OracleAppsBlog

A day in the life of an Oracle Applications Consultant

Friday, September 30, 2005

Oracle Executive Blogs and Corporate or CEO Blog lists

Niall Litchfield mentioned the other day that Oracle Executives are now blogging. I thought I’d give it a quick mention on this blog as well as provide some links to other corporate and CEO blogs.

It’s nice to see that they’ve finally caught up with SAP who’ve had executive blogs for quite some time.

The executives blogging so far and their profiles are as follows: -

John Wookey
John Wookey is senior vice president of Applications Development, responsible for the strategic direction and development of JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Oracle business applications. He has worked with Oracle applications including Customer Relationship Management, Financials, and Projects, as well as Oracle’s Healthcare, Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Student Systems groups.

Jesper Andersen
Jesper Andersen is senior vice president of Application Strategy, where he is responsible for the overall product strategy and direction for Oracle’s business applications. He brings more than 15 years of development and technical experience to his role with the company.

Cliff Godwin
Cliff Godwin is senior vice president of Applications Technology. His Applications Technology Group is responsible for ensuring that Oracle Applications effectively leverage Oracle’s systems technologies, and for building the common objects and services used throughout Oracle Applications.

Although these are called blogs they aren’t interactive as they don’t have comments enabled. It would be nice to see Oracle follow in the footsteps of the General Motors fastlane blog and have comments enabled. Certainly this would allow them to have a two way conversation with their customers. Secondly, these Exec blogs don’t have RSS support, hopefully this will be provided in the future.

If you’re interested in taking a look at other Corporate or CEO blogs then browse the following lists maintained at the New PR Wiki:

CEO Blogs List
CEO Intranet Blogs List
Corporate Blogs List
Product Blogs List

Related entries:

SAP versus Oracle Blogs
Oracle Executive Biographies

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Headstart Oracle Designer for Oracle Apps 11i

I recently stumbled across the Headstart web pages on the Oracle site and since I’d never heard about it, thought I would do a post on it so that I could educate myself as well as other readers as to what it really is.

According to the Headstart Oracle Designer site:

Headstart Oracle Designer is an add-on to Oracle Designer, based on Oracle Consulting best practices. It consists of two components:

1. Headstart Template Package, a sophisticated set of templates and reusable components that allow you to 100% generate a truly professional Graphical User Interface (GUI) which can be deployed on the Web.
2. Headstart Utilities, a productivity suite that checks and enforces the world wide Oracle Custom Development standards and significantly accelerates your development cycle through automation of time-consuming tasks in Oracle. Headstart fully support CDM RuleFrame with powerful utilities that transform business rules to business rule design definitions, create deployment packages for your business logic layer and let you create an access layer to your business logic in only a few moments. For more information on CDM RuleFrame take a look at the related white papers.

You’ll find fact sheets, demonstrations, white papers and related offerings on the site.

Headstart for Oracle Apps 11i apparently provides you with the following benefits:

• Fast delivery because of the highly productive tool set
• Fully integrated analysis and design information in a single repository
• GUI that is fully compliant with forms-based Oracle Applications
• Easy to maintain systems that are fully documented, fully generated, and completely managed from a central repository
• Headstart for Oracle Apps unites the power of both Oracle Designer and the Application Object Library. Headstart for Oracle Apps lets the powerful application generators of Oracle Designer use the objects from AOL. Headstart for Oracle Apps, in conjunction with the Application Object Library, allows the generators to generate application modules that have the same look and feel as the forms used in Oracle Applications. Menus, messaging, navigation, user interface components and special Oracle Applications features are fully generated by Oracle Designer.
• It is also possible to build applications that interface with the Oracle application server model. You can load these models in Oracle Designer.You can then reference these server model objects, such as views, into your new modules, which allows you to fully generate that module.
• In addition Headstart for Oracle Apps provides you with a number of utilities that fully support CDM RuleFrame and boost productivity by automating time consuming and error prone tasks.

Would appreciate comments and feedback from anyone who has used Headstart.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Oracle and Peoplesoft web site integration

Got a mail this morning from Judith Sim - Oracle Senior Vice President, informing me of changes to the Oracle.com web site.

According to the first section of the mail entitled Web Site Update:

With Oracle and PeopleSoft now operating as one company (except for operations in Japan), we’ve integrated our two Web sites, giving you a single view of the combined companies and making it easier for you to find relevant information online. We have made a number of improvements to Oracle.com, including streamlined navigation, such as a new A to Z product index to help users easily and quickly find details about all Oracle and PeopleSoft product and service offerings. We have also enhanced the quality and depth of information offered. For example, we have completely redesigned and augmented the Industry pages and expanded the section related to our Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings.

Enjoy checking out the updated sections which I’ve linked to above!

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Download Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco presentations

Although I’m not physically present at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco it’s nice to be able to follow what’s happening through OpenWorld online where you can view keynotes, sessions, online demos, webcams and the photo gallery. The blog center also provides some interesting analysis and commentary.

I’ve noticed a couple of people linking to presentations and was frustrated that I couldn’t access them as a username and password was required. Little did I realise that there is a publicly available username and password.

Featured Applications Tracks at OpenWorld this year are:

• Applications Strategy
• Applications Technology
• Corporate Performance Management
• Customer Data Management
• Financials
• Fulfillment
• Human Resources
• Maintenance
• Manufacturing
• PIM Data Hub and PLM
• Procurement
• Projects
• Sales and Marketing
• Service
• Supply Chain Planning

The Content catalog has a comprehensive listing of presentations that you can download. Use the following username and password:

username: cboracle
password: oraclec6

You should also check out the Oracle OpenWorld archives where you can download presentations from previous events.

There’s really enough presentations to keep you busy until OpenWorld 2006. I’m going to try and come up with a listing of the best ones I come across.

ITtoolbox Cognos Blog

I came across a Cognos blog at ITtoolbox the other day which I though I would give a mention. Cognos has been around for as long as I’ve been implementing enterprise systems. In my former days as a BaaN consultant we used to use it and even with Oracle it’s a viable option when it comes to reporting.

According to the Cognos site:

Cognos is the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and performance planning software for the enterprise. Our solutions let companies improve and direct corporate performance by enabling all of the key steps in the management cycle—from planning and budgeting, to measuring and monitoring performance, to reporting and analysis. Cognos is the only company to support all of these key management activities with a complete solution that spans all of the essential components of CPM—enterprise planning, scorecarding, and business intelligence.

The About section of the Cognos Blog states the following:

I’ve been developing financial, accounting, and production reports for the last 20 years. Follow along as I share practical experiences in making Cognos Impromptu and Powerplay have a major impact on how organizations do business. I’ll also talk real life systems development, work philosophy, and more about the kind of people I’ve met along the way.

The Author is none other than Atlanta Dan and his bio reads as follows:

I have been developing financial, accounting, and production reports for the last 20 years. I started as a CPA who fell in love with the Apple and Supercalc. Over the years I have had to master Dbase II, Lotus, MS Office (Excel and Access), SQL, and dozens of other languages to make all kinds of reports work. Powerplay and Impromptu captured me 14 years ago and I have yet to find better reporting tools. I started developing for IWR and PPES 5 years ago. Hand-in-hand with these tools I have been developing the related SQL server queries and objects, including developing and implementing data warehouses, marts, and other data staging techniques to provide the data in the format needed by Cognos Powerplay and Impromptu.

Some interesting articles have been posted to date. Enjoy reading!