Tag Archives: fusion

Oracle SOA Suite, AIA, PIPs and Fusion apps

23 Monday Jun 2014

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I recently presented on the subject of Oracle middleware (FMW) with an emphasis on  SOA Suite, Application Integration Architecture (AIA), Process Integration Packs (PIPs) and Oracle Fusion Applications.  Below is a derivative of the presentation.  I’ve sought to identify how the technologies relate, and how Fusion applications relate to the non Fusion products.

For those trying to get to grips with this technology stack – you might find the notes useful as I’ve included plenty of links to associated information.

Impact on Integration when Moving to Fusion Apps

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

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So as a road mapping question I have been thinking about the migration to using Fusion Apps so we have a road map and more importantly design patterns that will support a transitions from the likes of Ebiz R12, Siebel etc to their Fusion successors.

Example of Coexistance

Example of Coexistance

In broad terms the application level transition through the principles of co-existence are well established. What is currently exercising the grey matter is the middle migration. Perhaps the best way to explain this is through an example. The Product Data Hub (PDH) solution exists to provide a Master Data Management capability for your widest and gadgets.

You will want to share that master data with other apps such as Ebiz so you can deal with say order management. All fairly obvious, and in Fusion Apps world the different components should inherently work together. Back in R12 world though you are probably going to be using the Product MDM PIP (Process Integration Pack) with the Ebiz extension pack. When using the PIP like this then it’s just a case of retiring the PIP. But this PIP is designed so that you can extend the process to publish Master Data to your own apps for example you also push the data to your design systems as you maybe sharing available parts data.

So now we have an extended PIP whic in a simple Fusion apps migration you’d leave behind. But leaving the PIP behind also means an integration gap. So what is the answer.

Well on the early days of Fusion Apps the suggestion was that AIA and PIPs would be part of the ongoing story. but the reality is little has moved in this space. Understandable, Fusion Apps development had been far bigger than anyone expected, if fusion Apps are directly conversant then how much real demand exists for the PIP transformation. So what is the answer, well at this stage I’m not sure. I can say I have seen ABCS’ mentioned in the public FusionAppsOER. We know that AIA Foundation Pack EBOs are realised in Fusion Apps albeit via ADF BCs.

Given Fusion Apps underpinnings are the same as AIA so it should be possible to drop the AIA Foundation Pack (FP) into your Fusion Apps environment (setting aside all the licensing questions it would raise). Can you therefore drop in the PIP and disable the legacy Oracle app elements leaving your custom extensions? Do you accept a rewrite of your integration all be it you should just need to redevelop the orchestration layer (ABCS’ for Fusion App exist and you can carry forward your own ABCS’ for your app such as the design system in our illustration)?

Deployment of Fusion Apps with Non Fusion Apps

Deployment of Fusion Apps with Non Fusion Apps

Hopefully in the coming weeks we will get the opportunity to uncover answers with Oracle.

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – Summary Review

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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So having written a series of detailed blog entries reviewing a couple of chapters at at time I thought it might be worth just providing a very brief review. Writing a book that provides both breadth of coverage for a very large subject area as well as meaningful depth is a very difficult trick to pull off. But the authors of this book have succeeded magnificently. The book tackles the subject of basic customization that users can perform through to in-depth feature development using the Oracle SOA stack. Not to mention reporting and analytics. The book has been written in an engaging way providing context, background and Fusion Application principles and then taking examples of how to implement the different kinds of capabilities. From this book, you should have a good grasp of what to expect and how to approach Fusion application Extension work.

As a result I’d recommend this book to Architects, Project Manager’s who want to understand what their development team should be doing and the risks of their approach. This would also form a good roadmap into the detail for developers starting out in the Fusion applications space.

 

Detailed reviews can be seen at:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – Chapters 13, 14 & 15 reviewed

12 Saturday Apr 2014

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Our final detailed visit to  Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) covers the final 3 chapters which engage with the Scheduler, Look and Feel customisation and the relationship with integration and service concepts (dare I use the acronym SOA).

The chapter on the scheduler is pretty short, but then compared to many other chapters the size of the product/component is small. The book relates how the scheduler behaves compared to the Schedule Management offered in EBusiness. The surprising things is that each product domain (Financials, HCM, CRM etc) has its own scheduler rather than a single shared service; the book doesn’t attempt to explain the rational here which is a shame.  It does describe how it deploys into each domain, where the configuration exists and how to work with the configuration of the scheduler itself (e.g. where logging goes etc) and attempts to address some obvious questions from a administration perspective.  It then goes onto how to create a custom scheduled process with a worked illustration. All very well done, although I have to admit to a nagging feeling of I’m missing something – it maybe simply that deployment is very much through server administration rather than through an automated mechanism (so if you develop and test in a preproduction environment, you can package up the process of deploying config custom app to your production environment without needing to repeat the admin UI interactions, so you can be assured there is no inconsistency between deployment instances).

The Look and Feel chapter is about largely applying the changes so that the product feels like part of your business’ corporate solution – important if you’re exposing any aspects of it to the outside world. So aside from the use of the tools you have the ADF controls to effectively ‘skin’ the product. The chapter provides a brief but concise view of how skinning works, in relation to the old EBusiness technologies (CLAF and UIX) and current HTML technology of CSS and the key part of ADF (Rich Faces). More importantly it points out the relevant documentation on all the sources of information, and tooling such as the skinning editor. Not to mention addressing the issue of deployment. Obviously there is a short illustration demonstrating an element of skinning.

ADF Architecture

The initial emphasis on the last chapter is the reality that organisations can’t simply migrate all non Fusion Apps such as EBusines, Seibel etc to the Fusion solutions in one hit therefore you need to provide a degree of integration between solutions for as long as the transition may take. This neatly leads into the question of well how do I know what components exist to support integration, which brings OER (Oracle Enterprise Repository) into the picture. So obviously the book provides a brief overview to the use of OER. The various Fusion apps offer different interfaces for different tasks (from bulk data export to business events) so each of these ‘patterns’ are briefly explianed and as Fusion apps is offered as a SaaS solution how that might impact the ‘pattern’ availability. The chapter finishes by walking through the use of using a SCA Composite and web services to interact with a Fusion App – probably one of the most common approaches to integration at a transactional (rather than bulk) manner.  The only thing missing for me would be a brief discussion on Process Integration Packs (PIPs) which leverage all of  the technologies underpinning Fusion Apps into a custom package of integration operations or ready made integrations.

So the final chapters provide a strong close to the book continuing to offer an excellent overview, pointing you to resources to ‘deep dive’ as necessary.

 

Previous Chapter reviews:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – Chapters 11 & 12 reviewed

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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We continue on in our review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) to chapters 11 and 12 which look at Reporting and Analytics respectively.

Reporting in Fusion Apps is based upon OBIEE rather than vanilla BI Publisher against the application database. This means that you and build your reporting capability against a far more diverse set of data sources (license permitting of course). It does also mean that the steps for creating reports at least to start with are more complex as OBIEE realizes a multi-tier approach to report generation. The chapter goes onto to describe the types of data source, the means by which reports can be configured conditional execution and then through ideas such as ‘bursting’ where the report generating process can be partitioned and run in parallel by multiple processes each concentrate on a range of data (sound a little like Map Reduce doesn’t it). Finally how to format the output. All of which is then supported with a detailed illustration.  As you might imagine there are prepackaged reports and templates, so loading and configuring these in an environment is considered.

The book recognises that in a single chapter you can only really scratch the surface of reporting and makes reference to other tools in the OBIEE kit bag such as OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) BI and Mobile BI composer.  The only little trick here is the opportunity to point out some good sources of information.  But that isn’t a significant, there is such a thing as Google and it might take a bit more reading to find the best resources around these tools.

Chapter 12 looks briefly at the use of Analytics through OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications), Oracle Hyperion (also known as Essbase) that is available with Financial Reporting studio and focuses on OBTI. The chapter feels pretty standalone from the preceding chapter on reporting – which when using the book more as a reference is great, but from a cover to cover read can niggle a little, particularly when both chapters rely on OBIEE background.  But to be honest we are nit picking here. As with previous chapters there is an illustrated scenario walked through (the layout of which isn’t as good as previous chapters – but it is a relative observation), the illustration perhaps misses the opportunity for a killer blow of referencing the core app customisation to show how you might bind the dynamic reporting provided by OBTI view into the core CRM with the customisation. I have to say I am impressed by the OBTI technologies given the integration into the Fusion security framework, leveraging ADF and its optimisation strategies – all of which are clearly explained here.

It would have been nice to explore OBIA and Oracle Hyperion a bit further, but doing so would probably have warranted additional chapters. Overall a good chapter again, covering a lot of capability efficiently.

 

OTBI Architecture

Previous Chapter reviews:

 

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – Chapters 9 & 10 reviewed

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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Back to the the review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press), Chapters 9 & 10 take us from developing ADF based extensions to BPM and developing capabilities using a lot more of the SOA based building blocks such as Human Workflow.

The BPM chapter isn’t huge as actually the real effort behind BPM driven processes are more SOA based development. But the book does step back to explain Oracle’s history in the BPM and BPMN space and how Fusion Apps work using these technologies. So what we have is a good chapter more focusing on ideas and principles.

Chapter 10 naturally takes us into building full extensions which could be implementing the activities needed to realise a BPMN processes. The chapter is almost two separate halves, the first being the ideas and approaches adopted by Fusion Apps – such as the triggering of processes through EDN and onto into approval framework and how it compared to the preFusion products. The second half of the chapter turns all of this on practical steps in the various tools to realize functional extensions in a series of comprehensive steps.

Finally the chapter tackles the issues of deploying the customisation and the implications to patching and updating your Fusion Apps.

So yet again the authors have managed to cover a lot of ideas very effectively providing sufficient insight that you should able to find the necessary information if you’re working with a Fusion application not discussed here.

 

Previous Chapter reviews:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook Chapters 7 & 8

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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continuing with the review of  Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press), Chapters 7 & 8 get into the development side of building extensions through the use of JDeveloper and the ADF framework, although this approach is not recommended for CRM if it can be helped, bu then the Page Composer is far more powerful in the CRM context.

Chapter 7 walks you quickly through the process of establishing JDeveloper so that you can get underway with the customisation. Along the way the book references the very detailed Oracle guides and shares useful tips as well (for example how to share configuration between JDeveloper instances for connecting to a Fusion apps server without having to go through reconfiguration.

As Fusion Apps uses ADF for its framework, knowledge of this is going to help you understand more easily what is going as the book is not an ADF guide and focuses upon the use of the framework providing some honest hints and observations (e.g. it is necessary to know which task flow forms the basis of any page depending upon the product the identification of this information can be easy or difficult depending on the product).  The bulk of chapter 7 is focused to guiding you through 2 scenarios for customisation.

By the end of chapter 7, although a lot of information has been shared I’d have liked to have seen a couple of things addressed, how to minimise the risk/impact of customisation so that deploying a patch doesn’t clash or has minimal impact with any customisation. It is also too easy for organisations to customise a product to the point the C in COTs far out weighs the O and T. Remember CEMLI? The second aspect I’d hoped to have seen is the incorporation of configuration control of the development changes – but this probably more one of my pet issues showing.

Chapter 8 goes into the mechanics of developing your own UI within an Fusion App, covering DB table creation, business components, UI and so on including the security framework, creation of workflow elements and so on.  I have to admit that I found this chapter easier, than the pure customisation work of chapter 7 – although that could be because the whole mechanism is a bit more discrete.

Neither chapter really take on the question of testing (integration or unit level) – I’m sure that given all the good guidance here, that the authors have a few good practises and tricks that they could share on how to make testing as simple as possible.

Aside from a couple of small points, all said and done, the book does a tremendous job of addressing an enormous subject area, and recognises that it isn’t giving you every little detail by telling you which sections of the Fusion Developers guide will provide more detailed information. Bottom line, what the book doesn’t explain you have the insight into the official Oracle online docs to go find the rest of the information (without having to plough through a 1000+ pages of developer guide).

 

See earlier chapter reviews at:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook Chapters 5 & 6

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press

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Continuing with the review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) into Chapters 5 & 6. We start to be taken into a lot more detail on the different types of customisation. Chapters 5 & 6 looks at the page composer capabilities. Chapter 6, specifically focuses on CRM because of the differences it has, although the core principles are the same and chapter 5, tends to be look at it for everything else. For non CRM solutions the users get a limited Page Composer capability, and Administrators get a more powerful level of capabilities in the form of being able to control what information is hidden or presented. The fact that the book identifies the differences in behaviour between the likes of the  HCM and Financials etc is of serious credit to the authors as it requires a lot of effort to check and verify such differences.

The chapters although following the previous ones providing a breadth of coverage also now dive into some detailed step by step examples of customisation. The examples don’t cover every possible type of customisation, but a good example from each area for example adding details to a form and re-arrange form layout and labelling through to changing the navigation menus.  My only small criticism is that there is no clear statement about the start state (i.e. which components are deployed and their initial configuration, is there any prior data needing to be loaded etc). For me at least, I tend to look at the step by step guides as being comparable to the detail necessary to manually run test scenarios. That said, this shortcoming isn’t the end of the world and I’m sure with a standard deployment of the fusion apps to hand to experiment with you should be able follow achieve the points being demonstrated even if you have to err away from the precise actions described.

The CRM Fusion Application appears to have a lot more capability within the Composer approach to extensions with ability to develop scripts using Groovy and ADF Business Components. The definition of event triggers, simple workflows and user alerts via the likes of email.

I had hoped that the chapters would perhaps touch upon internationalisation and localisation (e.g. making labels language specific, currency presentation) but checking the Oracle documentation this is a development (JDeveloper) style activity – so I’m sure that the next chapters will address as they look at customisation from a JDeveloper perspective.

Over all a well written pair of chapters managing to walk that fine line of providing breadth of information whilst still going into enough detailed depth for you to understand what is involved in implementing these customisations.

 

See earlier chapter reviews at:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook Chapters 3 & 4

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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Continuing with the review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) I’m going to look at chapters 3 & 4. Chapter 3 looks at the different types of Flex Fields from the well known Dynamic Flexfields (DFF) and the more advanced EFFs and KFFs (different ways to provide more advanced flex values such as linking other tables of data).

The book describes briefly the steps to utilise many of the capabilities with some screenshots but don’t mistake this for a detailed key this value followed by click that button combined with screenshots of every step for all aspects (if you did that we’d probably trying to read 5000 pages not 500). So if you want to see and feel all the different aspects explained you will need to have an instance of Fusion apps to try the techniques out with. For me, this is no bad thing, I want to understand what the capabilities are and a sense of the effort and complexity involved – if I want to have blow by blow guide I’d turn to OTN and the tutorial video clips being made available everyday by Oracle on YouTube.

The book also recognises not all strategies are available with all Fusion apps and what can therefore be done. Either by implementing the capability yourself, or asking Oracle to prioritise feature development in the Fusion apps domain.

Unusually rather than continuing with customisation capabilities in Chapter 4 we look at Security. This is no bad thing as if you want to achieve security in depth you need to understand how it can be incorporated at every level as you go rather than as an after thought at the end. But as you go through this chapter you’ll see just how central the security framework is to working with Fusion Apps.

The security perspective comes primarily from an authentication and authorisation (A&A) perspective so bringing in OAM and OID along with related tooling (including APM which is a central tool for Fusion Apps Security). The A&A framework provides an advanced hierarchy of roles and permissions as the capability to integrate extensions with it. The book again provides a solid foundation on which you can build specific implementation understanding.  Security comes in two forms – functional (i.e. restricting access to Fusion app capabilities) and data (which records a user can or cant see). The fascinating aspect for me is the data view because the different organisational possibilities that can influence the data you can or can’t see – for example by value, by internal organisational structures such as departments, by suppliers/partners/customers and so on (Oracle use the terminology of sets).

Security considerations go beyond just managing major roles, but how to autoprovision users (i.e. I create an OID entry for a new employee – how to provide them with a standard set of credentials). How to interact with Fusion Apps at the web service level from inside or outside the secured FusionApps environment.

As with Chapter 3, there are illustrations on how to establish some security settings and leverage security for your own development, but not in an exhaustive click by click manner.

Both chapters, particularly Chapter 4 introduce the ideas and approaches in a succinct manner explaining both the more well known concepts but also the more advanced capabilities along with identifying some common challenges and how they can be overcome (through the provision of tooling or technique for diagnosis).

So far this has been the best introduction to Fusion Applications I have come across.

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – review Chapters 1 & 2

13 Thursday Mar 2014

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So I’ve got through the first couple of chapters of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press). The book starts with a presumption of minimal knowledge so the first chapter provides an excellent high level overview on the framework and assembly of Fusion Applications and some of the principles such as Weblogic node management. Although an appreciation of non Fusion Apps will give you a sense of some ideas such as Flexfields would be useful at this stage, but they are explained in a lot more depth later on.

Chapter 2 moves onto the different kinds of customisation that can be performed and how those customisations are achieved from user configuration through to tools in the Fusion Apps and onto JDeveloper and the Fusion Apps libraries. The interesting thing is that all though it is clear a lot of work has gone into managing the dev and test cycles on a shared Fusion Apps platform including potential change conflict management there seems to be little for direct linkage or built in configuration management.

In terms of a book, it has started very well, providing a sense of over all shape of Fusion Apps in a very readable and informative  manner.  I think this is going to be a informative & easy read.

Oracle Fusion Apps at Google