Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Springtime In The Rockies - Tuesday

Another great day at Collaborate 08...

I found the "Hands On Lab: Service-enable Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle SOA Suite BPEL Process Manager" to be a great session. Frankly, I wish we'd see more labs like this at Collaborate and Oracle OpenWorld. I actually built a fully-functioning business process from scratch using the BPEL Process Manager...yeah, I knew nobody would believe that a functional guy like me could do that in under two hours, so I took a picture.

My own session went pretty well: small crowd (about 25), which led to a great discussion. Hopefully, those who came found some value in what I shared.

Had a great face-to-face meeting of the OAUG Fusion Council. We have some big ideas in the works and new volunteers signing up to help us execute those ideas. Stay tuned!

The best part of my day was the time I spent with the Oracle User Experience folks. I had the opportunity to explore a semi-functional user interface prototype for the Fusion Application's Projects application module. The idea was that I would process some transactions and provide feedback on the UI...no clues (well, not many, anyway) from the Oracle team witnessing my work, I had to figure things out on my own. Now, I freely admit that my Projects skills are more than a little rusty and it took me a few minutes to shake that rust off. Once I got past that, I began to appreciate the Fusion Apps UI. The UI is very different from anything Oracle customers have ever seen before. Users will see much more information and functionality presented with very little navigation effort. The Oracle User Experience team has put significant effort into the UI design and it shows: The Fusion Applications UI is a "game changer". I think end users will be looking for somebody to thank for this stuff.

Working with the Oracle User Experience team was also a pleasure. Nice people, no pressure, and very accepting of both positive and negative feedback. If you ever have an opportunity to work with these people, take it. I get to participate in another User Experience session tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to it.

More pics from today posted here.

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