation on Release 11.5.10 Financials New Features should go to the following: -

• Karen Brownfield - Solution Beacon
• Don Driggs - Solution Beacon
• Mark Clark - O2Works
• Judy Vales - DARC Corporation

Additionally, you can visit the Oracle 11i10 page for various presentations and videos on the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.