Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

This one's from another Oracle team but is intriguing and noteworthy enough to include here:  Oracle and Google have teamed up to make certain data in the E-Business Suite accessible via Google's OneBox For Enterprise search appliance. 



What's particularly interesting is that the Google OneBox is external to the E-Business Suite environment, accessing data via standard E-Business Suite function security.  E-Business Suite search results are returned in XML format and merged into whatever other data Google finds from other sources.

I'm trying to get my hands on technical architecture documents, which are apparently still being reviewed.  Apparently, some small patches to the functional products are required to enable this integration fully, but details are a bit scarce.  In the meantime, we'll have to content ourselves with the available glossy marketing-level information.

[Editor:  This site was reorganized on Aug 14, so the feed links below are now obsolete.  See this article for new feed links.]

Here's something we've never had the luxury of offering before: 
automatic notification of certification updates for E-Business Suite technology stack components.  If you'd like to
monitor this blog for new posts, which will include E-Business Suite certification
updates and desupport notices, point your RSS or equivalent feedreader to this blog.

If you prefer, you can subscribe to a specific department instead of the entire blog:

General Oracle and E-Business Suite news
New certifications and updates for E-Business Suite technologies
In-depth discussions about E-Business Suite architectures
Desupport notices for E-Business Suite technologies

I've also syndicated this feed via Feedburner, Technorati, OraFaq, Bloglines and others; let me know if you use other syndication services that haven't discovered this blog yet.

Given that Oracle's flagship product is a database, you might be surprised about how little we know about your E-Business Suite environments and requirements.

Our team often struggles with prioritizing conflicting requirements, and in the absence of accurate information about our users, we're sometimes forced to make seemingly-arbitrary product decisions. 

For example, we don't know how many of you have implemented Demilitarized Zones (DMZs) in your corporate networks.  Supporting DMZs isn't exactly a picnic, so early releases of the E-Business Suite omitted support for this.  We only released DMZ and reverse proxy support in 11.5.9 and later.  I plan to discuss DMZs and reverse proxy architectures in a more detailed future post.

One of my goals for speaking at the Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) COLLABORATE 06 conference next week is to gain insight into your requirements.  I plan to ask everyone I see to complete a survey about their E-Business Suite environments and plans.

Even if you're not attending the conference, you're invited to participate in this survey, which I'm going to run continuously on this blog, too.

Every answer counts -- you'd be amazed by the amount of influence that a handful of customers can have on feature priorities.  To participate, email your completed survey to me:

• E-Business Suite Architecture Survey