ODTUG Community Service Day

Last year ODTUG started the idea of a Community Day immediately prior to their conference, and we spent an excellent day painting a school in New Orleans. One of the most valuable thing you get from attending the conference is meeting up with people, talking about what they do, how they do it and exchanging ideas. What better way to network than by giving something back at the same time?

This year in Monterey we went 'weeding' with the Big Sur Land Trust removing ice plants that whilst they look quite pretty are actually depriving the indigenous plants and in turn wildlife of their natural habitat. The hardest part of the work, at the time, was walking up and down the dunes to arrive at the site, although this morning my calves and back think it was a lot harder than it seemed!

I am very proud of what we achieved we did seem to make a big difference and left feeling it was very worthwhile. Then it was all aboard the 'short' buses and off to lunch, which we were told would be a picnic, and it was, but as we walked into the clearing there were tables and chairs and tablecloths and a beautiful spread in the middle of nowhere, thanks again ODTUG!



Because the ACE Directors had arrived Friday night most took part in the community day and it was another opportunity to talk to old, new and future friends. Have I mentioned before How I Love My Job?

Oracle HQ

Having arrived at Redwood on Thursday evening, I went straight to bed, 20 hours after I left home. It was quite an uneventful trip except 2 quick airport stories. First when landing at Newark my plane was held for a long time in the air and then diverted to a different terminal. As we taxied around the airport there were lots of camera crews, everyone thought it must have been a plane crash, but actually it was a Continental Flight from Brussels were the pilot died. The at San Francisco, we were coming into land on a beautiful early evening and along side us, really close was another plane, quite frightening for me but no one else seemed worried, I have never seen this before despite having been to SFO many times, turns out they have parallel runways.

Anyway I digress, the visit to Redwood was for the ACE Director day, and the best way to tell you what happened is to say log onto www.twitter.com and search for #ACED. We saw a lot of Fusion Middleware 11g but of course we were under non disclosure agreements until after the launch on July 1st.

It was a full on day, starting at 8.15 am and finishing just before 6pm, I really enjoyed the day, as my field is Apps and Fusion Apps I thought very little would be of value to me but actually I learnt a lot and did get to see where things fit in. I especially liked the sessions where the speaker came armed with slides but actually only used them to answer questions. Much more interactive and way beyond just a polished marketing script.

Then it was all on a coach for the 90 minute drive to Monterey for ODTUG, and again this was a great opportunity to speak to more of my fellow ACE Directors. On arrival at Monterey ODTUG had a welcome VIP reception for us and the registration was all done bar the credit card swipe. Excellent and thanks ODTUG.

Update on Lovemarks

We made it! The Oracle ACE brand is officially a lovemark.

BI Publisher and my favourite moan

Oracle ACE Director Eric Marcoux (note the ACE beads around his neck) gave a presentation at ODTUG on BI Publisher as an enterprise solution. It was an excellent presentation that compared the embedded BI Publisher which is free with the applications to the full version. What he noted was his two PeopleSoft instances are at different versions of BI publisher from each other and the stand alone version is higher. This is my favourite moan, please, please Oracle reduce the time between great technology being available, and it being available to your apps users.

But back to Eric’s presentation, I pointed out that the embedded BI Publisher is a restricted use licence and cannot be used on any bespoke. Mike Donahue the product manager corrected me and said that was only true in the case of EBS, not sure that is fair either.

But for reporting this tool is fantastic, it is probably one of the oldest fusion tools and started its life as XML Publisher in EBS. The product manager there Tim Dexter is really passionate about BI Publisher and his blog is well worth a read.

Within Fujitsu we have a lot of historic data around invoices and purchase orders from when we had many different business units all using different stationary, now when we run a report to produce a duplicate document, not only can it say duplicate across it, but the BI Publisher template can determine the logo and style from the org-id and date.

Oh and another moan, who comes up with names in Oracle? XML Publisher, no sorry BI Publisher will be called.........guess...........
Fusion Publisher in the next release

I am an Orcale ACE for my work with Fusion and I'm not knocking the concept or the product just the name