The OAUG Customer Support Council participated in two sessions during COLLABORATE 18 concerning the issues and challenges that localizations present during the course of the E-Business Suite (EBS) life cycle. Also participating in the sessions were the OAUG Multi-National Special Interest Group (SIG), chaired by Hans Kolbe, and Oracle, represented by Brandy Robert and David Heisler. During the conference sessions, we were able to collect a variety of pain points that Oracle has agreed to address in the near future. Some of these include:
- Improvement of the documentation in the patching readme files as well as the implementation guide.
- EBS ugrades and new installation of localizations require the use of downtime mode in release 12.2.X
- The lack of user guides in languages other than English.
- Extending patch wizard to work with localization patching.
- Some localizations do not work well with others.
- Localizations sometimes override properly installed customizations.
- Many localization packs are not consistently cumulative and the documentation does not properly address this.
We welcome feedback from our user community via the Customer Support Council. Please provide your additional ideas or concerns by commenting here in this blog, or email.
Update
As a result of the Customer Support Council’s’s and Oracle’s joint participation in two sessions during COLLABORATE 18 that provided conference attendees with the opportunity to discuss challenges regarding localization implementation and maintenance, Oracle has begun process improvement in several areas related to localizations (please refer to earlier editions of this blog).
Regarding the issue of quality control, since May 2018 all CLL patches have undergone technical QA with 100% of them installed and validated in fresh testing environments for both 12.1 and 12.2 EBS releases. Readme instructions have undergone a more rigorous review so that dependencies, pre-requisites, and superseded components will be correctly documented prior to their release.
Translation issues that occurred during the installation of mini-pack R12.CLL.D.3 will be fixed in R12.CLL.D.4. Also beginning with this mini-pack, Oracle will merge many of the pre-requisite bug fixes to reduce the complexity and effort of installing these mini-packs.
There was one clarification made regarding the breaks in cumulative versions of Fiscal Management Packs and Integrated Receiving Packs. The breaks are intentional and meant to align with each new version of a mini-pack. So for example, R12.CLL.D.3 was released on December 14, 2017 and thus the Integrated Receiving Pack and Fiscal Management Packs released after that date start the cumulative process over again. These packs written for R12.CLL.D.2 if not installed will have to be installed prior to the installation of those related to R12.CLL.D.3.
Future blog updates will address other areas that Oracle is working to improve. For further clarification of add-on localizations, please refer to the Oracle Support Document 429042.1 (Introduction to R12 Add-On Localizations).
About the Author
Joseph Imbimbo is an Oracle Applications DBA at PPG Industries. He also serves on the OAUG Board of Directors and OAUG Customer Support Council.
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