I’ve had a pile of unread books sitting on my desk for an embarrassingly long period of time. Here’s the first of several long-outstanding mini-reviews for those of you looking for books about the E-Business Suite.
In collaboration with the Oracle Applications User Group, Solution Beacon has self-published a useful book entitled, “The
Release 12 Primer.” This large format 236-page book ambitiously covers new product functionality as well as new technology stack features in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.
Insightful Product Family Coverage
The first half examines what’s new for a subset of the major E-Business Suite Release 12 product families:
Financials
Procurement
Supply Chain Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
What distinguishes this material from Oracle’s own Release 12 documentation are candid and thoughtful discussions about new features. These are accompanied by a
generous helping of screenshots and diagrams on virtually every page, including callouts for notable new fields and options. Most of these discussions assume a certain degree of familiarity with the equivalent earlier E-Business Suite Release 11i
products, making this a useful guided tour of the highlights of this new release for experienced users.
On To The Technology Stack
The second half of the book covers content that the readers of this blog will jump to first: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12’s technology stack. Like the product family coverage, the initial introductory and conceptual material covers much of
the same ground that Oracle provides in our own official Release 12 documentation. These discussions include a healthy assortment of diagrams and screenshots and are suitable for both novice and experienced Release 11i system administrators. Some
of the areas covered include:
Overviews of new components for the desktop, application tier, and database tier
Web Services
Java on the application and desktop tiers
Forms, Concurrent Processing, and Admin Servers
Application filesystem
Oracle Integration Repository (iRep)
Security recommendations
Beyond the introductory material, some of the more in-depth discussions distinguish themselves by providing useful commentary and insights into the administrative and architectural implications of these new Release 12 techstack components. Notable are
the “Solution Beacon Recommends” callouts, which highlight tips and other pragmatic observations about using these techstack features.
The book concludes with a discussion of roles and activities for various types of EBS administrators (with breakdowns of tasks performed by Workflow Administrators, Apps DBAs, and others), and then a quick survey of various Fusion Middleware technologies.
Not For Profit
Interestingly, Solution Beacon donates all proceeds from the sales of this book to the Solution Beacon Foundation. I admire this as a method of redistributing resources from our
privileged IT industry to others less fortunate. If you do pick up a copy of this book, you can derive some satisfaction in knowing that your purchase helps someone for whom access to the things we take for granted is a privilege and not a given.
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