BizTech Blog

The sixth installment in BizTech's Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Readiness Series provides an overview of the web services enhancements.

The fifth installment in BizTech's Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Readiness Series provides an overview of the reporting and analytics enhancements.

In my last post, I walked through the process for restricting specific responsibilities from creating or updating Key Flexfield Segment Values. For smaller companies with the same people doing multiple functions, this could be enough to meet this requirement. For my client, this restriction wasn’t enough. They needed to prevent specific responsibilities from seeing specific Flexfields, Titles, Structures, and Segments.

Recently, I received a call from a customer requesting my assistance with troubleshooting Purchase Order Import errors in R12. The customer was trying to import 1000 purchase orders that were related to projects. They were encountering the following error and were having difficulty finding the root cause as the message was vague:

Project information on the distribution is not valid. &PJM_ERROR_MSG

Here are some tips on places to look to resolve such issues:

There are many ways to implement SSO in your organization and have critical business applications with various authentication mechanisms integrate using a single nuclei. Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation activities are carried out by SSO software developed by keeping in mind the transparency, disparate identity repositories, varied platforms, web applications and servers and yet a strong security component to keep organization in loop securely.

Security Component which enables Single-Sign On typically utilized Active Directory (Microsoft Active Directory/ LDAP/ repositories/Oracle UCM or a Databases in some scenarios) where credentials can be centralized and stored in a single place from where it can be fetched to authenticate various applications. When external applications are identified as being within Circle of Trust using various authentication mechanisms, they are entrusted to access information from CRM On Demand and vice-versa.

Many of my clients were initially surprised that, while Oracle provides a form to create and edit segment values, there is no seeded method to provide view-only access. Some have been further surprised to find out there was no seeded method to restrict access to specific segments.

A client of mine, a global financial institution, had identified 80 individuals who would require view-only access to all the segments in 2 Charts of accounts, and I was able to meet this challenge using 2 separate forms personalizations. I’ll discuss restricting access to specific modules, flexfields, structures, and segments in a follow-up blog entry, but for now, let’s look at preventing specific responsibilities from creating or editing segment values.

In my previous blog entry, I talked about the overall picture of developing a custom Oracle Projects interfacing process. In this entry, I’ll review the steps for creating the initial Project record and associated components. For the Projects Interface Application used as my reference, the main Project record requirements are: Customer; Project Manager; Tasks; Budget (Cost/Revenue)

For those familiar with developing API based interfaces, calling the Create-Project API functions in the same way. For those unfamiliar with API development, prior to the actual API call, inbound data from the third-party application should be assigned to the available API record-fields, for creating the Oracle Project (much like populating the fields of an Interface table). Some fields are required and will cause the Create Project API to fail, returning and error if missing or invalid.

Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire InQuira, a leading provider of best-in-class service knowledge management software that supports web self-service and agent-assisted service.

The fourth installment in BizTech's Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Readiness Series provides an overview of the client side extensions functionality added for Oracle CRM On Demand.

Recently I had a call from a customer that had a requirement to mass update their supplier site payment method defaults in R12. They were updating the PAYMENT_METHOD_LOOKUP_CODE on the AP_SUPPLIER_SITES_ALL table and it was not reflecting the change in the applications.