Again Oracle shows its commitment to continue investing in PeopleSoft. This time by changing the release model of PeopleSoft Applications Portal, formally known as PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, by adding Feature Packs. With these Feature Packs customers do not need to upgrade or re-implement PeopleSoft Applictions to be able to use the new features, as Feature Packs come as patches that can be applied to the current PeopleSoft application using the change assistent.

As promised Oracle is now supplying Oracle Fusion Applications on Windows. Most system administrators and installers will probably say, why is this important?

Bringing Oracle Fusion Applications to Windows makes the application more accessible to the ‘common man’. Let’s be honest, the majority of IT does have knowledge and access to Windows, a smaller part has knowledge of Linux and an ever smaller part has any experience with IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris, not even to mention the availability of these two operation systems for the common IT. Since Oracle Fusion Applications is made up of so many Oracle components, Oracle Fusion Applications has attracted the interest of not only the ERP community, but also the attention of other communities like DBA’s, Middleware/Integration specialists, etc and they all want to get a taste of the future.

As information technology is here to stay in HR and its role in future HR execution will increase evermore, I thought it might be a good idea to add a blog every now and then about the role of HR-IT in HR. Shortcuts will be taken and assumptions will be made in my postings but always with the idea to better understand the pitfalls in HR-IT.

This posting describes pitfall # 1…

A best practice vs a best system.

The title of this blog is a quote made by Dave Ulrich, HR guru extraordinaire. The quote is a prelude and inspiration to this blog, and perhaps many to come.

Ever wondered why ERP projects do not reach their full potential?

Greetings all,

My name is Michael van Adrichem and I am one of the Oracle UPK specialists in Logica in the Netherlands.

In the upcoming months I will try to keep you updated about the latest updates and developments of the Oracle UPK tool.

For the people who are not familiar with the Oracle UPK tool, a short introduction is in place.
In this blog post an overview of the UPK tool will be given.

In the upcoming blog posts I will explain the different process parts of which a complete UPK implementation project consists off.

Chapter one: UPK Overview
What is the UPK?
In short, the UPK tool can be divided into two categories:

Organisation:
User Productivity Kit (UPK) is a unique solution that enables an organization through contextual / content sensitivity, in an efficient manner, to create, manage and publish all documentation, training and other support materials for applications.

Users:
A simple tool that allows users to quickly manage Oracle Applications (with importance of training and saving on training).

So to clarify, the UPK tool is one of the easiest ways for an organisation to train their employee’s in new systems. The UPK will take the role of a virtual guide and try to train them in a simple but effective way.

In a previous post I mentioned a new feature of PeopleTools 8.52: Dashboard. With this feature you can create custom dashboards with pagletes that provide information about a certain business area. Oracle didn’t stop here and also added Interwindow Communication (IWC).

Interwindow communication is a frame-to-frame messaging mechanism that enables browser window objects—such as pages or pagelets—to be aware of and react to field-level data changes that occur in other window objects that share the same browser window. Interwindow communication enables you to publish field-level changes as they occur so that any subscribing page or pagelet becomes instantly aware of the change and then, can act on it in real-time. Administrators, subject matter experts or application developers configure page fields to respond to either changes in value or a mouse click. When the triggering event occurs, the application posts a string-formatted message. Because of partial pagelet refresh functionality, subscribing pagelets can then respond within the context of the data contained in the message. Interwindow communication supports component-based pagelets and noncomponent-based pagelets (iScript-based or other Pagelet Wizard pagelets).