Oracle User Productivity Kit

Welcome to the Oracle User Productivity Kit blog!

Bill and I are very excited to have this new way of reaching out to our customers, partners, industry analysts, and everyone interested in Oracle UPK. We hope more UPK and Tutor insiders and community leaders will join us in delivering interesting and informative posts.

We are committed to supporting the UPK and Tutor community. As Oracle's acquisition of Global Knowledge Software continues, there may be changes and will be new opportunities for how the community interacts and grows. We will do our best to keep you informed of any changes and new opportunities here and everywhere we can!

What community resources are out there now?

Oracle Resources

UPK Forum

MyForums at Oracle.com hosts the official UPK forum moderated by Ania Gutierrez, Brian Haynes and Lisa Kawahara. Browse there for tips-n-tricks and wisdom from UPK users and Oracle employees. Register to ask your questions and offer your own perspective!

Oracle Metalink Knowledge Base entries for UPK

Oracle Metalink, and MySupport at Oracle.com, hosts the official Knowledge Base for UPK and is a great place to check for solutions to known problems. If you experience a problem installing or using Oracle UPK products, look here first! Dazzle forum users with your ability to quote from articles here! You'll need to register to access the site. (Update: I'm told the link only works if you are using the non-flash version of Metalink.)

Oracle UPK Community Site

From Metalink, choose the Community Tab. Click Enter Now, then click the User Productivity Kit link on the left. Oracle communities help you leverage professional connections through forum discussions, shared knowledge and documentation, web conferences and more.

GKS User Community*

The GKS User Community

is an interactive where you can communicate and exchange ideas on best practices and experiences with Oracle User Productivity Kit.
Within each secure forum, participants are provided access to a suite of powerful tools that enable a group of users to effectively get organized, share knowledge and communicate. Join today and discover how you can get the most out of your Global Knowledge Software!

You'll need to register to access the site.
* See the the Global Knowledge Software - Support page.

Unaffiliated resources

While surfing this series of tubes, we've stumbled across some other noteworthy blogs. These are external and we take no responsibility for their content or accuracy. But, they were kind enough to talk about UPK, so we'll be kind enough to mention them.

ebusinessuite UPK category

A collection of UPK-related posts

oracleappsblog

A lengthy article on UPK

We're still doing some setup and housekeeping, so you may notice changes to some areas over the next weeks, thanks for turning a blind eye for a bit.

We hope you'll continue to follow and enjoy the UPK blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed today!

The topics of context sensitivity and in-application performance support with UPK don't get enough attention. Many people I run into aren't aware of the capabilities built into UPK (and ODPN). There's a lot to talk about! I'll try to break it up into logical parts. Here's the groundwork.

UPK provides several options for providing context-sensitive help out of the box.

• Help Menu Integration for supported applications
• SmartHelp for supported web applications
• Application-provided context
• Hardcoded context

UPK can provide context-sensitive help for nearly any application. However, the necessary level of control over the application and the complexity of the solution can vary. Understanding these options will allow you to choose the best solution. You may even learn how to add context-sensitive help to applications which you thought could not support it!

Let’s define what context and context-sensitive help are, and examine how UPK implements them. In general, context is the environment in and the activity which a worker is performing. Context-sensitive help is exactly the information the worker needs to accomplish the activity in the environment. From the UPK perspective, the environment is one or more applications and the worker is the user. The activity is often a transaction or some other step in a business process.

In UPK, context is a set of values computed or passed from the application at the time of help launch that has some relationship to the activity the user is performing. The player package is the UPK output that supports context-sensitivity. It does this in two ways. First, it supports context by filtering the content outline and showing only applicable topics—that is, topics which contain the context passed from the application. Second, when an applicable topic is viewed, the topic advances to the first frame which matches the context passed from the application.

Ideally, context values are unique for every application and activity the user performs. But in practice, it may not be necessary or even desirable to have such detailed context information. We use the term granularity to describe the difference between the number of application states and the uniqueness of context values. The correct granularity for context depends on the number of different activities the user performs and the number of topics covering those activities.

In the next installments, I'll dig into the different methods of providing context-sensitive help with UPK. I promise more pictures and fewer words. ;)