OracleApps Epicenter

I’m delighted to announce the mobile version of Oracleappshub is now available.

If you access this blog from an iphone, ipad, android or other mobile device, the site will automatically switch to the mobile version.

Simply type in the standard url of www.oracleappshub.com and you will be able to view and read the content easily on your handheld.

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Taking this opportunity to wish reader from everyone a Happy Chinese New Year It’s the year of the Water Dragon according to the Chinese calendar. GONG XI FA CHAI!

Now we are entering into a whole New Year and what would be a better time to thank and wish blog readers than the wonderful New Year 2012?.

I take this opportunity to wish every reader of my blog a Happy, creative and Prosperous New Year 2012.

There are around two thousand e-mail subscribers and around 1 lakh views of this blogs each month across the globe. Hope the same kind of cooperation, comment and suggestion will be provided to us and that will further help to upgrade the standard of blog postings.

In response to a reader's query here is small note on EBS refund functionality.

Refund processing for the Supplier and Employee

When a supplier or employee sends a refund for an invoice payment that have made, record the refund can be recorded in Payables. A refund closes out an outstanding credit balance, so you are actually making a negative payment for a credit balance. The credit balance can consist of the outstanding balance of any combination of the following documents, as long as the sum is negative and equals the refund amount:

• Invoices
• Debit memos
• Credit memos
• Expense report

Paying these documents with a refund records each document as paid, and gives you a complete supplier transaction history.

Refund processing for the Customer

R12 There are two refund Options Available

1. Initiation of a customer refund by application of a credit or unapplied cash to a refund receivables activity
2. Automated refund generation based on credit memos generated by Auto invoice
   • Check refunds
   • Credit card refunds

In R12, the refund process has been automated for non-credit card transactions from Oracle AR module. For credit card transactions, refunds are applied to the same credit cards used on the transactions in Account Receivables. For non-credit card transactions, refunds are processed via AP. Receivables submit the refund request to AP, and in turn AP transacts refunds via Oracle Payments after gong through the approval process. To view the status of the refund, one can select the button "Refund Status" off the Receipt Application window which brings to the AP workbench. Following are the Refund process generated at receivable and then pass to payable to further processing and payment

Those who does not use Oracle AR as receivable, the refund data with customer basic information are fed into the Payable invoice where Customer will be created as one time supplier with minimum setup and check will be generated against the invoices created from refund data.

In case if you need some more thoughts on setup and steps , drop me offline

Oracle Fusion Applications is very secure and security approach consists of tightly coordinating the following aspects of security.

• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Function security via OPSS
• Standard Data security
• Privacy
• Access provisioning and identity management
• Segregation of duties policies
• Enforcement across tools, technologies, data transformations, and access methods

The Oracle Fusion Applications security approach supports a reference implementation of roles and security policies that address common business needs.

Fusion Application Security Architecture

As a first step, you need to understand what security capabilities are offered by Fusion Application. The figure below illustrates the Fusion Application Security .

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

As per architecture you can see lot many security tools are been used . some of them as:

1. Single Sign on
   • Oracle Access Manager (OAM)
2. Identity Management Tools
   • Oracle Identity Manager (OIM)
   • OIM SPML Interface
   • Identity Governance Framework (IGF)
   • Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD)
   • Oracle Internet Directory (OID)
3. Authorization Management tools
   • Authorization Policy Manager (APM)

If you are coming from EBS then this post will help you to understand the difference of security model in these two application.

here is quick comparison chart all the major security features of Oracle Application (EBS) and Fusion Application side by side.

Multichannel campaign management aka MCCM is all about interacting and communicating with prospects and customers across a range of different online and offline channels.

Campaign may have both way digital and traditional.

Digital is most enabled with the use of internet technology like email, mobile marketing, website engagement and social media is consider as
where as traditional marketing are typically have such channels as direct mail or point-of-sale interaction.

MCCM is part of Integrated marketing management - where both sides of marketing function operations and the campaign management functions, are aligned, synchronized, and efficiently adding value to each other.

Multi-Channel Campaign Management (MCCM) mostly deal with

• Creating, executing and managing multichannel campaigns : Enables companies with to define, orchestrate and communicate offers to customer segments across a multichannel environment, such as direct mail, call centers, websites, e-mail and communities
• Campaign planning, tracking and reporting
• Specific, basic campaign management functionality, such as segmentation, campaign execution and campaign workflow

IBM-Unica, SAS, Teradata-Aprimo and Oracle(Siebel) are consider to be good vendors in the multichannel campaign management tools.

Last Year, Oracle added Siebel Campaign Management and analytics solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machines for performance improvements to data warehousing and query processing for segmentation and data mining scoring.

One of the Oracle aquisition ATG to incorporate digital marketing capability into its offerings (by start leveraging Siebel Marketing and Real-Time Decisions (RTD) integration for offer management/decision capability with integrated Web content.)

Oracle Identity Management is major security infrastructure component of Oracle Fusion Applications .

Oracle Fusion Applications leverage Oracle Identity Management for foundation security services; identity administration (identity life cycle management, self-service account request and password management, enterprise role management); authentication and trust management (single sign-on, identity federation, privacy); access control (risk-based authorization, fine-grained entitlements, web services security); identity and access governance (audit and compliance reporting, segregation of duties, conflict-resolution management, attestation, role mining and engineering, identity and fraudprevention analytics); and directory services (persistent storage, identity virtualization,synchronization, and database-user security).

For detailed explanation of Oracle Identity Mangements integration with Oracle Fusion Applications refer this whitepaper published by Oracle.

Friend of mine working in retail sector asked some queries on Oracle Access Manager usage, quickly revisited one of training note when working in health care, both the sectors extensively using these products.This Post is collection is high level overview for Oracle Access manager.

What is Oracle Access Manager

Oracle Access Manager (OAM) is IAM solution for web access management and user identity administration. Oracle Access Manager is designed to support complex, heterogeneous enterprise environments. Oracle Access Manager consists of two tightly integrated components:

• the Access
• Identity Systems

The Identity System provides delegated administration of user profiles and workflow for creating, updating, and deleting these profiles. It also provides applications for user self registration, password management and dynamic group management. The Access System provides access control and single sign-on to Web applications and J2EE resources (EJBs, servlets, etc.) running on a variety of Web and Application servers.

Two Products and there Generally Available (GA) dates

Components

Oracle Access Manager consists of tightly coupled Identity and Access Systems. These two systems are integrated, so that a profile change made via the Identity System takes effect instantaneously for access evaluation by Access the System. The Access and Identity Systems also include web server agents namely, WebGate and WebPass, for all leading Web and Application servers. The following components are shipped with Oracle Access Manager:

1. Identity Server
   
2. WebPass :A WebPass is a web server plug-in that passes information back and forth between the web server and the Identity Server over the Oracle Identity Protocol (formerly Netpoint or COREid Identity Protocol). Hence, WebPass is the presentation tier of the Identity System. By default, WebPass renders its content as HTML so that it can be accessed through a browser. But in addition, it provides a Web Service interface, known as IdentityXML, which SOAP-based clients can leverage to programmatically interact with the Identity System. The idea behind IdentityXML is that it allows the integration of business logic governing identity administration process to be available and easily integrated with existing applications in a SOA environment
3. Access Server
   
4. WebGate :WebGate is an out-of-the-box access client for enforcing access policy on HTTP based resources; hence it is the Access System's web Policy Enforcement Point or PEP. The WebGate client runs as a plug-in or module on top of most popular web servers, and intercepts HTTP requests for web resources and forwards them to the Access Server where access control policies are applied. WebGates are optimized to work on web server environments, as are streamlined for the HTTP protocol, and understand URLs, session cookies, HTTP redirects, secure sessions (HTTPS); and also implement policy caches that improve WebGate's performance and allow for scalability in highly trafficked sites
5. Policy Manager :Access Manager's Policy Manager is a browser-based graphical tool for configuring resources to be protected and well as creating and managing access policies, so it is the Access System's Policy Management Authority or PMA The Policy Manager provides the login interface for the Access System, communicates with the directory server to manage policy data, and communicates with the Access Server over the Oracle Access Protocol to update the Access Server cache when policies are modified.

Get Clarified on -Oracle Access Manager differ from OracleAS Single Sign-on

They are similar products in that both perform user authentication. However Oracle Access Manager also provides powerful policy-based authorization functionality to web and J2EE resources, which OracleAS Single Sign-on does not. They are currently separate products and can be used together in a single environment if required. Oracle Access Manager access also provides integrations with a broad set of non-Oracle products and platforms.

2 factor authentication(including RSA SecurID, X.509 certificates)...etc [Adopted from oracle Documentation]

The Oracle solutions supports 2 factor and X.509 authentication for user authentication with Oracle Access Manager.

• RSA SecurID Authentication: Oracle Access Manager supports RSA Security features and provides the SecurID authentication plug-in and components needed to integrate a native SecurID authentication scheme into Oracle Access Manager policy domains for Web single sign-on. See "Integrating the RSA SecurID Authentication Plug-In" for details.
• Smart Card Authentication: Oracle Access Manager supports smart card authentication with Active Directory and IIS Web servers using ActivCard Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) for Windows 2000, ActivCard Gold utilities, and ActivCard USB Reader v2.0 in homogeneous Windows environments. See "Integrating Smart Cards" for details.

Oracle Cash Management is an open integrated solution for managing your company/enterprise-wide cash cycle. In addition to seamlessly integrating with other modules from Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Cash Management's open interfaces allow company to easily integrate with external systems, giving timely access to global cash information . Companies those practicing and prepares cash forecast, they can project cash flows from Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Payables, Oracle Payroll, Oracle Projects, and Oracle Purchasing. The Forecasting Open Interface allows you to also project cash flows from external systems. With the Forecasting Open Interface's distributed database support, you can generate a forecast that combines relevant transaction information from both local and remote databases which may be across region .

Oracle Cash Management lets you automatically or manually record and reconcile bank statements, matching against system transactions using rules and tolerance levels. You can review and correct any import validation or reconciliation errors online. Oracle Cash Management can automatically reconcile correcting statement lines against error statement lines and provide an audit trail for verifying correction of bank errors.

Fig 1: Cash Managment

Oracle Cash Management supports electronically downloading of bank statements from the bank. The Bank Statement Loader program supports standard formats such as BAI2 and SWIFT940, as well as user-defined formats. Bank statements are reconciled with payments in Oracle Payables and Oracle Payroll, receipts in Oracle Receivables, and journal entries in Oracle General Ledger. You can also reconcile with payments and receipts from other systems, including settlements from Oracle Treasury, using the Reconciliation Open Interface. The Reconciliation Open Interface is extensible, executing your custom logic when reconciling external transactions.

If you are implementing, you can refer these post that will be great help for you.

• Period Close Processing Checklist -> R12 Cash Management
• R12 : Cash Management Period Closure
• R12 : Cash Management & SLA
• R12 :Bank Statement Reconciliation
• XML based statement for Cash Management
• Implementing SWIFT MT's within EBS
• Managing Cash , EBS and SWIFT