An opportunity to clarify E1 Business Accelerator (fka Product Packaging) came in the mailbox today:
Back in Oct 08, you made a blog entry (http://blog.karamazovgroup.com/2008/10/jde-e1-technical-task-force.html) regarding a JDE E1 Technical Task Force conference which uncovered the Statement of Direction for 8.98. Included in Oracles SOD was Product Packaging improvements. You referred to them as a Business Accelerator. I've been looking forward to these improvements. But I noticed that these changes were not mentioned in the Oracle Release Notes for 8.98. Strange that!
My question to you is have you played with 8.98 Product Packaging much? Is there any benefit or value such that the product is closer to providing what Boomerang can do?
Thanks much, Doug Rezanka
My response:
Apparently the new name for Product Packaging is "Business Accelerator" and the name change is likely for these reasons:
1) Product Packaging was truly frustrating to use and I think Denver wants to distance itself from that name.
Business Accelerator connotes a varied product that can be used for more than just transferring objects for geeky reasons. I get the idea that they are trying to position this as a method for partners to deploy non-Denver developed objects, a "packaged" implementation. I have been saying for years that Denver needed to allow 3rd party development the way Microsoft did/does and make it easy to deploy and/or transfer objects. This appears to be a step in that direction but there is no real program behind it that has any real support in Denver.
2) New, zip file-based technology probably borrowed from Change and Support assistant. Industry standard, blah, blah, blah. It does make the changes more portable.
The revised product still has dependency issues where one must ensure that both systems (source/target) are at the same level TR and ESU-wise. Dependencies are still a problem in E1 and it would be nice if they had built Net Change functionality into Business Accelerators to somehow address this issue. This is similar to DLL Hell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_hell) with Microsoft products and highlights the issue with a product that is always being changed and improved. Microsoft seems to have addressed the problem with the .NET framework, I wonder what Denver could do?
I have not personally used this functionality and other than theory have no way of recommending of not recommending it.
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2 comments:
Jeff -
I recently did have a choice between that new ZIP functionality and the older Product Packaging system and unless a company has already gone through the setup steps for product packaging or the newer business accelorators, believe me, this .ZIP business is, by far, infinitely simple and involved only a single line change to the client PC's JDE.ini file and is completely supported by OMW. We found, however, some quirks in the processing options but worked around. As you mentioned, there will continue to be major issues around NET change control relative to ESUs, ect. In our case we had 100% duplicate systems. Interestingly enough, believe it or not, a company somehow that 2 completely distinct E812 systems at remote sites could somehow magically share code between themselves. It would have been laughable until we found out the amount of independent development that had taken place at these 2 sites and the emergency steps needed to get all the Site 1 code over to Site 2 and KILL Site 1 and go forward with Site 2. Client was totally new to JDE and unwilling to pay for the CNC help they didn't even know the really needed. Double-blind CNC ignorance is what I call it. When the client doesn't even know what they don't know!
There is still absolutely a reason for using Boomerang - I myself reversed-engineered all of the BLOB objects back when I created "erptransporter" in 2000 - and Boomerang is by far and away my recommended solution.
If you're wanting to convert objects through an upgrade, then Boomerang is absolutely the right step forward. Until 8.99 comes out, we'll not really know how "version independent" the new packaging system is.
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