Last year, I posted an article about a tool I’ve created that that makes it easier for JD Edwards users to balance their general ledger (GL) against perpetual inventory. Since then, I’ve received a flood of suggestions for enhancements to make this tool (known here at Andrews Consulting Group as RapidReconciler) even more effective. I’m happy to announce that we’re shipping a new release of RapidReconciler in April that includes many of these suggestions. In fact, we’re going to unveil the new release at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver.
I’ll say more about what we’re doing at Collaborate in a minute. But first, let me give you a sneak preview of the enhancements we’re going to demonstrate there.
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Two weeks ago, IBM’s senior executives came to New York to brief investment analysts on how Big Blue’s business is doing. While much of what was said matters little to the JD Edwards community, one executive’s brief utterance definitely caught my ear. At the end of his presentation, Bill Zeitler, Senior Vice President of the Systems and Technology Group, stated, “We’ve got the high end of the POWER6 family coming in the beginning of April.” This means that in two weeks, JD Edwards customers will have new servers to consider as platforms for their applications.
As many of you know, IBM’s POWER processors run the company’s System i and System p servers. The System i is the only server that runs JD Edwards World. The System i and System p also host a substantial number of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne installations.
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In yesterday’s column about Oracle’s new integration between JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Demantra Trade Promotions Management, I mentioned that I was asking Oracle for additional details on the offering. Little did I know that I would receive those details today.
As I mentioned yesterday, the integration supports EnterpriseOne 8.12 and Demantra 7.2. Naturally, that left me wondering whether users of EnterpriseOne 8.11 and earlier are left out in the cold when it comes to using the new offering. As it turns out, many such users may be able to deploy the integration with a little help from Oracle or a skilled systems integrator. Here is what Bob Monahan, Director of Product Strategy at Oracle, wrote to me about the matter:
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Yesterday, Oracle took a big step toward integrating its Demantra applications more tightly with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. The software giant announced an integration between EnterpriseOne and Demantra Trade Promotions Management. The new offering will make it easier for consumer goods companies and retailers to manage trade promotions and forecast their impact on demand levels.
The latest announcement marks the second time that Oracle has forged links between EnterpriseOne and Demantra. Last year, the company shipped an integration between EnterpriseOne and Demantra Demand Management. That offering tied the demand forecasting tools in Demantra to the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and financial modules in EnterpriseOne. While the Demand Management integration was a welcome offering, it did not deliver everything that Oracle’s retail and consumer goods customers needed. With their heavy reliance on promotions to move products, these companies require additional tools to predict how promotions will affect demand forecasts.
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Over the last several weeks, Microsoft has made two surprising announcements that could have a significant impact on JD Edwards professionals. Because of these announcements, it won’t be long before many of us are considering new options for integrating JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World with our Microsoft applications.
Microsoft’s first announcement hit the wires in late February when the company declared that it is dramatically expanding the ability of its products to interoperate and share data with other software. The vendor is posting around 30,000 pages of documentation on its MSDN web site that describes the APIs and protocols used to access its high-volume products. These products include Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, and Exchange Server 2007. Developers can use these APIs without license or royalty fees as long as the applications that use them are for non-commercial use.
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