Paper Selection Day 2011

Day three of the mammoth User Group Fest was Paper Selection Day for the main UKOUG conference.

First you will notice that we have dropped TEBS (Technical and E Business Suite) from the name. They are still very much part of this conference, but the conference is more than that and people who attend or speak from overseas are confused by the label. We have not dropped the conference series in anyway; those communities, who want their own conference, still do so, with its own marketing as part of the series. The December conference will have the whole Oracle Corporation marketing, next generation messages and the more generic business and strategy content. I think there is something in it for everyone, but very specific content for the PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel and Hyperion Communities will stay in their own events. In fact Wednesday was also paper section day for JDE conference in November.

Look back at previous postings, the days are pretty much the same but everyone is trying to be fair to all those who have submitted, balance the number of well known great speakers with new local talent, ensure as many end users as possible get an opportunity, and leave spaces for areas that are under represented and we need to go source. Not an easy job!

Traditionally I have led the Business & Strategy plus Fusion Apps Streams along with Toby Price, and this year we were joined by Jeremy Duggan. The content being submitted just gets better every year. To cover as much as possible we have to be creative with some sessions, combing abstracts or looking at tings from another angle. One particle session I hope will work well is we had a paper on managing your Oracle estate using opensource and Oracle wanting to talk about their manageability suite. Two ends of a very large spectrum, and what we have come up with is a short presentation on each followed by a live debate. Should be really interesting, and so pleased both speakers are up for the ‘bake off’.

At the end of the day we hopefully have the first draft of this year’s agenda and it is great feeling. I hope when it is published you will agree we have the things you love about UKOUG and some new things to excite you even more.