Oracle Spring ’12 Federal Development Update
I didn’t attend, but there was an Oracle Federal Financial Briefing on 17-Apr in Reston where information was shared about some of the upcoming GTAS enhancements and target patch release dates. Personally, besides focusing on our Fed R12.1.3 stabilization efforts on my current gig, I’m working to get smart on some of the basics associated with GTAS, the upcoming 6-digit USSGL standard and new Federal Accounting/System process changes associated.
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
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )New R12 CGAC & FV Consolidated Patches, Good, But…
Federal Development released a patch (9307787) for R12 in late December that provides a number of Federal Financials enhancements focused on better accommodating the OMB Common Government Accounting Classification (CGAC) attributes. The most obvious enhancements included are changes to the Treasury Symbols forms and related functionality. There is certainly more to the changes and a comprehensive document on the enhancements provided is available as MOS Note: 1277072.1.
These enhancements have been released for R12 Fed Financials only and the patch is currently in a controlled status for the 12.1 release. I’ve been focused on a Federal 12.1.3 upgrade for the last few months and we made the decision to start trying out the new CGAC patch in January. We ran into a few different issues resulting from the patch, but have been able to resolve them through a variety of additional patches, including the just released FV Consolidated patch 9000001 (also in a controlled status). Some of our issues with the CGAC patch were due to invalid object conditions caused by some FV objects (views, PL/SQL packages, etc.) getting out of sync with each other. The goal of this latest FV Consolidated patch is focused on providing the latest and greatest set of compatible FV objects. We are continuing to test, but our initial experience with the 9000001 patch on top of 9307787 has been positive, with the exception of having to rework a variety of our different Subledger Accounting (SLA) configurations a bit to deal with some changes. If looking at the CGAC patch, any agency will almost certainly need to go to the 9000001 patch as well.
Moving forward to uptake new enhancements is usually always a good thing, but due to the sensitivity and complexity of the R12 Federal SLA functionality, we must be a bit more careful with patching at this point in R12 than we might have been w/11i recently.
We’re used to (more…)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Comments on Proposed CGAC Fed Admin Changes due back to Oracle May 15th
As was previously mentioned, Mike Barker and Oracle Federal Development provided a web-conference that gave insight into some changes to Federal Administrator being considered to comply with CGAC on the 1st of April (Sorry for the delay in getting this out, I’m definitely way behind on my blogging due to a new-born, Collaborate 09, a good 60 hrs a week of client work and the rest of things in life). There were also some other topics presented, including the auto-generation of treasury symbols and budget distributions. Oracle is interested in receiving comments in hopes of arriving at the best design possible and has extended the deadline to the 15th of May for submitting comments. Oracle has asked that we not post the slide-deck online (on the FEDSIG web-site & I’ll honor that here also), but if you are a member of the OAUG FedSig (if not currently, you start here to sign-up for free), just email me and I can shoot you the slides.
Proposed tweaks to the Fed Admin design include:
– Define Treasury Account Symbols form enhancements
– A new form for associating Public Law Numbers to Treasury Symbols (instead of to the Budget Transactions)
– Define Fund Attributes form enhancments (formally known as Appropriation Parameters)
– Define Budget Codes Form enhancements (formally known as Budget Account Codes)
– New Define Business Event Type Codes (BETC) Form
– New TAS/BETC Mapping & Customer TAS/BETC Forms
– Setups to support AutoCreation of Treasury Symbols, Budget Distributions
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )FedSIG CGAC call with Oracle Development – 1 Apr
FYI:
“The CGAC call for the FedSIG with Mike Barker, Director of Public Sector Development, will be a concall / web conference. Here are the logistics:
Participants should use Internet Explorer for the web conference. Participants should, at their earliest convenience, go to https://conference.oracle.com and click on “New User” to ensure that their system is compatible to the Oracle web conference system. To ensure success, please make sure that your pop-up blockers are turned off. You might need to turn the blocker off, exit Explorer and then start it back up again.
If a user does not have admin rights to accept the downloaded applet to initialize the web conference, they will not be able to view the slides and, if possible, should join other participants in a conference room to view the slides.
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 1:00 pm ET
Duration: 90 Minutes
Call In: XXXXXXXXX
ID and Passcode: XXXXX
Web Conference ID: XXXXXX
Please encourage all participants to call in about 10 minutes before the start of the call at 1:00 pm ET, so we can start on time.
The intended audience for this call is existing Oracle customers, who are subject to the non disclosure in their Oracle License Service Agreement.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Oracle Federal Development CGAC/R12 Web Conference 4/1
It seems that Oracle development is offering up a web conference to the Federal Financials Special Interest Group (FED SIG) on how Oracle is addressing CGAC in R12. This is scheduled for April 1 from 1-2:30 Eastern. Oracle is asking how many different callers will be calling in to determine if they need to support a large audience, so if you want to post info on the poll about how many separate callers would be calling in, I can relay the info. It looks like they’re looking for a count by 3/19.
CGAC is the Common Government-Wide Accounting Classification Structure as published not too long ago by OMB FSIO. I’ve heard that Oracle has been making some changes in some of the table structures to better accomodate the definitions of some of the CGAC elements. More info on CGAC is available at http://www.fsio.gov.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )
Oracle Federal Applications 