EBS, APEX, Hyperion, Triage

EBS

The good folks from Oracle E-Business Suite Technology are out at OpenWorld this week, but still found time to post some valuable info on...OpenWorld 2009: E-Business Suite Technology Stack Certification Roadmap

APEX

The Application Express Listener Early Adopter is now available here.

Hyperion

Over at 'in 2 Hyperion' we have a posting on an Excel feature, custom lists, that many use and few know about, and how to combine it with Smartview: Compliment the Excel Add-In or SmartView with Excel Custom Lists.

Feel like bragging about how you have the biggest Essbase install in the cosmos? Well it has to be bigger than the one described here at Tim Tow's blog to qualify.

Are you a developer looking at Hyperion's complexities and wondering how all the pieces fit together, particularly Planning? This article from Rittman Mead Consulting is a good start toward clarity.

IT Philosophy: Triage and Queuing

I sense a resonance between these two postings, one, at Edgewater Technology's blog, speaks of project triage, a very high level concept, another, at The ORACLE-BASE Blog, goes down into the code to discuss queuing, another form of triage. Triage runs from the queing on the CPU all the way up to the user's daily calendar entries, it is a concept that should always be kept in mind when planning and building projects. It is also the most fundamental element of Oracle Support. Something is broken, or you don't know how to get the product to do what you need, you make an appointment with the doctor (file an SR) and the doctor (a combination of Oracle's internal workflow's interaction with the your profile and how you answer the questions when opening the SR and the actual support engineers) , sees you. Responses range from an unhurried process of preventive care (Sev 4) to rushing your DB to intensive care (Sev1). For Priority Service users you are near the front of the line as soon as you hit the submit button on the SR, and also have better ability to call in specialists if the problem is exotic, but the triage concept remains throughout. When is it time to think of triage? When the workflow gets out of whack. Wrong prioritization can lead to needless waste and damage. Increasing the priority of some tasks for politics or appearance' sake can cause harm, so can 'cry wolf' syndrome (i.e. if you always claim that any problem, even something minor, is a world-ending problem from hell). Artificially inflated priorities can wear out IT staff and waste money, ultimately slowing down the very project it was supposed to be expediting. Intelligent triage, though sometimes seeming harsh, will benefit your bottom line.