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.

Oracle has added another great feature to PeopleTools 8.52:

Dashboards

A dashboard is an overview consisting of pagelets containing information about a certain subject. Until now you were able to add pagelets to your home screen or workcenters. Because you only have one PeopleSoft home page, you are limited in the number of pagelets you can add to get a clear view of what is happening in your business or which actions you need to take. Workcenters did add some additional productivity, but you are limited to add pagelets only to one frame of the browser.

By now, most of us know it takes more resources to run a Fusion Applications environment, than any other ERP system. Creating a local sandbox, to acquire knowledge and experience of  Fusion Applications, is not done on local servers anymore.

Do not despair …

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) provides a familiar user interface to internet search users and gives secure access to all of your organization’s data sources—Web sites, file servers, content management systems, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, business intelligence systems, and databases.

Looks familiar?

That is indeed familiar, that’s Google with an Oracle logo… Oracle seems to have build a search engine and has made use of the familiarity of the Google GUI and behaviour to position this tool. Oracle is supplying SES as stand alone product and has integrated SES with it’s other products like Siebel, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite & PeopleSoft.

Where Google will search the internet based on supplied keywords, SES will search your Enterprise data based on keywords. Oracle has created an embedded framework in PeopleSoft to integrate and communicate with SES, called PeopleSoft Search FrameWork.

Oracle Open World 2011 was mainly dominated by Exalogic. Exalogic is hardware and software engineered together to provide extreme performance for Java applications, Oracle Applications, and all other enterprise applications.

And yes, now Oracle is also offering Oracle Fusion Applications HCM and CRM in the Cloud!