Friday, January 8, 2010

New Releases of Application Management Pack and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Available

Happy New Year! May 2010 be a year of maximum uptime and optimal performance for your applications. To kick off this new year, we are releasing a new version of Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite.

These two management packs address many feedbacks that we have heard from our customers. After we launched the original version of the E-Business Suite Management Pack about two years ago, we went to present the product to many user group meetings and tradeshows to promote the product. In the Q&A sessions that followed our presentations, several questions tend to come up over and over. From the questions, we learned that while people were generally pleased to see the new management pack, there were clearly some unmet needs in the original version of the product. These needs included:
- Support for “hot cloning” such that E-Business Suite could stay running while cloning is carried out
- Patching Automation to apply E-Business Suite patches
- Automated Migration for E-Business Suite functional artifacts
- Transaction Diagnostic to identify transaction bottlenecks

We have been hard at work to address these needs ever since. Some of these requirements were met when we released Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, which covers customization, setup and patch management, last May. However, with the release of that pack came a new requirement: change approval process support.

The new versions of Application Management and Application Change Management Pack finally address all these needs that we have been hearing from our customers. Key improvements include:

Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite
• Smart Clone: Smart Clone enables E-Business Suite systems to staying running while being cloned, and it provides flexibility for administrators to incorporate their own custom DB cloning techniques into pack's clone routine. Some of the key cloning scenarios supported include: RAC to RAC, RAC to Non-RAC, and scale down (Multi Node to Single Node).
• Concurrent Processing Dashboard: Administrators now have the ability to monitor and manage Concurrent Managers and Concurrent Programs through a intuitive dashboard. The new dashboard provides a detailed overview on the efficiency of Concurrent Managers in processing concurrent request. Administrators also have the ability to keep a watch list of specific concurrent managers and specific concurrent programs.
• End to End Tracing: Administrators can now analyze Oracle E-Business Suite's database load from Application Management Pack. Also the administrators have the ability to search Application Web User Sessions all the way down to Database Sessions. Top DB sessions can also be traced back to the Application User.

Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite
• Change Approval Framework: Changes orchestrated through Application Change Management Pack can now be controlled through the new change approval framework. Separate roles can be defined for approvers, who review and approve changes, and administrators, who deploy the changes. Built in notification capability enables approver(s)/requestor to be alerted about the status of relevant change requests, and the change approval records provide a way to maintain an audit trail of changes.
• Integrated Custom Application Management: This feature enables E-Business Suite administrators to easily register new custom applications across Oracle E-Business Suite systems and also track and validate existing custom applications in a standard way.
• Pre-requisite Patch Analysis: Oracle E-Business Suite patches can now be analyzed for pre-requisites prior to deployment in the target system. The analysis also verifies whether the pre-requisites are already met in the target system, and if they are not met, then those patches may be added to the patch job.
• Offline Transformation: This allows administrators to download Oracle E-Business Suite setup data in Microsoft Excel document and use Excel to edit and define new data.

These two management packs form the foundation of an advanced toolset for managing Oracle E-Business Suite. When combined with complementary products such as Oracle Real User Experience Insight and Application Testing Suite, they form a complete solution that cover all aspects of E-Business Suite lifecycle management.

We hope that you find this new management pack release compelling. To learn more about these two packs, go visit our product website. You may also download it from edelivery to try it out.