OTNTourLA 2016 - Costa Rica

Costa Rica User Group 

This was my third user group event in Costa Rica, first in 2012 and again in 2014, on both those occasions I had the chance to explore the country, which in part made up for the fact that this was a flying visit. Arriving Tuesday afternoon, speaking Wednesday, leaving Thursday morning.

The journey to Costa Rica was quite uneventful, and it wasn’t too long in the taxi to the hotel, which felt almost like home. Both Tim and I had stayed there on previous visits. We arrived just after lunch and had a very lazy, quiet day, which included the hottest ever outdoor jacuzzi I have ever been in, matched only by the coldest pool I have ever felt despite us being in a very warm Costa Rica.

I have started to use my alarm to tell me which country I wake up in, saves that "It's Monday so it must be........." moment.

Adriana my student Helper

The next day we met up with Kamren and after breakfast made our way to the Universidad Cenfotec which hosted the conference. I am not sure of the numbers but there were 6 streams and really good session attendances. It was so well organised, and as in previous years the Costa Rica user group arranged for each speaker to have a student helper, mainly to help us with logistics and language. In the past I didn’t appreciate these enough, and this time we all took time to ensure we included them in the sessions and discussions, and I hope have encouraged them to get involved in communities and presenting to help their own careers.

My first session here was my Digital Disruption and as in Panama we had a great discussion. It was a good ice-breaker because when the audience are not native English speakers it is a big thing to ask questions, and this is a very non technical session and makes it a little easier for them. The students enjoyed this, although I am not sure they believed how basic IT (or TIC as they call it) was in my day.

Next up I gave the PaaS4SaaS again with a live ABCS demo. My audience included EBS, JDE and PeopleSoft users so I was really pleased with that. The JDE users came from Chiquita, the banana people and their concerns are around data security in the cloud so I encouraged them to attend my third session, ‘Cloud around the World'.

The User Group then took us out to dinner; we experienced their Traffic and eventually arrived at the restaurant. Those of you who know me can just imagine how much I enjoyed that, in a city where trains hit cars on the unmanned crossings every day! Not bad enough for my top 10 worst journeys but defiantly a contender for the next 10.

Tim and I had the privilege of sitting for dinner with the University TIC Facility leader and two gentlemen from CAMTIC the national body for people in digital technologies. We had a really good conversation about the importance of technology and opportunities in Costa Rica, and in return they wanted to know all about Brexit!

All too soon our trip to Costa Rica was over, thank you to everyone who made it such a great event, and us all so welcome.

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OTNTourLA 2016 - Panama

This was my second visit to OUG Panama

Their President Edgardo Sanchez was a fantastic host, I didn’t realise when I accepted his invitation to dinner on the Saturday evening I was the only person in town, but he took me with his family to Tinajas a very traditional Panamanian restaurant that included an amazing show with all the costumes and dancing indigenous to Panama.

On the Sunday Edgardo took Alexis Lopez from Columbia, his wife Clara and I to see the Panama Canal. When I was here in 2014 I missed this trip so was very keen to do it now. Edgardo works for the Panama Canal Company so the tour was the public tour, to see the locks operate etc, but also the headquarters, the amazing setting and you can’t fail to be in awe of the setup. We were also incredibly honoured as the Canal Extension; an addition canal for even bigger super ships has only been opened for less than a month.

The Panama Canal in Action

Next to went to see traditional buildings from different time periods in Panamanian history and crafts, then we finished the tour with a great meal in the marina. Half way through there was (another) thunder storm and although we did get a bit wet at our open air table the staff obviously get plenty of practice of bringing down the awning to keep out the rain, although they did have to fight the near hurricane winds accompanying it.

I can’t thank Edgardo and his family enough for their hospitality and I simply fell in love with his little daughter

The Panama Conference was held in our hotel, which was actually in a shopping mall, convenient for Tim Hall who had to do emergency shopping due to KLM thinking he didn’t need his luggage.

Since we were staying in the conference hotel, it was a quick start to the day. The event had 120 registered and 3 streams, it kicked off with a quick plenary session from Pablo Ciccarello talking about OTN and the ACE program.

Over the weekend a couple of Oracle speakers had pulled out so I volunteered to do an extra session here, which meant 4 but that isn’t an issue, once you are at an event you may as well be contributing all you can.

My first presentation was “what to consider for an move to Cloud Apps” and in the audience I had several people from the Panama Canal Company who are big EBS customers and several PeopleSoft customers, so it was great for me, and quite interactive. This is what I love most about the opportunity to present worldwide is the opportunity to hear what organisations are thinking and doing. The Panama Canal Company are also implementing Hyperion Planning, so I was able to include a discussion on how essbase is embedded into Cloud ERP.

Next up was my presentation on “Digital Disruption and what that means to the Oracle Economy’ - people think they know all this but when you start the discussion and look at all the changes in what they are doing the discussion always brings up new examples, I can add to the next presentation.

My third presentation was on PaaS4SaaS and I think I am going to have to either split this into two or severely cull some of it. When I presented it for the first time at Collaborate 2015, I had our Proof of Concept from January 2015 to share. Since then I have that story as it has extended, improvements made by Oracle in the integration and then here in Panama I for the first time did a live demo of Application Builder Cloud Services. Just an hour having presented my findings to the Product Development and Management teams in Oracle over a webcast at lunchtime. 

In the penultimate time slot there was a session entitled “Cloud HCM’ from a local partner. I knew it was in Spanish but thought it would be great to see how it is positioned locally. After just a few minutes I realised it was a presentation (and very salesy) on Taleo, which as I have explained myself if Oracle HCM, but not the original Fusion application I was expecting. Perhaps I should read my own blogs.

I was to present ‘What’s the Weather Like Where you Are? Are Cloud Apps the same the world over?” in the last slot but the timings for the day had progressively lost synchronisation with the agenda, and that combined with an Oracle session that for some reason waiting 20 minutes before starting, meant there was no audience left to present to. Never mind, 3 was defiantly enough and I had a great day.

After a very long day, Edgardo invited us to dinner again but Tim, Karmen and I had a fairly early flight to Costa Rica, and politely declined.

Thank you to everyone in the Panama Oracle User Group for making us so welcome, and kicking off the OTN Tour Latin America so well.

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OTNTourLA - Before we started

First stop on the tour was Panama, and I took the opportunity to go a few days earlier and mix business with pleasure and go diving.

I wanted to dive in two oceans in one day, however their rainy seasons has over run and that means rivers are running into the ocean and bringing lots of mud with it. This creates poorer visibility but I don't care, I live in N Ireland and seeing my fingers means good visibility sometimes.

This poorer visibility meant that the Caribbean side of Panama was the only side worth diving in. I found an amazing PADI dive shop online (Panama Divers) who came and collected me, took me on two dives on Friday, I stayed in their on site hotel, did two more dives the next day, despite the lack of sleep from the constant rain on the tin roof, and then took me back to Panama City.

The first two dives were all about the number of lobsters on the reef, both dives were about 50 feet not nothing too taxing, only a gentle current and for me very acceptable viz. I wore a 2mm wetsuit, much better than the previous weekend in N Ireland when I wore 2 (yes TWO) 7mm wetsuits. The water was for me a great temperature.

My favourite sponge of the day

What I loved best about these two dives was the amazing ocean structures, especially the sponges, every one is unique and these are living creatures.

That rain I mentioned, well I honestly thought it was going to stop the diving on say two, but no we still did.

I found a Moray eel, there was a sting ray a few feet away from us, and some amazing fish, including the biggest Parrot fish I have ever seen.

I also went to see a wreck of a twin engined aircraft close to Drake's Island, the resting place of Sir Frances Drake, although the locals call him a Pirate. 



Between dives we sailed past the remains of the old fort, that protected them from these pirates.



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OTN Latin America Tour 2016

I hope you followed us on twitter with the hashtag #OTNTourLA.

This is my 5th Latin America Tour, I am so privileged to have those opportunities, an employer who sees the value and no family at home to moan about me being away.

The OTN Tour in Latin America is split between North and South, and full details (in Spanish) are on the OTN site. The OTN Latin America Community is run by Pablo Ciccarello.  If you follow each link you can also find Pablo's photos from each event.


This year I am on the North Tour, I did this tour previously in 2014 and in 2012


August
Before it even started
1st       Panama 
3rd       Costa Rica
5th       Mexico
8th       Guatemala
The journey to Colombia
11/12   Colombia 

Enjoying Colombia

The Long Trek Home    

A few statistics:  13 flights, 40+ flying hours,15,839 miles flown, 8 hotels.

As well as local speakers ORACLE ACE Directors: Tim Gorman(USA), Tim Hall (UK), Osama Mustafa (Jordania), Alex Zaballa(Brasil), Debra Lilley(UK) did various parts of the tour, although only Tim and I did the whole tour.

This happens because the co-ordinators Nelson Calero and Gustavo Gonzalez create the tours so a big thank you to them. Also thank you to the individual user groups and especially to OTN and Jennifer, who fund our travel. 

Thank you for all your help and support.

First Thoughts on Application Builder Cloud Services - another PaaS4SaaS

If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that I am on a mission to use PaaS to extend the SaaS HCM & ERP applications, and now I am finally getting to play with ABCS

A year ago I was excited about a new Oracle offering Application Builder Cloud Service, a PaaS offering for the Citizen Developer. This should heave been just what I need, no development skills – remember ‘I’m not technical’ and connected to SaaS, Oracle Cloud (or Fusion) apps.

I saw my first demo at Kscope15 and my thoughts at that time were:

• This is a totally new product, developed, I hope, specifically for building simple extensions to SaaS
• How will this connect to SaaS when I have the lack of APIs highlighted as a constraint for Java Cloud Services?

However I volunteered to repeat the Proof of Concept I had for PaaS4SaaS that used JCS. A few weeks later my suspicions were confirmed, it was working with CX but not HCM & ERP. This is not the fault of the ABCS team, the APIs needed to come from apps development.

When we got to Oracle Open World, in the ACE briefings, this was still being ‘sold’ as PaaS4SaaS, rather than PaaS4CX. This annoyed me, it showed a lot of promise but simply didn’t work with my SaaS, the HCM & ERP. The ACE briefings should be about discussing with technical experts (my ACE colleagues), where Oracle are and where they are going. This is not the arena for marketing.

However this year in June OTN bought the ACE Directors together again for a PaaS Developer Challenge, and in an update at that event it was announced that ABCS was in beta testing for HCM. I was excited at this prospect especially when it was explained that it was because there are now REST APIs from HCM, but rather disappointed that I hadn’t been asked to be part of the beta program, I guess in my inflated opinion of myself I thought I would be an obvious choice.

Anyway I soon got that resolved and got a trial version of ABCS. Thanks again to OTN the trial is being extended, so I can build demos and include them in my presentations. 

The APIs are in controlled release, I was told there was a patch that was needed and I raised an SR for this, to be told they were standard in Release 11, and the patch was only valid for Release 10. As Certus beta test Cloud HCM (&ERP) for Oracle we were already on R11. 

By this time it was Kscope16, exactly a year after I first heard of ABCS, and I attended a 'hands on lab' session to build a stand alone (not integrated) ABCS application. My honest belief was this isn’t a Citizen Developer, you do need to understand a few basic concepts, but these can be fixed with some kind of training. There are some youtube videos and documents and I think that a simple sample application and perhaps a script to replicate the 'hands on lab’ would help even more.

ABCS is simple to create your own apps

I arranged to spend a day with Oracle in the UK replicating the PoC and was very excited. Susan Duncan in the Product Management Team and I sat down and started. The first problem was that although I had the APIs they were not authorised (or rather switched on). 

Thanks Oracle Support, when I raised my initial SR to have the patch applied, was it not obvious I wanted to use the APIs? Telling me they were already there at R11, does not make them available, at this stage they should have told me I needed a business justification to be included in the controlled release, but no, I had to raise another SR to get that information!

Very Simple to create screens based on custom objects

However Susan had access to the APIs on a sales demo system so we were able to start our testing. Neither of us really knew how to use ABCS with apps, but with a bit of trial and error we did find our way around and create a simple record we wanted to populate. Two of the fields needed to come from HCM, which in the original PoC we had to extract using BI Publisher and populate in JCS periodically. Now using the API the list of values came direct from HCM. 

SUCCESS, this is a big step forward. 

The LOV comes from Cloud HCM, via the new EMP API

However, whilst we could select a record from HCM we could not save it in ABCS, this is because the rowid in HCM (&ERP) is alpha numeric and in CX it is numeric. Not a big issue to fix, and the next patch (the beauty of the Cloud) will fix it for everyone. Thanks to the UK developers who were able to tell me this straight away and save time.

What I really, really like is the UI. ABCS offers either a SaaS or an Alta UI. The SaaS UI really does look like SaaS, which means my extensions will not be obvious to the standard SaaS user. This is a fundamental objective for any extension that Certus delivers to customers. 

There were a couple of things in this current release that disappointed me: 

• There is a wizard that builds your objects in ABCS. As you follow it, it creates a view, an edit and a create page. If you edit after the wizard you are editing just one of the three pages. This is a different UX to what we have in SaaS, the pages behave differently. However it doesn’t detract from the functionality.

• There is a concept of Save & Continue, which allows you to edit a record you have just created. This is set up by the wizard and in most use cases I can think off we would want to add another record in a data entry mode. Product development tell me I can do what I want through editing, but not via the wizard. Again a different behaviour. 

I am very excited about moving this forward. This week I have presented to the development and product management teams and am confident that like the error, things will move quickly, this is the beauty of cloud. I said I had shown this to colleagues and to our development partners at eProseed. In fact Luc from eProseed has also been testing ABCS from a stand alone perspective and together we will find more and more ways to exploit this. 

And yesterday whilst on the OTN tour of Latin America I gave my first live demo of ABCS!

I am positive as I use more and more of this it will become easier and I do see lots of opportunities for us to use this especially during implementation projects, and for simple customer requirements. The JCS option adding the processing, integration, document storage and mobile clouds as needed is still the answer for more complex extensions, and the APIs are available to any of these options.

2016 Kscope - What Did I Learn?

Oops! This has taken me two weeks to write, I got back to UK and was just so busy. I thought perhaps it was too late but I still have the same nail polish on I had done at the end of Kscope so I guess it is OK.

As a user group leader you miss out on a lot of the great education delivered by your own group, especially when you want to cover multiple streams. My main area is Cloud Apps but I am also very interested and need to know about the technology, so every year I try to go to KSCOPE the ODTUG conference, simply as a speaker / delegate.

This year the event was in Chicago, and I intended to arrive in time for their Community Service Day, but the travel gods were against me and I was delayed over a day. I was very vocal about the journey, on both twitter and in this blog, but I did eventually arrive Saturday evening and believe I have earnt enough good travel karma to get me through the next couple of years.

Jennifer from the ACE program took a few of us to dinner the first evening to a celebrated restaurant. They then went onto Navy Pier but I had had a long day and went back to the hotel for a good sleep.

Chi Gung Class

Next morning I started early, as I did every day and have done every event since Kent started his Chi Gung sessions. I still can't do it very well but it is a great start to the day.

Sunday is the Symposium and for me that means ADF. The day was dedicated to Oracle product managers giving updates on their products and I think they did brilliantly. The talked about the great range of PaaS products available and only said 'Cloud' about a dozen times.

The welcome event kicked off the evening and the major sponsors, Interrel had a photo booth, and I love a good photo booth

Me & Michelle Malcher

Alex Nuijten, Chris Saxon and Me

I attended many sessions about the new Application Builder Cloud Service for the Citizen Developer and am working with Sue Duncan back in the UK to see if we can duplicate our PaaS4SaaS proof of concept. This included taking part in a hands on lab session, which seems OK but didn't include integration with SaaS which is what I need to do. When Sue and I have finished I'll blog again.

My own session was on UX being the secret sauce in Cloud Applications, and how this is created with ADF. I was presenting to developers and sharing all the tips and help they can get from Oracle Development and their UX team.

one of the scavenger hunt tasks

Last year I came in the top 10 of the Scavenger Hunt, and we tried a version of it at UKOUG, although I think the american ability to openly encourage ridiculous things, plus not worrying about off site tasks means this is much better suited here. I didn't do too badly and won Google Chromcast and a Tile.  Read their side of the story here.

I also spent more time with Jennifer from OTN, she was encouraging people to take up a cloud trial, give it a go and see what you can do with it. I also made a two minute top tip with Bob Rhubart and a longer video for OTN with I am hoping they will be at UKOUG doing the same.

They certainly know how to party at Kscope and this year it was in the Museum of Science and Industry, a beautiful venue and the theme of the evening was the roaring 20s, another great opportunity to dress up. They used the scavenger hunt to encourage people to visit all areas of the venue, I looked in a submarine, went down a mine, became a lego master builder and looked into many aircraft.

I took part in the Women in IT event, as a table facilitator, there were a lot more men there this year and it was great to have discussion about challenges and opportunities.

On the last morning I took the opportunity to take a much recommended Architect Tour of the river, and it was amazing and much better than my last trip to Chicago which was in the winter.

I know it sounds like it was all fun, and it was, but I also learnt so much, spent time with several product managers learning about how their developments may shape the applications I work with, and just as importantly giving them feedback about this affects real customers.

I also got the chance to have a real slow weekend, just chilling out with Michelle Malcher and her family. Others came and went and it was BBQ most days. I felt very welcome in Michelle's church and they let me read (in my beautiful english accent).

Michelle & I

And finally, my journey home was great, British Airways gave me an upgrade, so much better than the way out.

I love Kscope, and next year it is in Texas, see you there.

Not a good day - so I am allowed to wallow in self pity - the final chapter

After parts I and II this is the final chapter.

I got to the airport hotel about 7pm, and just couldn't be bothered to eat. I should have done, I was entitled to British airways paying for it, but I was just too weary.

I also met people on the same flight as me from Belfast who were given £10 vouchers for outlets at the airport and no one offered me that. Probably they were simply stressed and too busy, they had also run out of overnight kits.

So I went to be at 10 it had been a very long day, I had a boarding card for a flight at 11:20 and I was resigned myself to having missed my plans for Friday evening and that I would miss the Kscope Community Service Day.

What did help was all the people on social media keeping my spirits up, and the idea of #fingerscrossedfordebra.

What didn't help was Mark Rittman, who by coincidence was always booked on the 11:20 and was contacted to be given an upgrade to club class. That's fine, and it reinforces a strong belief of mine that only men travelling on their own get upgrades but he does love to rub my nose in it.

Anyway roll through till the morning and I'm woken by a message to say my 7:45 am flight is still on time. And a twitter message from BA in response to my last message 8 hours previously to say, sorry we took so long to come back to you but we can see you have been booked on the 7:45.

So I went straight back to them who said, sometimes the syste doesnt tell us!! There was no way I was going to get ready and over to T2 for this flight and i still had a luggage tag and boarding card for the 11:20.

I went straight to customer services in T5 and they confirmed I was on it and my bag was actually loaded already. Then I made my way to the lounge, checked twitter and Mark is tweeting more pictures of his upgrade options. Others are telling me he is joking but I know he isn't.

I got to the lounge and the gentleman there said the boarding card was not valid. apparently it wasnt entered properly in the sysyem. so another 10 minutes before that was sorted.

And once I got to the gate for an on time departure, there is Mark with his upgrade. In fact he even tweeted as he left me waiting when they called Club Class. But I felt great relief when I was sat in my seat (in cattle class) ready to go. Then the pilot announced there would be a short delay when they found someone to remove the luggage trollies left behind the aircraft on their parking lot!!!!!

smug git in his seat

The journey was fine, Bryn Llewellyn was also on board, he had been moved over from a United flight that had been cancelled. I'd like to say everything else was ok but an elderly gentleman decided to open a luggage locker and hit me with a violin.

We landed, did immigration and collected luggage with no issue at all. Bryn and I shared a taxi to the hotel, and I was here, at Kscope16.

I'm not blaming any one person at British Airways, it was chaotic, but whoever is in charge of that software needs to accept here is a problem. I have had 7 different boarding cards to take 2 flights and you just couldn't make up the sequence of events.

But it is all over now and thank you to everyone who encouraged me past my sense of humour bypass, and the great welcome I have received once I arrived.