Floyd Teter

I know all your favorite spots,
And tonight we will connect the dots.
- From "Connect The Dots" by The Spill Canvas

So, guess where I was last week? Aw, c'mon, guess.  Really, just try once?  While, alright, if you don't want to guess...I was at Oracle HQ for a three-day workshop on UX ADF Design Patterns!  Lots of hands-on work in using design patterns to build wire frames and then implementing those designs in ADF.  The workshop was really all about connecting the dots.

Also had the opportunity to see plenty of new product prototypes...none of which I can talk about (inserted frustrated sigh here) other than to say that there is some extremely cool stuff in the pipeline from the Oracle UX team.  Seems like this team's innovation engine is really taking their game up another notch.

Back to the workshop.  While I can't get into the finer details of the workshop here, I can tell you that everything from the workshop is available on-line.  To wit*:

• UX.Direct provides both a design process and a toolkit that you can use today...right now...fully functional...free (and how often do we hear "Oracle" and "free" in the same breath?).  You'll want to start by spending some time exploring here.
• ADF Design Patterns are a subset of Fusion Applications Design Patterns. The idea here is to share out the Fusion Apps design patterns so that developers can independently build applications that look, feel and function like Fusion Applications (think partner and customer enablement).  Although the OBIEE Design Patterns were not explicitly covered in the workshop, the same concept of consistency and best practices applies.
• My next foray into design patterns will include building some mobile apps.   So it was pretty timely for a portion of the workshop to cover Mobile Design Patterns.  Definitely worth checking out.
•  During the workshop, many of the attendees (including me) discovered that our ADF skills were more than a bit lacking.  And it was difficult to implement our designs without those skills.  I found myself continually referring to Oracle's basic online JDeveloper and ADF training.  If you're not familiar with JDeveloper and ADF, this is a great learning resource...saved my bacon many times, including a few instances last week.

In summary, great workshop.  Covered stuff I can take back to the job and use.  Now, for those of you who think I'm just regurgitating Oracle marketing hooey, check out the new Splash BI product from EiS Technologies (yes, I work here - shameless plug).  We built the product with JDeveloper and ADF Essentials (another Oracle freebie - wow!), using the ADF Design Patterns.  The combination cut our development time by 75 percent and allowed us to build a simple, great-looking enterprise reporting app.  It was just a matter of connecting the dots...

*I have always wanted to use this phrase in a blog post!

I've gotten quite a few questions lately about upgrading OBIEE from older versions to 11.1.1.7: how to get it done, what are the steps, etc. In other words, "Floyd, how are you getting it done?"

Well, the honest-to-goodness truth is...I follow the instructions of people who are smarter about it than I am. It's a practice I follow quite often. Albert Einstein used to say that he never memorized anything he could look up. As a lazy guy, that sounds really good to me; it's worked out well.

So, in terms of steps for upgrading OBIEE to 11.1.1.7 (or anything else regarding OBIEE, for that matter), I look to the very bright people at Rittman-Mead. You can find all you'll ever want to know about the upgrade here. That's it.

Google (or Bing or whatever your search engine of choice happens to be) is your friend.

It's been some time since I wrote much here about Oracle's E-Business Suite.  It's not that I don't like the EBS Suite, because I really do.  I've just been focused on other things.

Sometimes, when you're distracted, somebody will put out something so nifty that you're forced to refocus.  The Oracle EBS folks have done that to me with a new YouTube channel dedicated to EBS. Lots of good stuff here. The channel might even provide some tidbit you'll want to dig deeper into at Collaborate 13. So check it out and spend some time grooving on EBS.

With Collaborate 13 on the near horizon, I'm hearing quite a bit of "Hey Floyd, what's EiS doing at Collab 13?"...the short answer is that we have a pretty significant presence at the conference.  Here's the long answer:

Sessions
Da Booth
Hey, you can't be an Oracle Partner and not have a booth at a conference, right?  So, we have a booth.  I'll even be hanging out there a bit myself.  So, if you want to see some cool reporting and BI products to compliment Oracle products...including the new Splash BI...come by and see us in Booth #1121.  We'll have the well-known Treasure Chest going as well as a drawing for an iPad 3.  And, besides all that, we can talk at "da booth".  Speaking of having a conversation...if you mention @eistechnologies in a tweet, we'll give you a free two-day reporting assessment.

See ya'all in Denver.

Since I put up the Collaborate 13 Teaser post revealing the Welcome screen for the new EiS Technologies Reporting and BI product, I've been swamped by folks asking to see more.

Keep in mind that there are some limits on what I can say before Collaborate 13 (I may not work at Oracle, but it sure feels that way at the moment).  Still, one particular request seems like it won't get me in too much trouble:  "C'mon, Floyd.  You have 5 tabs in the screen you've shared.  Can't you at least show us the other 4 tabs?"  Yeah, I can do that...

Administrator  Domains  Reports  
 Dashboards 
Still some work left to do on the UX Design, especially with the Dashboards portion, but it's coming along.  Feedback, opinions, suggestions...all welcome.
And be sure to see EiS Technologies at Collaborate for a live drive after the new product announcement (Monday of Collaborate week, if all goes according to plan).
One more thing...I'll be need some charitable contributions until I find some work in the event I get fired for sharing this...just keep that in mind ;) 

Those of you who follow either this blog or my Twitter account (@fteter) know that I've been up to my eyeballs in new product development over the past three or four months.  You know that I've been using ADF Essentials in building that product.  You also know that my team at EiS Technologies is planning to roll out the new product on a Controlled Availability Release basis at Collaborate 13.

A few notes on the overall experience:

•  ADF Essentials has not only performed better than advertised, it's changed our development team's thinking about how applications are developed.
• Thanks to ADF Essentials, we've built this product from scratch in under four months.
• The ADF Design Patterns, the ADF Rich Client User Interface Guidelines and the UX Direct tools were huge enablers in increasing productivity and cutting development cycle time.

Time for me to shut up now and let the product speak for itself.  Here is a landing page screen shot from our latest iteration.


Take a look.  Zoom in. Blow up the screen shot.  Leave first impressions in the comments.