OracleAppsBlog

Blogging

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

UK Oracle Apps Contractors, Consultants and Blogger Meetup in London

Next week we’re having a UK Oracle Apps Contractors, Consultants and Blogger Meetup at the Tapas Brindisa in London. If you fit into any of those categories and would be interested in coming along and meeting myself and other Oracle Apps Fans for a drink and chat then please join us at 7pm on the 13th February 2008. 

The event was initiated by Simon Tomey of BeLife and I’ll be joining in along with some of his colleagues and friends. Although its a social I’ll be there with my laptop and internet connection so we can always do some techy stuff.

If you need any further information don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ve also created an event in Yahoo’s upcoming calendar tool so that you can automatically add the details to whatever calendar software or application you are using or let us know whether you plan to attend. 

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Kudos: OracleAppsBlog Recognized as Top Oracle Blog Site by WhatIS.com

Posted By: Michael Siebert

OracleAppsBlog.com was recently recognized by WhatIs.com as a “must read” blog for information technology topics covering Oracle.

We are pleased to announce that OracleAppsBlog has recently been recognized as a top blog site for Oracle technology by WhatIs.com.  Specifically, we’ve been deemed a “Favorite Technology Blog” under the Oracle category.  Three other blog sites were also recognized for their contributioins to the Oracle community:

Lewis Cunningham - covers a variety of Oracle technology, especially databases and development;
Mark Rittman - a must read site for all things related to Oracle and Business Intelligence; and
Oracle’s Blogging Network - basically, every executive, developer, or product manager blogger who works for Oracle.  But if I had to place my vote for the most outstanding blog that falls under the Oracle corporate umbrella, it would undoubtedly go to Steven Chan’s blog on Oracle Applications Technology.

Of course, we have our bloggers, readers and over 3,500 forum members from all over the globe to thank for their contributions to the site and their support.  Being recognized as a top site is certainly an honor, and is also a testament to the Oracle applications community and its ability to support one another through blogs and forums.  Keep up the good work!

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Oracle Contractors Blog

It’s been a while since I last posted on this site. In fact, my last decent entry was about six months ago, two days before my son was born which is probably the main reason for an absence of posts on my part. I haven’t had much time to look at e-mails for the site as well but I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks working through the backlog and putting some new entries together. I had a chance today to look at the Oracle Contractors Blog, which was launched late last year and thought I would give it a mention.

It features blog entries from the following Oracle Contractors: -

• Andrew Cotterell
• Barry Goodsell
• Dax Gomez
• Dean Christofolis
• Denise Bonvicino
• Dilip Nagarkar
• Fergal Grist
• Jason Howlett
• Jazz Badeshia
• Jim Hooper
• John Temple
• Khalil Rehman
• Kuren Dhand
• Lee Broders
• Marty Biggs
• Misbah Jalil
• Neil Jenkins
• Nick Davey
• Paul Driver
• Peter Hunt
• Richard Fieldhouse

A look at some recent entries: -

• What is so special about drop shipping and why should your customers care?
• Big Brother and Shared Service Centers
• Oracle Business Intelligence Warehouse Builder 10g
• 10 years plus and still nervous!
• Are Oracle trying to get a foothold in the OS market?
• Explicit Cursors are Dead - Long live the Implicit Cursor
• Eyes on The Prize
• Interesting uses of Oracle CRM
• MFG across Continents - Can each unit close their month as per their Time Zone.
• New version - Same old problems?
• The Project Initiation Phase - Do It Right or Die
• The wrong and right way to avoid “invokeMethod” in Controllers

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Countdown to Oracle Open World: Schedules and Blog Cards

I’ve finalized my Oracle Open World schedule for next week, and have a good mix of e-Business Suite technology, Release 12, Fusion Middleware, and Business Intelligence sessions lined up.

For the most part, I was able to get into the sessions I wanted with one exception.  I’d really like to attend Nadia Bendjedou’s session entitled Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications, and apparently so would quite a few others as the session has been booked to capacity for several weeks now.  I’ve seen her present before, and always walked away with a much better understanding behind e-Business Suite technology.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed, or maybe I’ll just linger outside the room and hope to sneak in.

Richard came up with a great idea - the creation of OracleAppsBlog business cards.  I’ve created some of my own cards via Overnight Prints to distribute at the conference.  Here’s a preview of what the cards look like:

Front of OracleAppsBlog.com Card

Back of OracleAppsBlog.com Card

Post a comment if you plan on attending any of the sessions below, or if you plan on attending Oracle Open World.  It would be great to meet some of the other members of the blog in person.

Monday

The Next Application Platform
Technology Directions for Oracle Applications
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in the Next Major Release of Oracle Database
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Tips and Tricks
Oracle’s Business Intelligence Road Map

Tuesday

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Architectural Overview
Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Updates
Deep Dive: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 New Technology Stack
Oracle Analytic Applications Road Map
What’s New in Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2?

Wednesday

Oracle E-Business Suite System Management: Release 12 New Features
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12: Installation and Cloning Enhancements
Analytic Applications Q&A with Development and Strategy Executives
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition Discoverer 10g Best Practices

Thursday

The Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12: Process, Integration, and Eventing
Best Practices for Implementing Siebel Business Analytics
Using Analytics to Compete More Effectively, Improve Sales Execution, and Maximize Revenue
Oracle Discoverer Future: Protect, Extend, Integrate
Oracle Daily Business Intelligence: A Business Intelligence Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite, Providing Relevant, Timely Information to End Users

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Second year of existence

The OracleAppsBlog has now been in existence for two years. Its amazing to think its been going that long now. The blog has been much more successful than anticipated and I believe still has much more potential for growth of this blog and other related Oracle and ERP blogs . This year has seen the addition of 125 new posts and 1,400 new members as well as the introduction of the forum (with 155 topics posted to date) and wiki modules. I’m highly impressed with the functionality provided by the forum and I’m hoping that it will be used more this year. Sadly, I don’t have much time to devote to answering the questions but its nice to see other members helping me out in this area. The wiki will open up opportunities for members to document collaboratively. 

I’d like to see more contributions by level 2 members this year so I’m going to do my best to get more authors and make it easier for existing authors to post. At the moment the documentation for level 2 members needs a bit of enhancement so that it’s clearer how to post blog entries, this was actually requested last year and I still haven’t got around to it!! Hence I’ve decided to take a blog break next week and focus on getting that done. One action I have taken to help blog authors is to purchase a group license for Blogjet, a really nice blogging software client that helps you edit and post blog entries. Also, if you have an article you want to contribute but don’t have the time or know how ot write it up into a blog entry, send it my way and I’ll do the work for you.

I thought it would be nice to take a look at some stats from the blog for this year. I’m not into comparing but rather like to see that the the blog has grown in terms of traffic, members and content. I’ve started playing with a number of different statistical tools this year so I can’t pull out last years stats for everything. Incidentally, reading this post on blog addiction it seems I’m pretty much there. Here’s the stats:

• Technorati Rank – 84,835
• BritBlog Rank – 16
• Top Blog Sites Rank – 26
• Google Page Rank – 6
• Alexa Rank – 156,085

According to Statcounter, SiteMeter and MyBloglog I’m averaging about 350 visitors a day and 580 page views a day. Both of those tools only work on the main page and the pic below shows what going on at the back end as provided by the Urchin stats of my webhost pMachinehosting. As you can see I’ve had a about 5 million pageviews in total this year and am averaging about 15,000 page views a day. Of course, some of this traffic is from bots and not humans so MyBloglog, Statcounter and Sitemeter are probably a bit more realistic.

I understand that the ExpressionEngine Commerce module is being released some time this year which I’m sure will make EE one of the most attractive CMS (Content Management Systems) around. I will certainly be implementing the commerce module although I’m not quite sure what I’m going to sell, I’m more interested in implementing it just to see how it all hangs together. The polling module has also been broken for a while so I hope to fix that shortly so I can get more interaction from readers in that area. The site certainly needs a redesign that will produce a consistent interface and theme between the blog, wiki and forum module. At this time last year I thought I would do a redesign myself but due to time contraints I’ve decided to hire someone to do it. It’s quite difficult to find decent web developers who know ExpressionEngine and are not busy so we might have to wait a while!!

Of course, if you have any suggestions for improvement I welcome them. I wanted to thank anyone who has made any sort of contribution to the blog to date and I hope to see more growth and better content in the coming year.