OracleAppsBlog

A day in the life of an Oracle Applications Consultant

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

JD Edwards Blog by Andy Klee at ITtoolbox

There’s a new JD Edwards blog at ITtoolbox called What’s Hot & What’s Not with JD Edwards. Looks like it’s going to have some good content.

The About section of the Blog says:

Welcome to my blog for the JD Edwards community. I’ve been a JD Edwards consultant for the past 16 years, and in the last 5 years I’ve headed up Klee Associates, Inc, providing consulting and training services for JD Edwards, Oracle, and SAP clients. Reading this blog will keep you up to date on the important (and no so important) happenings at Oracle, the current custodians of the JD Edwards product line.

The Author Bio reads as follows:

As President of Klee Associates, Andy leads one of the premier independent JD Edwards consulting firms in North America. He considers himself very fortunate to have been able to attract some of the best people in the business to the Klee team. He is totally committed to differentiating Klee Associates from the teaming masses of consulting firms roaming the ERP landscape.

He started with JD Edwards in 1989 and has been involved in training, consulting, and project management for over 16 years. He was one of the first consultants to implement the Energy and Chemical Suite. He also has over 10 years experience with Advanced Pricing, dating back to before the first release on A7.1.

Andy developed the concept of Mastery Workshops for the install base in 2001, and is busy creating more value-add services for both new clients, and the install base. In late 2002, Andy made a decision to start SAPtips, and OraTips was rolled out in mid 2005.

Andy moved to the Western Slope of Colorado in 1999 after living 22 years in Denver.

Andy’s first post is entitled Blog 1 - What’s Up (or Down) With Fusion? and makes this interesting statement:

Gazing into my crystal ball, I predict that by 2008, Oracle will release Fusion Financials. That will allow them to claim victory, but still leave most of us wondering when there will be enough rationale to make the move. The whole thing will be done by 2014, forcing Oracle to extend the 2013 deadline for support for World and EnterpriseOne to 2016.

I like what Andy has done here and I’m sure it will educate people as to what’s going on in Project Fusion. Recommend you add the ITtoolbox Popular Blogs and New Blogs RSS feeds to your feed reader.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Oracle and Profit Magazine now have RSS feeds

I recently blogged about Oracle adding extensive RSS support to the OTN forums. Yesterday I noticed that both the Oracle and Profit Magazine now have RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Subscribing to the feeds means you’ll be notified of what’s in a new issue of each of these magazines.

It’s nice to see that Oracle is taking RSS seriously and attaching feeds to most areas of their site. My only complaint to date is that they haven’t attached an RSS feed to their Press Releases so I have to visit the site every day to see whether it’s been updated rather than receiving a notification via RSS.

Links to the feeds:

• Oracle Magazine
• Profit

Oracle ACE program

Congratulations to Mark Rittman, who’s just blogged that he’s been awarded the “Oracle Magazine Editor’s Choice” award for “Oracle ACE of the Year 2005”, and has just taken part in an interview that’ll appear in Oracle Magazine in Nov/Dec 2005.

What’s an Oracle ACE?

According to the Oracle ACE site:

To foster the growing community network that is a fixture of the Oracle “ecosystem,” Oracle has launched the Oracle ACE program, which formally recognizes Oracle advocates with strong credentials as “activists” in that network.

Oracle ACEs are technically proficient and eager to share their experience, whether through writing books, articles, or blogs, speaking at events, participating in OTN Discussion Forums, or simply serving as Oracle advocates in their respective organizations. Candidates are nominated by either existing Oracle ACEs or Oracle product management on an ongoing basis and ratified by a nomination committee.

I think this program is a great way to encourage individuals to promote your organization and associated products. You’ll notice when reading through the Oracle ACE profile’s that some of the ACE’s have their own blogs and most of the individuals mentioned have written thousands of posts on the OTN forums.

Mark’s blog covers the more technical aspects of Oracle and inspired me to create a blog that was more applications orientated. Looking forward to a meet up of all the Oracle bloggers at the UKOUG conference.

I’m really interested to see who the other winners are in the Oracle Magazine Editor’s Choice awards for 2005 and will update the blog when I find out.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Forums now have RSS support

Been meaning to blog about this since it was announced but only remembered to now. The OTN forums now have extensive RSS support i.e. you can subscribe to entire categories or an individual discussion.

You’ll find a comprehensive listing of RSS feeds you can subscribe to here.

Justin Kestelyn announced this on the OTN blog and had this to say:

Thanks to a major software upgrade (we’ve gone from v2.6.5 of Jive to 4.1.2), the OTN discussion forums now include native RSS feeds, user status levels, more accurate and reliable search, and a much improved UI.

Excellent work, congratulations to the OTN team!

Sunday, August 14, 2005

A Better Learning Environment (ABLE) at Harvard University

This post discusses the Harvard University systems support site and the use of Oracle 11i and Peoplesoft at this institution.

A Better Learning Environment (ABLE) is a support site for users of Harvard Universities systems. More specifically, the site provides support for Financial Applications (Oracle), HR Applications (Peoplesoft), Reporting Applications (Financial and HR) and for Harvard’s Central Administration Staff.

The resources available at the site include: -

• Forms
• Policies
• Rates & Schedules
• Work Instructions & Processes

Of particular interest is the section on Chart of Accounts (CoA) which outlines the account structure they implemented at Harvard.

For Financial Applications Harvard runs Oracle eBS and you can read about their upgrade to 11i from 11.0.3 in January 2003 here. According to the newsletter the upgrade introduced a new look and feel, new login techniques, and a new method of navigation for Web Voucher, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Budget Tool, AWS2, HUDINI, and Applications Administration.

In November 2004 the University upgraded from 11.5.5 to 11.5.9 which you can read about here.

The Universities Administrative Systems e-news is an interesting insight into how ERP systems are run and maintained. According to the site:

The Office of Human Resources publishes a semimonthly electronic newsletter for users of University financial, HR, and reporting systems, policies, and procedures. It contains:

• Updates on projects underway to build or improve University administrative systems
• Information about new University financial, HR, and reporting policies, procedures, and forms
• Reminders about upcoming deadlines and cutover dates
• Tips and tricks for working more easily or productively

On the e-news site you will also find back issues of the publication as well as a useful index by topic.