Oracle BI Publisher Blog

I spent the morning in Las Vegas today at the Oracle HCM User group conference. Its build build build in Las Vegas ... everytime I come here there is some new palace being built for us to play in. Still traffic is still not too bad, well compared to the Bay Area anyway and the conference was 10 minutes from the airport.

XML Publisher was headlining in the main conference hall and we had about 400 folks turn up to listen to what this relatively new tool that they have been hearing about here all week is all about. Sadly due to some technical issues we could not do any demos so there was a lot of 'imagining' going on in peoples minds.

The first half of the presentation was all about XMLP's capabilities ... it does so much, an hour does not do it justice. If you think how much time you spend configuring and developing for multiple reporting solutions and here you have one that does it all ... less effort to develop, less to maintain and you get happier users to boot.

The second half of the presentation Vipin from the EBS HRMS team showed off what they are doing with XMLP in the HRMS product. I checked their templates, they are now shipping about 70 for their customers to use ranging from W-2's for the US to the Finnish Paylist Audit Report and that number is growing rapidly with each release.
I think the biggest benefit their customers are going to see is the ability to update these layouts to their own tastes plus localizing templates for specific countries is going to a relative snap!
The product team are also seeing benefits as can customers in the ability to consolidate datasources, many of their report extracts have been consolidated, easier for them to build, maintain and test.

After the main session we followed up with a round table 'Meet the Experts' there were about 50 folks present with questions ranging from how do I get started to how does the concurrent manager work under the covers to how can I extend the HRMS extracts to get the data  I want to how do I burst reports to ten thousand retail outlets on a daily basis ... tough questions to answer without being able to show people a demo ... pictures really do speak a thousand words.  If you're looking for more info, check out the our homepage on OTN or search for "About XML Publisher" on metalink and check out the docs there.

Gotta go, I think I see another casino sprouting on the runway at the airport ...

So, Collaborate 06 starts next week, a coming together of the Independent ORacle Users Group (IOUG), Qwest (the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards user groups and the Oracle Applications User Group ... its going to be big, organizers are expecting over 5000 attendees with 450+ sessions and a packed exhibit hall.

They'll be plenty of opportunity to learn more about XMLP, there are several customer sessions, an XMLP panel, our main session (lots of demos planned) and even a hands on session.

Transform Your Standard Reports ? GO the XML Way!
04/26/2006 9:15AM -10:15AM RAD-BELLEVUE

The City of West Palm Beach uses XML Publisher as Oracle痴 integrated solution for its reporting needs, eliminating third-party software at no additional costs. So can you! We utilize Microsoft Word to design templates and Oracle Apps to integrate and print documents viz., W2s, 1099s, payroll checks and other standard reports. Attendees will learn how to transform boring reports into dazzling outputs. This presentation includes a brief introduction to XML and how you, too, can benefit from this technology to address your document needs. We share how to create free form and table layouts using the template builder and other formatting tips

XML Publisher Live! ? With All the Bells and Whistles
04/26/2006 10:30AM -11:30AM GOVERNORS BR D

We would like to share our experiences implementing Oracle XML Publisher successfully at Iron Age (retail business) for the customer facing documents like invoices, pick slips, pack slips, AP checks and purchase orders. Like any other new software product, we have gone through a lot of challenges to make this work. There were issues at patching, right version of client plug-ins, Barcoding, MICR character alignment, pagination for invoices and finally just understanding the kinks of the tool. With a few caveats, we can finally say that the business users can now design their own customer facing documents.

Building Templates Using XML Publisher and Publish Business Documents
04/27/2006 9:45AM -12:00PM PRESIDENTIAL BR D

Build report templates using Oracle XML Publisher and deliver the formatted reports to end users by fax, e-mail and print. Find how you can eliminate pre-printed forms for POs, invoices, checks, pick slips, 1099, etc. Learn what is coming ahead and how you can extend the value of your Oracle Apps.

Delivery of XML Publisher Formatted Reports
04/25/2006 9:45AM -10:45AM JACKSON CD

Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) provides yet another option to format reports for the Oracle end users. What options do Oracle customers have to deliver the XMLP formatted reports? Does XMLP work for businesses of all sizes? Does it solve all formatting problems? This panel will discuss challenges and what is ahead.

Oracle XML Publisher: Enterprise Reporting and Delivery Platform
04/25/2006 3:30PM -4:30PM JACKSON EF

Oracle XML Publisher offers an efficient, scalable reporting solution for complex, distributed environments. Its central architecture generates and delivers information to employees, customers and suppliers ? securely and in the right format ? allowing users to create and maintain their own report formats from data extracts supplied by multiple sources.

We're also down on the Oracle demogrounds so if you're coming to Nashville drop by and say howdy!

Collaborate06 has started with a bang ... this hotel is huge, just to give you an idea how big ... they have a river running through the grounds of the hotel (all of which are under glass) and you can ride a boat and get a half hour guided tour of the hotel. The fish are huge, wish I had brought my rod!

Monday is pretty much given over to Special Interest Groups during the day. This evening the exhibition floor opened to floods of attendees with burning questions. We have an Applications Technology pod staffed by yours truly and a few other brave souls. It was pretty busy ... not OpenWorld busy but busy enough.

Adding External Data

I got a request tonight; 'How can I bring other data into the layout that is not in the datasource provided?' ... there are a couple of ways to do this. Now Im not going to tell you how to execute a query from the template to pull in more data from the db ... that starts to tie the template to the data extract too closely and we go down a path we do not want to go ... that said its possible but we're not recommending it. If you have some static data or can call a URL to pull XML data; maybe a servlet or static XML document then you can easily integrate this into you output.

There is a function in XSL called document(), we can use this to pull XML data into the template very easily. Basically we declare the function at the top of the template. For this example lets use a well known RSS news feed.

<xsl:variable name="news" select="document('http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories')"/>

We create a variable, 'news'  and assign the RSS feed results to it using the document function. The variable will contain a nodeset or tree of data not just a single element.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
 <rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss">
 <channel>
 <title>Yahoo! News: Top Stories</title>
 <copyright>Copyright (c) 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.</copyright>
 <link>http://news.yahoo.com/i/716</link>
 <description>Top Stories</description>
 <language>en-us</language>
 <lastBuildDate>Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:18:26 GMT</lastBuildDate>
 <ttl>5</ttl> 
 <image> <title>Yahoo! News</title>
 ...

We can now reference the "news" variable and its contents in the template.

The image shows a portion of a template using the "news" variable.

FE - <?for-each:$news/*?> - this is pulling the complete nodeset into the for-each loop
Channel Link - <?/rss/channel/title?> simply referencing the title element
Link - this is a piece of text i.e. 'Link' with an MSWord hyperlink layered over the top,{/rss/channel/link}  - I'll cover the whole notion of links and dynamic links in another post.
FE - <?for-each:item?> - now we start looping over the news item data just as we would normally.
The rest you can check out yourselves, the template is posted here. When you test remember you may need to set a proxy to get out of your firewall.

So pretty simple huh? Of course you can get a lot more imaginative, say your XML source accepted parameters you could pass parameter values based on the main data set, you can build dynamic URLs to open another report, even a self service web page or an Oracle Form or anything else for that matter.
Busy day tomorrow with panels, presentations and the demogrounds ... see ya!

Its Wednesday ... the exhibition hall is winding down and I have not stopped talking for 3 straight days. The three OAUG sessions I have attended so far have been standing room only ... there were folks sitting on the floor in the ailses ... crazy.
I joined an XMLP panel discussion on Tuesday chaired by Kris from Sirvisetti, lots of questions and Im pleased to say we had the anwsers that tee'ed up the main XMLP session from me. Another heaving room full to the rafters and then some ... very small projection screen meant a lot of squinting from the back ... we covered a lot of ground in an hour showing some of the new features in the latest release for Apps ... demos galore ... some more sucessful than others :o)

The best sessions so far for me were today:
Transform your standard reports - Go the XML way!
This morning Neida and Josephine from the City of West Palm Beach took folks through their experience implementing first, some simpler HR reports and then tackling the Payroll check print! I think there were a few hiccups along the way but they are now live and their users want more more more! Awesome presntation. You can get a copy of their presentation here.

XML Publisher Live! - With all the bells and whistles
Sridhar from Apps Associates followed up with a presentation on the XMLP implementation he was involved in at Iron Age, a workplace footwear company. They had some tough requirements for their customer facing documents, decided to go with XMLP and have now been live for about 8 months and everything is running smoothly. You can get Sridhar's presentation here. 

Both presentations provided some great tips and tricks for building templates and also putting together a plan of action for implementing XMLP. All this was fantastic for me, these were Oracle customers using Oracle technology to address a tough problem and they got to see just how they could get started and implement XML Publisher and start saving time, effort and money.

The demo pod has been busy since we opened on Monday night, a constant stream of folks looking for answers and demos of the Apps and standalone release. Tomorrow there is an all morning session on XMLP, Building Templates Using XML Publisher and Publish Business Document this is going to be run by Kris again ... he's nearly as busy as me! 

Well, Im back from a long  long road trip to Colorado from California, nearly 2800 miles through some of the most boring and most spectacular scenery the US has to offer ... the two extremes strangely enough in the same state, Utah.
On the way out driving through mile after mile of searing hot salt flat. I dont know how I stayed awake having driven through the night to get through Nevada (sorry Nevadans I'm sure it was beautiful out there in the dark).

on the way there ... mile after mile of salt

on the way back ... mile after mile of breathtaking scenery

              http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/index.html

There is lots of new content available on all flavors of XMLP plus all the documentation you could ever want and even a download for the Enterprise edition that takes just a click, not 10 ... enjoy!

Its coming ... its even bigger I hear rumors of Oracle taking over a block of Howard Street in San Francisco to "extend" the Moscone Center for the week :o)
This year there will be two XMLP events for EBS and PeopleSoft customers at the Extreme Weekend - lots of hands on stuff to dip your proverbial toes in the XMLP water. Places are limited so book early.
There are also over 20 sessions related to XMLP and its use throughout the all of Oracle including EBS, JDE, PeopleSoft and Enterprise. The sessions are not just from development, we have customer and a partner sessions lined up. Last year they were turning folks away from the doors so get there early too.
Of course the demo pod will be swamped all week but drop by, hang out, have a chat and get a demo or three!

The above sessions are of course subject to some change but you get the idea.

Its coming, that crazy week (for me anyway)  and although crazy its one of the most enjoyable weeks of my working year - I get to meet and talk to as many of you as possible. We'll be down on the demogrounds throughout the week and I think we'll have demopods for EBS, PS, JDE and the Enterprise release - of course you'll get to see publisher all over the place.

Here's whats in the session catalog so far that relates to Publisher.

There are some great looking customer sessions from WGI and Hologic and of course sessions from the teams responsible for the publisher flavors. There are other sessions that will mention the use of publisher and look out for the session on the 'Report Repository' I mentioned last week.

See you there I hope - drop by the demopods for a chin wag.

Today is blog action day - so I read this morning. Its a call to arms for all bloggers to write about a single subject - the environment, quelle surprise!

Im certainly not an 'environmental sceptic' - I majored in Environmental Science back in the UK - this was not a 'town planning' degree - this was hard core, nuclear physics, environmental chemistry - 3 branches, microbiology and an awful lot of math (not quite sure why.) So, I think Im reasonably well versed in all things environment - we do our bit here in our piece of Colorado with recyling and the like. We even signed up for solar panels which I hope are going to come some time next year - I can not wait to see that electricity meter go into reverse!

Here comes the flameworthy retoric. I do take everything that a certain peace prize winning politician says and does with a pinch of salt - yes, the world is warming, I dont think you can ignore that. But some of the 'scare tactics' used are worthy of MCCarthy and his 'reds under the bed'. Yes, America needs to wake up - the $1 gallon has gone and running vehicles that get 12 mpg is madness if not for the environment then for your pocket at least.

But car manufacturers need to wake up too - a Volkswagen in Europe that maybe has a 1.1 liter engine and gets 40 mpg miraculously turns up over here sporting a 2.0L turbo - why? To cater for the American thirst for power? The roads here are almost as bad as the UK for congestion, why have all that power? We'll be measuring performance using the 0-30mph yardstick soon because 60 is a distant memeory on our roads. The weather dude this morning was pointing out that the fog was lifting over Denver, hmm the brown hydrocarbon laden smog appeared to be doggedly hanging on and was doing a great job of obscuring the Rockies - the mountains that is.

What am I getting at - the great American obsession with cars? Maybe ... You can have the best light rail systems in the country but if folks still want to sit in their own metal boxes, sipping coffee, spewing fumes, it aint worth it. Re-education is the key, not scare mongering.

Thats it - I have made comment on the environment, I could go on, but I wont - you're relieved I can tell. The only tenuous link back to BIP that I can come up with is that Mike, our PM owns a Prius!

A few weeks back I made a call for templates for a demo of the new Reports Repository demo at OpenWorld. As I mentioned this is going to be a repository for us and hopefully you to share your templates with the Publisher community at large. I got a few templates but I'd love to get more.

Doug Fortnam at Protege Software Services contacted me with a great example of a sharable template - its not for an invoice report but actually a custom report but its very useful. I'll share his insights here.

This XML Publisher Report is a report to document any Forms Personalizations present in Oracle Apps 11.5.10. I presented it at the New England OAUG in Massachusetts in June of this year. I think it is a good example of a useful, shareable template because it documents the setup of Forms Personalizations, either select Personalizations or all Personalizations in the database. The sql query to generate the flat file was developed in TOAD and then used in the Report Wizard to create the data template. This example makes extensive use of re-grouping and conditional logic to display the data in a fashion similar to what is displayed in the Oracle Forms. If I had to do it over again, I would develop a data template with grouping to simplify the rtf template. Not sure if there is a performance hit because of all the re-grouping.

Doug shared the template and you can get it here.

I have been looking at the blog stats over the last 6 months - it's funny, Mon-Thurs numbers are huge, well Im happy with them. According to the stat counter on the site, this blog is getting between 2-5000 hits a day. Thats not bad in my opinion, for a product that is not that 'big' and a blog that is technical in nature - it's not often that you will get a 'world according to Dexter' diatribe here.  So Mon-Thurs are great, Friday is a sloooow day - we halve our numbers most weeks. I guess I lose you folks in the Asian contingent from the readership if I post too late in the day. Hence, you may have noticed that Friday posts are light on the ground or are a little 'fluffy' in nature - not that Im chasing hits and only want to write when I know Im going to be read. Far from it - I view the blog as a resource that you folks can use - it gets news out there, it supplements the official documentation and is fun to write ... most of the time.

I have received several emails recently thanking me for the content and how it helps - that is great, thats exactly what I wanted the blog to be. Now, I want to get more content thats useful to you out there. Sometimes I indulge myself and will write up some demo project I have been working on - for instance, not many of you will be interested in the data entry via PDF series I wrote up a while back - whereas the recent 'Where's my Total' set of posts got me loads of feedback.

With that in mind you will see two new 'departments' on the blog - 'Newbies' and 'Hints and Tips'.  You can probably guess whats going to be in those two - but I would also like to get some inputs from you dear reader. What topics would be useful to you? Are you a newbie and need newbie stuff? or are you more experienced and want push the boundaries of the product and need some help?

I guess we have readers across the board but I want to hear from you, thats an order people get commenting or mailing!

I have an admission to make - may be you have noticed, I have not been on the forum recently. I have been drowning in mail, demo and ppt prep for OOW ... apologies!

I took a look yesterday and jumped back in - have to admit I thought there might be a few zero reply threads but to my suprise and pleasure there were very few. There are still questions flooding in but folks are 'giving back' on the forum and answering a few questions with their wisdom. A big thank you from me and team and a pat on the back.

For those of you that do not know about it or have not used it - just post a question and you'll get an answer. Those of you inside the Oracle org - get out, its not for you, you have a mailing list to ask questions :o)

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=245

Its dominated by EBS and standalone users but I want you JDE and PS folks getting in there - I'll help out as much as possible and Im happy to ping JDE and PS dev teams for answers on your behalf.

I'm now back on the horse and will endeavour to get at least a 1/2 hour on the forum a day again to help out. 

Us Oracle bloggers have been at it about OOW for some time now ... Im seeing a backlash from those that can not make it asking us to stop. It's the one week a year a year we get to talk to you folks directly so its a little understandable the Oracle blogosphere is awash with talk of OOW.

I have covered sessions on BIP in a past post, today Im bigging up the OAUG XML Publisher SIG, note the old school name - its an early start but should be worth it.

Abhishek who runs the SIG sent me a tentative agenda a few weeks back:

User Presentation - Using BI Publisher for outbound Interface - 45 minutes

Town Hall Discussion on BI Publisher - 1 hour

It's squarely aimed at EBS customers and OAUG are recommending pre-booking a psot - Im not sure on the numbers for the SIG but our EBS session on Tuesday is already full - we're trying to get a bigger room, fingers crossed! There is a more generic BI SIG where standalone and BIEE folks can get more info:

Session ID:
Session Title: Oracle BI SIG
Date: Sunday 11th November - 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM
Room: Moscone West 2014 - L2

Not sure on the content of this SIG - will try and find out.

Mark Rittman is over next week and running the ODTUG BI&DW SIG on Sunday at 11am,  Moscone West 3010 & 3012 - more info from Mark here.

My plane gets in at 7.45 on Sunday so I might be a little late but would not miss it for the world - hope to see you there, if you cant Im sorry but you'll get to see pictures and a quick report on Sunday afternoon - my new cell phone is my new best blog friend.

Final update for OOW for the week - earlier this week we were filling the XMLP for EBS session room with pre-booked folks. By yesterday we had nearly 50 people wait listed to get it. The great logistics folks have gotten us a bigger room.

Couple of doors down from the old room and bigger - get a reservation quick to guarantee a seat or a square foot of floor space.

Whats going on in the session?

Well, all I have is about 30 slides and thats it!
We have demos galore from bursting to the reports repository, I have folks talking about their implementations, I have some Oracle Partners talking about their solutions and you got my dulcet tones to keep you interested and to make a change I have questions for you all - should be fun!

Get to the Schedule Builder here and get a spot.

Quick Update  

Pradeep from out PM team has pulled out a list of 5 sessions that cover BIP/XMLP from a customers perstepctive - try and get to some of them and get the real skinny on BIP/XMLP

It was great to see 60 or so bleary eyed bippers arrive for the OAUG XMLP SIG hosted by Abhishek. It was good session with a ppt on outbound electronic documents using eText templates then followed with Town Hall syle Q&A. Last count I have 14 action items ... its gonna be a long week.

Just a quick wrap up on Sunday - this morning we had the XMLP SIG run by Abhishek for OAUG - its funny there were more folks in the room that the picture would have you believe ... honest!

I thought it was a good session folks got the chance to vent and ask questions - its great to see so many people either live or going live with Publisher and now starting to ask 'OK, so what can I do with it next' - bursting is going to be a major thang for many of you I think - its certainly got peoples ears princked when it was mentioned this morning - the other biggy was 'hardware' secured check printing - we have a soft solution but many of you already have a DIMM card in your printer and want us to talk to it. Eric from Evergreen Data Systems got the chance to step to the plate on that one this morning. Evergreen are an Oracle  partner and have just such a 'hard' check solution and they have now got it working with Publisher under the concurrent manager. If you are looking to implement check printing from scratch check them and their solution out - they have a booth down on the exhibition floor - look out for them.

I know there are folks out there that already have the hardware purchased - they just need to be able to 'talk' to it via Publisher - those of you in the room this morning at least got a nod from our man at the top that we would take a look into it. Because we do not generate the PCL output ourselves its going to be a limited solution but we might be able to look at doing something for you in the near future. I'd appreciate any comments on this and requirements.

Anyhoo, I seemed to have come out of the meeting with about 15 action items to investigate - not quite sure how that happened. I just attract work I guess :o)

This afternoon was spent trying to get the demogrounds together - we have 3 dedicated Publisher pods this year - 2 standalone and an EBS one - Im still a die hard EBS fan at heart so you'll see me mostly hanging out at the EBS pod willing to wax lyrical all day or until my voice gives up to anyone that will listen. For those of you with a PeopleSoft or JDE 'bent' - there are pods for you too in your respective areas.

This evening was spent with the folks from Hologic and Washington Group International(WGI) - Glenn from Hologic will be presenting a good foundation guide to Publisher from a customers persepctive on Thursday 10-11am Moscone West 3014 - if you want an intro with the chance to quiz someone who's gonna tell you how it is get to the session - Im gonna bust a gut to be there. Rich and Ray from WGI hail from my new 'neck of the woods' in deepest darkest Colorado - they have been doing some visionary stuff with SOA in their company and Publisher provides the reporting and document generation component and integrates into their master document processing plan. They will really get under the covers of Publisher and down to the nitty gritty of BIP APIs on Wednesday 4.30-5.30pm Moscone West 3024 - should be a great technical session, join them to see how they put publisher (and us) through its paces. If nothing else come and ask Rich just what WGI does - its amazing - check out his podcast with Cliff last year.  

Met far too many folks today who, when introduced said 'Who? Tim ... the Tim Dexter from the blog?'
Yep I'm the man with no face until you meet me that is. To rectify this and prevent more disappointment when you see me in the flesh as it were ... here's a great picture taken tonight. Understand dear reader, I have been awake for nearly 24 hours, I'm dog tired and I'm grumpy ... be afraid, very afraid!

Down on the demo grounds this morning ... a slow start but boy did it get going. We are right next to the concourse - not buried at the back like last year so there were lots of folks coming by. Im very impressed by what some of you are getting up to with publisher - you have moved on from getting that invoice listing out and are now attacking the bursting engine with a vengeance. I heard today of a customer, sorry I can not remember your name, doing 'double bursting' - burst once and then take the results and burst those again - I did not catch the business problem we were solving but solving it we were and thats what matters. So bursting is hot - just about every one I spoke to wanted to know how to burst-  other than to drink 3 gallons of water and see if you can hang on!

For the initiated, bursting is a term used to describe the taking of a set of batch data, splitting them in to individual documents and then delivering them to recipients. A good example was quoted at the SIG yesterday - a company generates commission statements for all of its sales force every month. Rather than run 100s of individual reports, just run one for all of the sales force and then burst each report to the appropriate employee - simple n'est-ce pas? Thanks Jean Pierre - my 20 year old French is more than a little rusty :)

Publisher offers a little more, what if each employee had a delivery preference, or some wanted HTML while others PDF? what if some wanted it formatted using Layout A and others Layout B? Publisher can do that - as long as those values around layout, format and delivery option are available at run time then the bursting engine will dynamically apply templates, format layouts and deliver according to preferences.

We go a stage further thou, for real low level control, at each stage of the burst e.g. data split, format, generate, etc we have created a 'listener' - you can subscribe to any listener in your own code so that as a stage is reached in the burst you can interrupt the flow, step in, execute some logic and then let the burst continue. Let's say you wanted a copy of each document sent to your content management system - in the case of partner documents such as invoice, you can not just dump the documents into the repository, you need to add some attributes to it so that its searchable later on. Use the listener functionality - subscribe to the 'generate' event - once the document has been generated, get a copy of it and its XML data - now parse out what you need from the XML data and create your meta data file - now push this into your content manager et voila. The customer gets their invoice and you get an indexed copy of it for retrieval and record if needed later.

There are versions of bursting for EBS, PS and Standalone and I believe JDE will deliver a solution next year.

Go forth and burst! 

Joe and Elise got the word out on RR and Web2.0 today with a great session. A good session that was nearly full - check out the presentation via content builder. RR coming soon ... Go Ariens!

Last day today and I have really enjoyed meeting many many of you Bippers. I'm really pleased to see so many folks either now implementing or live and generating documents.

Many of you are embracing the 'publisher' way of reporting.
I spoke to someon yesterday about how they are using publisher. Reporting requirements are reasonably straightforward so he has designed a set of materialized views with 200 or so columns in them. Then built simple 'select * from' extracts and turned the business community loose with the template builder. His development team are not responsible for layouts any more and extract maintenance is a relative doddle ... fantastic stuff.

This approach is not going to work for everyone of course but its a great example of how publisher cab help you rethink your reporting approach. Making the business happy and gving then what they want and making ITs life easier.

The level of sophistication that I'm seeing some you using publisher for is amazing. Double bursting, BPEL integration, document routing, the list goes on and on - we need you folks presenting next year or at OAUG. On Tuesday I had a slide on data entry, since then I have had at least 3 conversations around 'how can we get it done'

It has not been EBS and standalone all week either I have spoken to many PeopleSoft and a few JDE customers. This is where I have to lean on the likes of Mikhail and Jody from the PS tools team for help and they have stepped up. I think thy have had a busy week on their pod and Jody is presenting this morning, so be sure to get along.

So, I'm happy with you people - its a long and winding road I know but you're doing great. I hope we measure up half as well as I think you do. On that not I bid you adieu from OOW07 ... normal service will resume tomorrow.

My work at OOW is done for another year ... well once I have sorted through the mass of ToDo's and questions on the back of business cards I'll be done.

We have been discussing hosting a weekly or bi-weekly Customer Web Session - we wnt to interact with you folks, get feedback on upcoming features, how-to's, template clinics, etc. We would do a couple of sessions in the day to pick up Europe, APAC and Americas so we are not talking a US centric thang ... gotta remember my roots and the worldwide coverage we have and I know the blog has. So an hour every week or two to learn something new or see a potential new feature.
I would really appreciate hearing from you on this - would you come?

A little off topic today but having watched and read about the AppsLab entry today on Human Computation and CAPTCHAS I thought the following mig