[Oct 16, 2007 Update: BI Publisher is certified with Office 2007: the Template Builder
plug-in is certified and RTF templates work smoothly with Office 2007. ADI 7.2 Rollup Patch 10 (patch 6455020) is certified with Office 2007]
Lately I’ve been getting a rising number of questions about our plans for certifying Microsoft Office 2007 with the E-Business Suite. Additionally, I’ve started to receive a relatively smaller number of questions about our plans for certifying OpenOffice with the E-Business Suite, too. Here’s a quick discussion about both of these certifications.
Current Microsoft Office Integration Points
The E-Business Suite has a small number of integration points with Microsoft Office. These include:
- Financials
- Application Desktop Integrator (ADI) / WebADI to Microsoft Excel
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Proposals to Microsoft Word
- Contracts to Microsoft Word
- Sales to Microsoft Outlook
- Projects
- Projects to Microsoft Project
That list is compiled based on my limited vantage. It might not be complete — for reasons you’ll understand in a moment. Bear with me: I need to part the curtain to show you a glimpse behind the scenes.
One of my team’s responsibilities is certifying the latest technology stack components with the E-Business Suite. For more information about my group’s responsibilities, see this article.
However, we’re not involved in any certifications of Microsoft Office with Apps.
The reason: testing these integration points requires fairly deep functional knowledge and expertise. For example, the ADI integration bulkloads financial data into Oracle Financials via Microsoft Excel. We don’t have any Financials or ADI specialists in my central certification organization, so my team wouldn’t be able to assess whether the Excel-to-Financials integration is working correctly. Therefore, the WebADI team is responsible for certifying and documenting the latest version of Microsoft Excel with their product.
Escalating Your Requests
As far as I’m aware, none of the the products [Editor Oct 16 update: besides ADI] listed above have been certified with Microsoft Office 2007 yet. Since those certifications fall outside of my group’s responsibilities, it’s a bit difficult for me to make any firm statements about their progress.
This has been raised with our E-Business Suite program management team. They’re looking at ways to track and document these certifications centrally. I’ll be sure to post updates here as soon as our plans firm up on this.
In the interim, if your organization is planning a Microsoft Office 2007 rollout, your best route would be to log a formal Service Request via Metalink against the specific Applications product about their latest certification status. If your rollout is happening soon, you can escalate your SR, too. Make sure that you provide specifics about the integration point that you’re using, as well as information about your rollout schedule.
Adding OpenOffice to the Mix
There’s been a lot of publicity lately about OpenOffice, especially following IBM’s announcement that they’re joining the OpenOffice.org community. It’s inevitable, then, that some of you may be curious about our plans for certifying OpenOffice components with the E-Business Suite.
One thing to note is that this may not be a simple plug-and-play replacement. I can only theorize on the possible issues. At minimum, I would anticipate a number of potentially non-trivial technical issues driven by the lack of direct Visual Basic (VBA) macro support in OpenOffice today and the inherent differences in file types.
This doesn’t rule out the integrations, naturally. However, making OpenOffice work with the existing integration points will likely require real development effort.
As far as I’m aware, none of the product teams listed above have any plans to augment their existing integration points with support for OpenOffice. I would speculate that this is something that could be revisited if there was sufficient demand.
The conclusion reached for Microsoft Office 2007 applies here, too. If your organization is considering an OpenOffice rollout, log a formal Service Request via Metalink against the E-Business Suite product. Make sure that you indicate the scale of your rollout as well as your planned schedules. This will help our product teams gauge the degree of market demand for OpenOffice certification.
If any new developments arise on either of these certifications, I’ll be sure to post them here.
Related
- Linux Clients for the E-Business Suite
- Replacing Jinitiator: Java Plug-In 1.5.0_12 Certified with Apps 11i & 12