Oracle Portal 10.1.4 or 10.1.4.1 Upgrade to 10.1.4.2 – Features and Bug Fixes

AshokTechnical Tips4 Comments

You may have applied or are considering applying the Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.3 patch for a variety of reasons. As a result, if you are running Oracle Portal 10.1.4 or 10.1.4.1, your Portal will be upgraded to 10.1.4.2.

Portal 10.1.4.2 New Features

There isn’t much to be found in terms of documented new features for Portal 10.1.4.2, but I understand the following to be new to this release:

  • Portal Repository JSR-170 adapter
  • You can now copy pages across page groups
  • New HTML DOCTYPE specification

Portal 10.1.4.2 Bug Fixes

Of the many bug fixes documented for Oracle AS 10.1.2.3 and Portal 10.1.4.2, following are just a few that you might be pleased about:

  • Omniportlet onclick was still opening the link in the same browser window.
  • Customize/Personalize links on a portlet were accessible even after the Global Inactivity Timeout has occurred.
  • When a WSRP portlet tried to upload content of size > 64k as multipart request, then an error was displayed saying > 64K is being uploaded.
  • All old-style URLs may now be redirected directly to the new URL without going via the splash screen.
  • More in the full article…

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.

Google Apps SSO and SAML

AshokNews and Updates1 Comment

M&S has taken our years of Identity Management with products from companies like Oracle to integrate with Google’s popular “Google Apps” offering.  By leveraging an existing Identity Management infrastructure, organizations can seamlessly integrate with Google Apps assets like calendar, mail, documents, sites, and more without requiring their users to login, let alone even have any knowledge of Googe Apps usernames/passwords. M&S is comfortable with the SAML protocol that Google relies on and can implement an appropriate handshake with a variety of tools and languages, including Java, .NET, PHP, and Perl. Contact us if you are an existing Google Apps Premier … Read More

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.

Oracle AS: Undeploying Multiple Applications (including BPEL Human Tasks)

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Undeploying a single application in Oracle Application Server is pretty straightforward. However, I had a scenario where I needed to undeploy many human tasks (since each of them is deployed as an application in OracleAS) and undeploying them one-by-one was becoming painful. I recalled finding a place to undeploy mutiple applications, but couldn’t remember it exactly. After digging a little, I figured it out again and wanted to write it here in case it can help you (or me in the likely event that I forget again). From the Cluster Topology page of Enterprise Manager Application Server Control, you get … Read More

Oracle WebCenter 10gR3 Review – Framework, Web 2.0 Services, and SOA

AshokIndustry Trends, News and Updates, Technical Tips1 Comment

Ashok Aggarwal, a Partner at M&S Consulting has recently written a complete review of Oracle WebCenter Suite.  This has been published in a few major trade journals and websites. You can read the article at: Oracle WebCenter Review – Framework, Web 2.0 Services, and SOA Following are two excerpts from the article. The review goes into a fair amount of detail with Oracle WebCenter 10gR3: When customers approach us to help them solve their business requirements, they often have a set of existing applications, both custom and purchased, that requires their end users to spend time moving from one system … Read More