Tips, Traps, and Tangents — July 2008

While the summer doldrums may be upon us, there has been no reduction in the flow of JD Edwards news coming across my desk. In this article, I’ll discuss important changes on the middleware and tools fronts, promising developments for JD Edwards World, and a way that almost any company can get a fat check from Oracle.

Next Stop…WebLogic?

Last week, I posted a review of Oracle’s plans to integrate BEA products into its Fusion Middleware portfolio. As the review stated, Oracle’s middleware roadmap raises many questions about the role that BEA products will play in the Oracle Technology Foundation for EnterpriseOne. While we are still working to get definitive answers to those questions, sources inside Oracle have confirmed that there are no plans to force EnterpriseOne customers to use BEA WebLogic Server. If you are running Oracle Application Server or IBM WebSphere Application Server, you will continue to receive support.

 

Oracle Delivers Cool Tools for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

Over the last several weeks, Oracle has quietly posted two significant software offerings for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne users on its web sites. The first offering, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, is one of the most substantial upgrades to EnterpriseOne Tools in years. The second, the Financial Management and Compliance Console, provides role-based financial analytics via a dashboard-style interface. Both offerings are now available for download by licensed EnterpriseOne users.

If you have not looked at EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, you really owe it to yourself to do so. If you are a system administrator or CNC, we bet that you’ll love the new Server Manager. Put simply, Server Manager takes the many disparate tools and interfaces used to manage EnterpriseOne servers and consolidates them to a single tool with a consistent, intuitive interface. While we have not run user tests on Server Manager, our hunch is that the tool will significantly reduce the time that sysadmins spend on tasks such as server installation, patch management, package builds, and configuration management.

 

Installing an EnterpriseOne Web Generator? New Paper Shows How

Are you an EnterpriseOne 8.10 or 8.11 user who plans on upgrading to the EnterpriseOne Tools 8.96 release? If you are, you could be in for some surprises that could be unpleasant if you’re not adequately prepared.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying that EnterpriseOne 8.10 and 8.11 users should avoid Tools 8.96, as it works perfectly well with these releases. You should know, however, that Oracle really engineered the latest Tools release with EnterpriseOne 8.12 in mind. For instance, Tools 8.96 can generate Java Serialized Objects from EnterpriseOne 8.12 specifications on the fly (with some limitations). If you run Tools 8.96 on Enterprise 8.10 or 8.11, however, you have to install and configure a web generator to generate the JSOs manually. Unfortunately, Oracle does not provide thorough documentation for how to properly install and configure the web generator on these two earlier releases.

 

High Availability Options for EnterpriseOne…The Full Deck

Earlier this month, I posted an article to the JD Edwards Advisor entitled “What is High Availability for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne?” At the end of the article, I promised that I would post a full slide deck on EnterpriseOne high availability options after I presented the slides at Collaborate. Now that Collaborate is over, I’m keeping my promise. Here is the full deck for your thoughtful review. (Please be patient…this is a big file!)

As you will see from the slide deck, I discuss many of the issues that an EnterpriseOne shop must consider if it wants to ensure application availability. Besides defining what high availability for EnterpriseOne is, the slides cover the following topics.

 

What is High Availability for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne?

In today’s global marketplace, just one hour of unplanned downtime could cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why chances are good that you are being asked to ensure the availability of your EnterpriseOne applications. So where do you start? In this post, I’ll lay down some basic definitions you can work from to start developing your high availability strategy. For more help, just email me at kherrig@gsi-solutions.com or see me at Collaborate ’07. I’ll be presenting on this topic at Session 20710 and representing Global Systems Integration (GSI) at Booth 718.

Let’s Get Started!

What is “high availability” with regards to EnterpriseOne? Well, everyone’s definition of “high” is different, so we should really refer to it as, “HIGHER Availability.” But for the purposes of this blog, the upcoming presentation, and familiarity, we will go with “high availability.” That being said, what is “High Availability for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne?”

 

What’s Going On With EnterpriseOne 8.12?!?

As CNC professionals, we were shielded from the numerous functional changes that JD Edwards made to EnterpriseOne Xe and all releases up to the 8.11 level. However, EnterpriseOne 8.12 contains important architectural changes that will affect our management of the system.

In all previous EnterpriseOne releases, the specifications we use were stored in several locations: on the “SPEC” directory on the deployment server; on standalone machines with a “fat” or “thick” client in the “SPEC” directory, as well as in the RDBMS repository after check in; and on the Java application server (JAS) generation machine. The deployment server databases were either MS Access or MS SQL Server, depending on your release. But we all knew that the spec files were where the changes were contained.

Now, if you are installing or upgrading to EnterpriseOne 8.12, why is the spec directory empty?