Supplier Portal – Oracle EBS and Middleware

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The Challenge

ABC, a publicly traded services and manufacturing organization, has leveraged Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to manage a variety of back-office functions, including their suppliers. Suppliers have been provided data from EBS manually by internal teams — the data sent has varied in both content and as well as format.

Internal teams spend valuable time generating reports manually for external supplier organizations and suppliers are left with the tedious process of generating their own reports. All the while, both groups may be relying on measures out of line with ABC’s priorities.

The Solution

We took a systematic approach to the issue, addressing:

  1. EBS/Data
  2. Discoverer/Reporting Logic
  3. Portal/UI

The Results

Finally, by setting up proper SSO and hooks from Portal to Discoverer and integrating end-to-end all the way down into the database, users in Portal (regardless of whether they are internal or external users) see only what their user account can see. Additionally, by leveraging the latest Portal 10.1.4 features, we were able to provide ABC with a portal that had a completely customized look-and-feel matching their external website exactly.

Within days, the entire solution was architected, designed, and developed. We were all excited about the quick progress and all of ABC’s expectations were exceeded.

Oracle Portal 10.1.4 Intranet and OpenWorld

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M&S Consulting has implemented a world-class intranet environment for a publicly traded high-tech manufacturer in California.  The implementation takes advantage of the latest Portal 10.1.4 features, while implementing rich user interfaces within Portal’s architecture.  The implementation is comprised of over 20,000 pages, including over 500,000 portal items.  The intranet is a valuable knowledge and collaboration tool for thousands of internal users. In recognition of the solution’s success, M&S was invited to present it at Oracle OpenWorld in 2007.

OracleAS 10.1.2 on 32 bit vs. 64 bit

AshokTechnical Tips1 Comment

Some people get excited about the prospects of running Oracle Application Server (10.1.2) on a 64-bit OS.  However, just to be clear here, even if you go through the patching to get the install completed, you will still only be running OracleAS in 32-bit mode.   By the way, if you have reasons for really wanting to run OracleAS on a 64-bit OS, I would be interested in hearing a compelling argument.

Discoverer – Public Connections for Oracle Applications with SSO

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While using SSO, in order to create a public connection to Oracle Discoverer for Oracle Applications, I suggest creating a service account (user) in EBS and marking that user for LOCAL authentication (instead of SSO). There may not be many reasons to create a public connection in this scenario, but I did come across one recently and it is not well-documented, so I thought I would share. Of course, with Oracle BI Discoverer (non-Oracle-Applications), connections are made by database users and creating a public connection doesn’t require any EBS changes.

Selected for Oracle iSupplier Portal Integrated Solution

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Bringing together many components of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite, as well as Oracle Applications (via E-Business Suite), M&S is uniquely positioned to delivery immense value in a short amount of time. M&S is designing and implementing a security, integration, and user presentation architecture with Oracle’s EBS, Discoverer, Portal, and Identity Management.

16,000+ Employee W2s Delivered via Extranet Portal

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The Challenge

ABC, a facilities services company, has employed over 16,000 people in fiscal year 2008. At year end, ABC’s payroll vendor generated an enormous number of W2 documents for distribution to each employee. In addition to physically mailing the individual W2 documents, ABC desired this information be delivered through their employee Portal so the information could be

  1. quickly accessed,
  2. accessible 24×7 now and into the future, and
  3. available in an electronic format.

The Solution

M&S devised a mechanism to generate a single file per employee based on a unique Social Security Number. Once the files were generated, they were loaded into a database inside the customer’s LAN. A web application was built to identify the user logged into the Extranet Portal, request the appropriate W2, and display it to the user securely over SSL.

The Results

Within weeks, the entire solution was designed, developed, and deployed into production, available to over 16,000 employees. Once deployed, employees immediately began logging into the Extranet Portal from around the US to access their electronic W2s quickly and securely.

Underpowering Oracle Portal 10.1.4 on purpose….and winning.

kevin.landonTechnical TipsLeave a Comment

Our friends at Oracle give us a nice list of requirements for their Application Server and Portal products, to help us define to our customers what is needed to run these mammoths of ability and power. But can you make it run on less? And if so, how much less?

Note: Oracle does not condone or recommend any of the following practices. In a real production environment, I agree. This was done as a test to see if it could be done.

Oracle says that to run Application Server 10g you need a few things. For this post, we are on the Windows Server OS. It is put forth you need to be on at least SP1 of Server 2003, Have a minimum 300 MHz CPU (although they recommend a 450, and really recommend 2 GHz and up), and 1 GB of RAM, on an NTFS file system. There is of course the need for a Network interface, and some other ancillary items, but above are the core hardware specs, pulled from their installation documents.

If I said you could make it work in 640 MB of RAM, at 1.4 GHz of CPU on a desktop motherboard, you might say I’m crazy…

Oracle Portal HTML Templates – Page Skins, Content Layouts and More

AshokTechnical TipsLeave a Comment

I have seen a large number of Oracle Portal implementations, and even a fair number using Portal version 10.1.4. It amazes me how many do not take advantage of HTML Templates. These are one of the most powerful additions to the Oracle Portal product, and it is a shame if they are not used or not used the “right” way. Implementors can give their users a customized look-and-feel that is truly flexible and powerful. We have done some incredible things with HTML Templates, and will be showcasing some of the capabilities this year at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. … Read More