As soon as we can get our hands on these new GTAS patches, we need to jump on them to start understanding some of the impacts to our EBS environments in further detail.  As the Federal E-Business Suite community, we don’t really have much time to be able digest, test and prepare for these changes.  First required reporting cycle for GTAS is after Nov FY13 month-end (Calendar Nov 2012) and the fact that GTAS will only accept Bulk File feeds (i.e. no pencil whipping any numbers like with FACTS today), means we’ve got to be ready with this stuff working.  If anyone is looking for more info from Treasury on GTAS, you can find it here.

For R12 Fed Financials Installs who jumped on the CGAC & FV 90000001 patches early (me and my local Denver Federal Financials Shared Service provider!), at least we have that piece behind us.  But certainly there is more coming, especially for all the agencies still on 11i.

Here’s the link to the deck I scored:

Oracle Federal Financials Spring ’12 Development Update

If you’ve been following the twitter feed, you know I’m heading to Collaborate ’12 to present two Federal Financials R12 sessions and catch-up on as much news/info as I can there.  The FED Sig meeting is on Monday, maybe that will help.  Keep watch on the twitter feed for anything I pick up relevant to the Federal EBS community.

If anyone has any comments or knowledge to share that you feel would help spread key info, please don’t hesitate to comment.

–Larry

Here is the link:

OracleFedForum EBS Directions

Here’s an attempt at sharing some of the past week’s events, announcements and information of Federal relevance (with a few other items) that I picked up.  The link to the Oracle Collaborate 09 Media Kit, which provides press-releases and additional info on a number of these items is available here.

E-Business Suite 12.1 Released – 12.1 (12.1.1) was made Generally Available on Monday, May 4th.  12.1 brings a variety of new capabilities to the table, but for the Federal community, the biggest news with 12.1 is the important step forward in the long awaited “Projects Federalization“.  12.1 now provides the capability to create the required USSGL Budgetary postings from PA Agreements/Fundings, Revenue and Costs.  Projects has never provided USSGL Transaction Codes or any other solution for creating these entries and this gap has been a long-time Federal Top-Ten enhancement request.

Other top 12.1 new features include:

-Practically all standard Oracle Reports now can be generated through BI Publisher (v 12.0 = 852 seeded BI Publisher templates, v 12.1 = 2600+ seeded templates)
-PA Agreement Definition Enhancements
-PA Agreement “Date Effective” Funds Consumption controls for revenue and invoicing
-The association of PA Agreements with AR receipts (to handle Unfilled Order with Advance Scenarios) and flexibility in controlling the proper accounting for associated revenue (e.g. drawing down the advance instead of recognizing a receivable and having to manually adjust)
-Revised AP Third Party Payment capability which provides the capability for associating a “Remit to Supplier” on an Invoice
-The capability to maintain line-level transaction balances for AR Invoices
-Additional standard data elements in Purchasing to support FPDS-NG reporting
-A bunch of new features in Sourcing including enhancements to capabilities for segregating Cost vs Technical proposal evaluations (“Two-Stage Evaluation for RFPs”)
-Secure Enterprise Search right out of the box (think of being able to use a Google-like search from any OAF page (i.e. your home page) & getting links to take you straight to the documents).  This capability is available for implementation in earlier EBS versions, but for 12.1, its available straight out of the box.
-Enhanced BI Publisher integration with OAF pages through the capability of a new Print button/link (or capability to add) on any OAF page, that will allow the initiation of BI Publisher requests (so for example, in iProc, then users don’t have to launch the JRE & submit a normal concurrent manager request just to print a hard-copy of a requisition)
-OAF Flexfield references: This brings the capability of core forms Context-Sensitive Reference Field-type functionality to OAF forms.
-Diagnostics Upgrades
-The capability to see record history in OAF pages (e.g. created by, last updated by)
-A variety of OAF personalization enhancements
-Announcement of the Application Change Management Pack (this is a new Oracle Enterprise Manager component available to assist with patch, customization, setup/config management, etc. across instances).
-iSetup enhancements
-E-Business Suite Native SOA Enablement (less need for the use of adapters)
-Enhanced User Management (UMX) reporting

Of course there’s more, but that’s probably enough to start with.  The 12.1 software is now available on edelivery.oracle.com, the 12.1 documents are available from OTN and Support Note 790942.1 is a good starting point for 12.1 resources.  I look forward to sharing more info on 12.1 over the next few months.  I actually was working on getting a 12.1 instance up & live during the event, but ended up needing to do more patching than I’d initially anticipated (I was hoping a quick, flawless rapid-install would be all that was needed) to support the latest Forms/Application Server version, so I wasn’t able to get it done yet.  But hopefully in the next few weeks, I can start playing with it hands-on and I’ll work to share what I find.

Per Oracle, the paperwork for FSIO certification of 12.1 has already been submitted.  Since nothing changed fundamentally and we’re only talking enhanced functionality here, this should be just a paperwork drill, so hopefully FSIO won’t wait too long in providing the go-ahead on 12.1 (it only makes things better, so why hold anything up).

BI Apps 7.9.6 Released – This is the latest version of the BI Apps content for OBIEE.  I blogged about this here for a bit more detail. I found it interesting to see in a couple sessions (even in Charles Phillips’ keynote) that the new Federal Financials Analytics were specifically called out on the slides or by the speaker.  Besides the Federal Financial Analytics, BI Apps 7.9.6 now provides Projects Analytics, in addition to other various enhancements.

11i10, 10gR2 DB and other software Extended Support fees waived for another year – Typically, Oracle provides premier support for a platform for 5 years and then starts to up the price if entities don’t upgrade, charging extra for “Extended” and “Sustaining” support.  Believe it or not, 11i10 has already been out for almost 5 years and although the 11i10 premier support had already been extended through Nov 2010, now 11i10 premier support has essentially been extended through 2011.  So, organizations that haven’t upgraded yet, can still get the same level of support through most of 2011 without having to pay extra fees for the Extended support.  10gR2 DB Extended support fees are waived through July 2011.

The Oracle messaging at the conference was pretty clear.  It was pretty much “We understand the current economic climate and know organizations don’t want to embark on large projects that take a while to show ROI, so here are the offerings we want to push that are smaller projects and result in a quicker ROI”.  Oracle was pushing BI Apps, the User Productivity Kit (UPK), Secure Enterprise Search (SES), the Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Process Integration Packs (PIPs).  The latest release of Beehive (Oracle’s new collaboration tool announced at OpenWorld last fall) was also announced.

A couple other nuggets I thought I’d pass along:

-Oracle is working on building integration with Federal Financials and the Hyperion Budget Planning/Formulation product.  So then, that should make for a potentially slick integration between the Budget Planning & Budget Distribution side of things.  It sounds like integration is also being built with HR Apps to facilitate the position budgeting integrated capability

-With all the talk about enhanced integration & AIA, I asked one of the Advanced Procurement speakers from development about if there are any plans to enhance the flexibility of the Purchasing APIs.  Of course he didn’t get specific, but mentioned that increased openess of the APIs is definitely on the roadmap.

-Regarding Fusion Applications, it seems that the Public Sector is on the back-burner for Fusion Apps.  So the apps will become available for commercial before being able to support all the specific Public Sector requirements.

Hope that gives a decent overview for now.  I’m sure I’ve got some other stuff in my head that I just can’t think of at the moment.  There are a bunch of other blogs I’ve seen talking about Collaborate announcements/events such as the Triora Group Blog, so be sure to Google for additional info or feel free to comment here if there’s anything else to share or if you think I can help with.

Wanted to mention that Oracle and CACI are hosting an event on Feb 3 in DC, around their collaborative enhancement of the E-Business Suite Federal Contracting capabilities.   Click here to see additional details on the location, speakers and times.  Suggest touching base with your agency’s friendly apps rep or partner rep on details to register.

A few interesting points of info include:

-Both Oracle and FSIO are pointing to January 2009 as finalizing the R12 FSIO certification

-In the Oracle Development update, Oracle pointed identified R12.1 as targeted for release in calendar year 2009 (12.1 is slated to include additional out of the box integration for Projects SLA items such as the capability for creating standard journal entries for Unfilled Customer Orders when an agreement is baselined). This obviously doesn’t really give much specificity, but at least they mentioned it.

Here are the slides from the meeting as presented from Oracle and OMB FSIO.

Oracle CAB Development Update (Dec. 3, 2008 )

R12 Overview for Dec 2008 Cab_v1

FSIO Presentation at Oracle 12-3-08

Hopefully, this will not delay the process significantly as a number of agencies are eagerly awaiting the go-ahead from FSIO.  Of course, the irony of the situation is that R12 solves a number of issues (due to SLA and other capabilities) and I’d consider it to be more compliant with FSIO requirements than prior releases

Other news from the call:
-The next Federal Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting is scheduled for 12/3 in Reston.  This is typically an invite-only event for Federal Financials system owners/executives.
-Next FEDSIG call tentatively scheduled for 12/16.
-The FEDSIG will be extending its time frame for collecting enhancement requests from agencies.  See the template at http://fedsig.oaug.org and contact information for forwarding the enhancements.
-AP Patchset O created a number of issues for an agency on the call, suggest testing it well prior to moving into prod.
-A straw poll was taken of how year-end closing processes went.  For the most part, it seems agencies are getting through year-end easier with each passing year.  Numerous agencies reported needing to develop custom year-end processes.
-2 large agencies have mentioned significant performance considerations with rebuilding summary accounts.  Oracle is apparently working on some performance enhancements to the summary account build process so maybe we’ll see that in the future.
-Multiple agencies indicated continuing problems with unaccounted AP invoices (due to failures of the Payables Accounting Process) and mentioned the desire for enhanced focus by Oracle to assist with mitigating these continuing issues in the future (note: due to the changes in R12 SLA, these specific issues should go away and lets hope we don’t have too many new ones)
-A few months ago, Mike Barker (Oracle Federal Development Lead) offered up the possibility of providing a web conference on new R12 capabilities aimed to help agencies comply with CGAC.  This is still being considered, however the current highest priority is getting through the FSIO process for R12.  The webinar won’t be until after the next R12 demo/presentation with FSIO.
-The FEDSIG chair is researching the preferred time-frame of the OAUG Collaborate ’09 FEDSIG meeting.  Options are somewhere between 1 hr & a half-day.

If anyone reading this is unsure on how to join the FEDSIG or is interested in getting on the distribution list for the monthly calls, see http://fedsig.oaug.org.

The agencies going live that I know of are:

• DoD Business Transformation Agency (BTA) (as the first agency being rolled out under the Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI))
• International Trade Commission (serviced by DOI-NBC SSP)
• Treasury Debt Management (serviced by DOI-NBC SSP)

If anyone knows of others, feel free to comment.  Its just interesting to know.