Focus on Fundamentals is Key to Insurance Companies

To survive and grow in today's challenging economy, insurance companies will need to successfully employ strategies for "getting back to fundamentals," Oracle Insurance executive Chuck Johnston notes in a recent article in National Underwriter Property & Casualty magazine.

In a follow-up interview, the vice president of strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance added that one of the keys to today’s return to fundamentals is finding additional ways to reduce operating expenses to improve operational efficiencies. And for many insurance firms, an essential first step comes with transforming traditional workflow processes using more sophisticated business process management (BPM) applications.

Significant Certification and Patch Enhancements for Oracle Financial Services Applications

The Oracle Financial Services Applications development team has completed several certifications and patch releases for the Oracle Financial Services 4.5.39 family of applications earlier this year.

The new certifications for Oracle Financial Data Manager (includes Administrator, Balance and Control, and Rate Manager), Oracle Risk Manager, Oracle Performance Analyzer, and Oracle Transfer Pricing applications include:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES 4
- Oracle 11g Database

New certifications for the Oracle Budgeting & Planning application include:
- Technology Stack Upgrade: Oracle Financial Analyzer 6.4.0
- Patch 8 and Oracle Web Agent 6.3.4 Patch 10
- Internet Explorer 7

Among the new patch releases announced for Oracle Financial Services 4.5.39 applications are:
- Patch #6147921: for Request Queue Errors in HP UNIX on Oracle 10g Database
- Patch #6966074: for Request Queue Errors in Sun Solaris SPARC on Oracle 10g Database
- Patch #7703405: (OFSA Patch 4.5.40) provides fixes for errors in Risk Manager and Performance Analyzer
- Patch #7243974: a patch only for Budgeting & Planning (Patch 4.5.39.4) for a new certificate date
- Patch #6449835: another patch only for Budgeting & Planning (Patch 4.5.39.5) for Russian language translation enablement.

For further details about the certifications and for patch README files, go to My Oracle Support.

Oracle ECM Upcoming Events

Are You Going to AIIM?

March 30-April 2,Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

If you are planning to attend the AIIM International Exposition and Conference, e-mail us and we can arrange an executive one-on-one meeting to discuss your implementations and future product road maps. At the booth you can meet with our partners and watch a presentation in the mini-theater. Also be sure to watch the keynote speech on Tuesday at 8:45 a.m., where four Oracle customer executives will discuss how they communicated the value of ECM to their business. Register now for AIIM.

COLLABORATE 09 - IOUG Stellent SIG

May 3-7, Orlando, Florida

The IOUG Stellent SIG hosted four popular technical sessions at this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference on SIG Sunday. Similar sessions will be scheduled again at next year's conference, but you'll find even more technical sessions at the upcoming COLLABORATE 09 conference in May. Register for COLLABORATE 09 to get valuable insights to Stellent and Oracle Content Management products.

Contribution By Angela Golla

Oracle Application ExpressOracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using only a web browser and limited programming experience, you can develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure.New built-in capabilities for Application Express 3.2 include Forms Conversion and additional security enhancements. Learn more about this new tool at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/index.html

EBS, Alert Log, Bad Code, APEX, Windows, JDEV, BI Publisher

EBS

At the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog this week:

Certified Oracle RAC Scenarios for Oracle E-Business Suite Cloning

Alert Log

Global Oracle Contractors Network blog has a posting on programmatic 

probing of the alert log. Very handy functionality, though of course 

you can also get this using OEM, but the direct program access will let 

you dig for specifics you may be looking for as an event driver in your 

monitoring system.

Bad Code

The BexHuff blog has a postingo on historically bad ideas in software. 

The question there is what do you think? Some of the ideas mentioned 

are pretty well entrenched and have many advocates. Are you one of  

those advocates? Here's a chance for a dialog on this.

APEX

There's a new release of APEX out there. Take a look at the posting on 

it at the Inside Oracle APEX blog.

Windows

This is at a PeopleSoft blog, PSST0101, but it's about Windows, not 

PSoft. Ever have updates come in overnight and find your box has 

restarted in the night? Good for security, but something of a pain if 

you had a batch file that didn't run because of it or another long 

process that was cut off. So here is a way to prevent that.

JDEV

Here is a posting, refering to another, that will help you open the 

JDEV IDE faster for quick code changes: JDev IDE: defaulting to the 

source code editor for web pages at the one size doesn't fit all blog.

BI Publisher

Tim Dexter over at the Oracle BI Publisher blog points out a new blog, A BI Publisher's Diary... If Tim likes it, it's likely to be worthwhile.

Contributions By Angela Golla

Do you need more information about upgrading to E-Business Suite R12? Check out this useful Metalink note Note 567515.1 . It provides links to key documents and references concerning the upgrade process.

Oracle E-Business Suite News and Articles

Go Green with Oracle Content Management

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, but don’t realize that
those cost cutting measures may also have positive environmental effects that can
increase goodwill and shareholder value. Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions
provide tremendous return on investment, but also make your organization more
environmentally conscious or “green” by cutting the consumption of electricity,
paper, fossil fuels, and the emission of greenhouse gases.

To quantify these efforts, Oracle has created the Oracle Document
Management Green Calculator. This online tool, and the accompanying
spreadsheet, will enable you to see how your organization can effect environmental
change by moving printed information online.

E-Business Suite Advisor Webcasts
(Requires Metalink login)
Schedule for upcoming Advisor Webcasts on Oracle E-Business Suite, Communications Apps and Database.