Greetings EBS Friends!
Where has the year gone? It's almost time to usher in 2017!
The E-Business Suite advisory group published a survey late last week on the topic of common Oracle Forms functions you'd like to see offered in HTML (OA Framework).
The impetus for this survey originated from a discussion the advisory group members had with senior Oracle EBS leadership last year at the Alliance conference, and the discussion centered on the resources needed to install and maintain the Java JRE on all our users' desktops because EBS requires Java for loading Oracle Forms pages (as well as some other functions within EBS).
Hopefully all of you follow Steven Chan's EBS Technology blog, and if you do you've seen his recent communications on what's coming for Java and its use in E-Business Suite (if you haven't subscribed, you can find his blog here: https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan). Even with the upcoming changes Steven discussed on his October 9th blog about EBS at some future point moving away from the Java applet and instead using Java Web Start, it still means we'll have a Java presence to install and maintain on the users' desktops.
Given the importance of Java to use Oracle E-Business Suite, we suggested that perhaps for the more casual, occasional users we all support, users that aren't located in an operational area at your institution (such as Accounting or Human Resources), and do not use EBS constantly as part of their job... perhaps these more casual EBS users could leverage only OA Framework pages and thereby avoid the requirement of installing Java on their desktops (the working assumption is that for the more heavy usage users that are in operational offices and use EBS as a core tool to do their jobs every day, those users would continue to have Java installed and maintained on their desktops).
To make this a viable desktop support approach for intitutions to leverage, however, it means any function those casual users need access to in EBS must be offered in OA Framework (HTML pages). To that end, the survey published late last week was to garner your input, our EBS community members, regarding what "Forms" functions would be critical in your opinion to have an alternate offering in OA Framework available. Please take 5 minutes to complete the survey, and share your input with us. The results will be shared back to Oracle EBS senior management where we hope to continue the dialog of advocating on behalf our our EBS community within the Higher Education User Group!
https://www.heug.org/p/su/rd/survey=4689a240-9557-11e6-bd15-4040f7e9a909
Respectfully,
Cyndie Winrow