Archive for December, 2009

E-Business Suite Release 12.1.2 now available

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 by Barry Goodsell

Last week Oracle announced E-Business Suite Release 12.1.2, also known as “12.1 RUP 2″, or Patch 7303033. This release update pack (RUP) combines error corrections, statutory/regulatory updates, and functionality enhancements into a consolidated, suite-wide patch set.  This release is a maintenance pack and can only be installed on top of an existing EBS 12.1 environment.

The following sections describe the new features to R12.1.2 that are of particluar interest to Projected Consulting’s clients and partners. Note that there are no new features specific to Project Costing and Project Billing.

Oracle Project Foundation

Enhanced Project List Page

The Project List page is often the main hub that users interact with when accessing Oracle Projects. In an effort to make this page more informative and streamline access to common functions, several enhancements have been added to the Project List page.

Main Project List Region

The following enhancements apply to the main region of the project list page:

  • To improve efficiencies and usability, the Action button available in the Project Home Page is now also available in the project list. Users are no longer required to drill down before they can execute an action against a selected project.
  • To provide easier access to commonly used reporting values, Quarter to Date and Year to Date values are now available as attributes displayed in the list.

Worklist and Notifications Region

A new Worklist and Notification region is available on the Project List page. The new region displays worklist items and notifications assigned to the user across all projects for which the user has an active role. Productivity is increased as users are no longer required to drill down into individual projects to retrieve notifications and review items that need attention.

Report Views Region

A new Report Views region allows users to quickly access commonly used reports and queries. Users first create and save the reports using the Alternative Search page. All saved reports are then available for reuse and can be retrieved directly from the project list page. This feature not only provides quicker access to data but also saves time by allowing users to save queries rather than redefining them each time they need to view the results.

Bookmarks Region

A new Bookmark region allows users to streamline retrieval of project-related items they commonly need to access. Once users select an item to bookmark, the item appears in the bookmark list until the user removes it. The list of bookmarks is specific to each user based on the items they choose to bookmark. The bookmark region is not available on all pages.
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R12.1.1 – Projects Reporting Pack

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 by Barry Crawley

The Oracle Projects suite of applications has always suffered from a reporting problem, or at least many user organisations have, for a long time, had a perception that this is the case. The reason for this can be summarised into a couple of salient points:

  • There have always been widely diverse reporting requirements for Projects reporting, not only between user organisations, but also between different users groups within these organisations.
  • Oracle has never quite come up with a ‘one size fits all’ solution to reporting in Projects. In fact the reporting capabilities in Projects have never really measured up to the rich functionality offered by these applications.

So taking a step back and thinking for a minute one can conclude that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. To report from the Projects applications you need to consider various options and be prepared to use multiple solutions, even within one organisation, dependent on requirements. There are a numerous options / combinations for consideration, and the selection of the most appropriate ones can be a bit of a minefield, even for the specialist. I do not, in this article, seek to migrate through this minefield, but to let people know that there is something new out there that needs to be considered. That is the R12.1.1 Projects Reporting Pack.

What is it?

It is a feature that enables you to monitor project performance without accessing the applications i.e. it sends reports to via email to recipients who are key members on a project(s). A number of reporting templates are supplied that can be added to a ‘reporting pack’ which is then run through the standard concurrent manager and distributes the reports accordingly.
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