If you read a lot of Oracle blogs you can’t have missed the news that you get to vote for some of the sessions at Oracle Open World this year on Oracle Mix. There’s a lot of great sessions suggested and although I’m about to plug my own I would encourage you to check out the other suggestions and vote often.

My suggestion is for a session inspired by the series I started on Why product development should blog, which only got as far as three part:

Why Product Development should Blog - How blogging will help your customers and YOU

A bold claim, but one I’m pretty confident I can back up. I’d also be interested in getting input form other bloggers within and without Oracle so I can share some of your wisdom in this session too. So add your comments and remember to go and vote.

by David Haimes (with excerpts from an internal document by Seamus Moran)

Regular readers will probably be used to this answer now… it depends.

In General Ledger 11i your functional currency referred to the currency of your set of books, it was one of your three Cs (Calendar, Currency and Chart of Accounts). In R12 we changed the terminlogy, there is no more set of books that is now renamed Ledger and the Currency of your Ledger is referred to as the Accounting Currency of the Ledger.

This is a subtle change and I’m sure experienced 11i practitioners are still using the term functional currency but you all need to stop because it’s confusing people.

In Financial standards (IAS 21 and FAS 52), Functional Currency is a test for the integration of your overseas and home businesses. If the businesses share a Functional currency, they are integrated, and you must use a financial statement conversion method called “remeasurement”. If the businesses do not share a Functional Currency, they are stand alone, and you must use a financial statement conversion method called “translation”. To determine the Functional currency, there are a series of cash flow related tests: it is an objective, situational determination, and not an optional choice.

Now just because your auditors tell you that your functional currency is Euro, this does not mean that you need to go about the tricky business of changing your Ledger Accounting Currency (or Set of Books functional currency) to Euro. What it means is that you need to remeasure in Euro rather than translate.

To do this re measurement you can use

1. The GL translation program
2. A secondary Ledger
3. A consolidation program such as Hyperion

It is not standard to have your Ledger Accounting currency different to you local currency, you will need to file local statutory reports in local currency, your bank will likely send you statements in local currency etc. so you really need your ledger operating in local currency to handle these easily.

So remember my Ledger Accounting Currency does not have to equal my functional currency.

I noticed today on Stephen Chan’s blog that this White Paper is available on metalink

Best Practices for Adopting Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12 (Metalink Note 580299.1)

I haven’t reviewed the document yet, despite there being a section on AGIS. As soon as I resolve the problem I’m having with my metalink login I will take a look. I understand it was pulled together by Anne Carlson, who I know reads this blog becasue she mailed me just today with a question about it, I’m hoping some of the useful posts from this blog made the cut.

I want to use this opportunity to plug two other guides that are new in R12 and I highly recommend you read if you are looking at upgrading to R12.

Oracle Financials Concepts Guide, Release 12 (Part No. B28873-01

Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 (Part No. B31543-01)

I discuss them a little more along with a few other resources in this post.

UPDATE (June 16th):

I reviewed the White Paper and the AGIS section is fairly sparse - I will be contacting the author to try and get more detail in there.

However on the whole I think it’s a great document and essential reading for anyone looking to implement  or upgrade to R12.  Now if we can just publish that information on a blog, then we’ll truly have a living document, I’ll ask that question of the document owners.

I’m blogging in the style of twitter, for those of you in withdrawal due to it’s recent availability issues. Got to stick to 140 char limit

Confused by the title of this post? It refers to a headline in ‘The Sun’ (UK ‘Newspaper’) that is so famous in the UK it’s a popular phrase

Twitter is a free service. No advertising, no fees, no hidden charges, no taxes, no problem. It is used by free loaders like me (and you?)

@Twitter was down a bit over this weekend, it has disabled some features and limited usage levels on others while it sorts out it’s problems

@TechCrunch did a one word blog post during the downtime ‘Twitter!’ got over 400 comments. Clearly people feel passionately about Twitter.

@mkrigsman blogged about twitter downtimes calling it IT mgmt failure saying ‘many people depend’ on it @dhaimes responded ‘more fool them!’

@twitter should not be burning cash building a bullet proof technical infrastructure to support millions of free loaders, it needs to make $

Bullet Proof infrastructure anyone can do, just hire the experienced people and buy a lot of hardware and software, easy, but it will cost $

The dot-com dead pool is full of wonderful scalable infrastructures, costing a lot of money which owners did not figure out how to pay for.

I used to use, Webvan which built a great infrastructure, had some great technology and spent $1 Billion. It never made a cent and went bust

If ‘many people depend’ on @twitter, would they all pay to use it? If they guaranteed 99.9999% availability how much would you pay for it?

Did you notice every paragraph is exactly the 140 characters long? One great thing about twitter is it forces people to be much less verbose

I recently had a question about what Balancing Segment Value (BSV) to enter in the accounts for the All Other All Other rule and I have to admit it could be a little confusing. There is a technical limitation with the flexfield infrastructure we use to capture and store accounts which means we have to have some value for BSV and Intercompany Segments, even though we will substitute in the real BSV when we generate the Intercompany accounting.

Here is an example (chart of accounts is balancing-natural account-intercompany)

I define the following rule

Then I enter a journal

When I post this, the balancing lines generated are

So you can see we discard the BSV and Intercompany segment from the set up and use the correct ones from the transactions. If we always reatined 99, we would be using 99 as a clearing company for everything, if you wanted to do that you would use the clearing company options.

When I looked out of my office window this morning I noticed somebody had a left a great big yacht outside 500 building. It is still there, nobody towed it and I didn’t see any parking tickets on it, so I assume Larry parked it there. I wonder if it’s his new ride to work; anyone can show up in a Porsche 911, Ferrari Testarossa or Toyota Sienna but if you really want to turn heads park your 62 foot Americas Cup yacht outside the office.

I was curious to check it out so I did my lap of the lake. If you have ever been to Oracle HQ you will have observed this phenomenon, we all like to walk around the lake after our lunch and this week there has been a bit of a crowd near the Yacht, I was one of the sad characters taking photos.

Thanks to Oracle nerd for this post, referencing an article on CIO magazine. Apparantly connected employees are more productive. I thought this was a no brainer, if I know a lot of people I can get help and advice from a lot of people, equally if I know a lot of stuff people want to stay connected to me so they can pick my brains and get their job done.

The article goes into more depth and backs it’s argument up with stats, research and references, but I’m a blogger not a journalist. I think the paragraph above is obvious so I state it as my opinion and I’m done. For more detail on my ideas around what I call dev 2.0 you can read my original post, if you want to see it in action - you need to come and join my team, or maybe offer me a job (Boss - if you’re reading, this is a joke).

I try to be clever and/or funny by putting a cryptic title for my posts, I think it’s my attempt to make Financial Software sound fun, perky and exciting (which it is of course). Probably the real result is for some people to get here from google (or Yahoo - do they still do search?) and be very disappointed, in fact they are probably hitting the back button right now. WordPress can show me what searches people did that got them to my page and without going into the details let me tell you that my posts about the Intercompany Periods feature (why do I need another Period?) and my musings about clearing my desk to move office (Cleaning out my Closet?) have probably been read by many confused young people and I apologize to them if they are now here reading this too. Right now those of you who know this is a blog about Oracle Financials are probably wondering when they can stop skimming the preamble and I might get to something of use or interest, so without further ado…

I was working with some AGIS users creating an Intercompany transaction from the entry screen when somebody asked “What does that radio button do?” I realized nobody in the room fully understood the feature. Automatic distribution mode is essentially an aid to ease the amount of data entry you have to make. If you’re creating a transaction batch with multiple transactions (ie. multiple recipients) you’ll have a set of initiator (that will be you as you are entering the batch) accounting distributions for each of the transactions in the batch. Now if I have a batch with dozens or hundreds of transactions in and I want each of those transactions distributed to the same accounts, entering them manually against each transaction will take some time. So if I select automatic distribution mode you just enter your initiator distributions once and the batch header level and when you submit we will prorate those down to all teh transactions in the batch. So you can save a lot of key strokes entering transactions.

Financial Services Accounting Hub or FSAH (pronounced F-saa apparently) is a great product and is not only for Financial Services companies either, I understand we’ll sell it to anyone.

From a (very) high level perspective it allows you to use Oracle SLA and GL to perform the accounting for third party applications. Companies the Financial services industry tend to build a lot of highly complex applications (e.g. loan systems, trading systems) in house, but they want the final accounting of transactions form these disparate system to end up in the same place and it will be nice if they can re-use the same accounting rules too. Hence the concept of an accounting hub.

If you are using FSAH on R12, you can also utilize all the new AGIS features introduced in R12 and that could help you to apply common intercompany processing rules across your entire business too.

I have had a few discussions with customers asking if AGIS could be used as a hub for all intercompany trading across many ERP systems and the answer is very much so, that is something that we had in mind when building the product. You should be able to push transactions from multiple Oracle instances, even on different versions and throw in an SAP or Peoplesoft instance too if you want. There will be some integration work, but we use standard interfaces, services, API and also make use of the Workflow Business Event system to make this process as easy as possible.

What is the difference between Tax Avoidance, Planning, Mitigation and Evasion? The first three of these are legal and the last one isn’t. With the recent conviction of Wesley Snipes, tax has been in the news quite a lot and over in the UK there has been some interesting stuff written about the country’s largest retailer, Tesco and it’s tax situation. The guardian newspaper responded today to a writ issued by Tesco, over an article in the guardian back in February.  The article talks about how Tesco has been moving assets to different companies in a variety of jurisdictions.

Global corporations have complex legal structures and whenever any assest or liability moves to a different Legal Entity, that is Intercompany and there may be tax involved. The complex and ever changing laws in this area mean it is increasingly important that you have tight control on your intercompany and it is documented because auditors and tax authorities may need to take a close look.

I had dinner with the Appslab crew last night, they’ve been at the Web 2.0 Expo doing their thing; I expect Jake will blog about th conference soon. I enjoyed listening to their ideas and figuring out how they fit into not only our products but our development process. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how web 2.0 concepts fit into my daily work in product development and have come up with the phrase “Product Development 2.0″.

So what is Dev 2.0? Dion Hinchcliffe talks about it as business reaching out to customers over the web and letting them influence the direction of products. An example he uses is XM radio station playing records voted for by it’s users over the web or by sending in text messages. I think customer input is important and tools like this blog and Oracle Mix are great ways to engage customers, but my vision of development 2.0 has a totally different angle, I am looking at the daily life of a software developer or product manger in a large software shop and how we can add web 2.0 into the mix

Oracle has thousands of employees in product development and communication is always a huge issue in an organization of that size. We need to make maximum use of the latest tools to ensure the hard work put in by a person in the org to figure out the best way to do something doesn’t go to waste and that knowledge is available to people who need it. Traditionally we rely a lot on informal networks, for example if I need info on BI Publisher, I call Tim, I used to work with him and know him. I have 10 years worth of contacts like that, dozens of favors I owe and am owed, friends of friends people I know from the gym, car pool partners, snowboarding friends etc etc. This is the ‘phone a friend’ model, when I am stuck I call a person who will know an answer and who will take my call (This reminds me of a trick I use when people are not taking my calls - dial an outside line and then call their number so the caller ID does not show as you, they pick up and get a shock when they hear your voice). The problem with this model is it just doesn’t scale, I need a way to let other’s tap into the knowledge networks and web 2.0 is all about connecting people, to each other and to information.

Example of Development 2.0 in action are blogging by subject matter experts, social networks inside the firewall, user docs and standards guides on wikis, annotation tools to comment on others work, digg like sites where you can vote on the most useful information, the list goes on. This is something sagar talked with passion about when he was at Oracle and I think in Apps development many people really get it and the the word is spreading.

However Product Development 2.0 should not just be about technology that enables communication on a scale never possible before, it has to be about changing the attitudes and mindsets of people. We need to be committed to sharing what we know making it part of our daily job to add to the common knowledge base of organization. There is probably a full post on that in my head, but ironically I don’t have the energy to share my ideas and knowledge on that right now (it’s after midnight and I’ve been up since 7am).

So what does product development 2.0 mean to you? Do you see it on your organization? If you are in development at Oracle, do you agree with my opinion that things are changing? Share your wisdom in the comments.

When I was about 10 years old I got a new electric train set for Christmas, but before I got to play with it I had to pinch a plug from one of my siblings toys and fit the only available (and dangerously mismatched) fuse in it. Then I had to read a complicated set of instructions to assemble a delicate set of parts and it was a minor miracle that I had it working before the New Year.

Now when I buy something new, the first thing I do is open the box, turn it on and press buttons to work out how to use it, if I get stuck I maybe look to see if they have a quick start guide. Consumer goods manufacturers make things very intuitive and ready to work right out of the box these days and we have grown to expect that. Remember that iMac add? step 1: plug into power, step 2: plug into a phone line, step 3: - there is no step 3! Wow can I have an ERP system like that please?

When designing AGIS for R12 we tried to minimize the time it would take to get started entering transactions in an initiative we internally called ‘AGIS out of the Box’.  I have to give credit to this idea to my former bosses Joe and Terrance for initiating this, but the whole team stopped, sat down and thought about what we could do to allow users to open the box and start using AGIS right away.

We came up with a few ideas

1) No profile options

No not a single one, we created a system options page so no need to search through thousands of profile options or read our minds (or even the manual) to figure out what options there are, they are where you might expect them; in a tab marked ‘Options’

2) Seeded System Options

We ship with the options for the most straightforward (according to us) options set already; change them if you want, we won’t be offended

3) Seeded Transaction Type

We seeded a default transactions type, again with the most simple options (no approvals and no invoicing required) so you can use that or create your own if you prefer.

4) Automatically create Intercompany Organizations

You’ve already taken the time to enter your Legal Entites, or maybe they were upgraded from 11i so just kick off our process to classify them all as Intercompany Organizations for you. This might save some people a lot of typing and to be honest, it was not too time consuming to code. Again create them yourself if you prefer a more granular definition of your Intercompany Orgs

5) Super User, Super fast Security Set Up

If you have some users who need to have access to all Intercompany Organizations, we have a button on the security page that will do that for you. I just hope your read this or noticed it before you typed them in manually!

6) Create Intercompany Customers and Suppliers

If you need invoices for your AGIS transactions then you might end up creating a lot of Customers and Suppliers, sites for each OU and then you need to associate them to an Intercompany Org so we know which one to use when. That’s too much, so we try to help create them for you from our Customer and Supplier Association UI, just pick an LE and we’ll create everything that needs behind the scenes for all the Orgs and OU. Again if you want you can do it manually, no pressure to do it our way.

Now just because we added a few features in one product it doesn’t mean R12 is as easy to set up as an iMac. What it does show is that by switching our way of thinking we were able to provide some useful features to ease set up at a very low cost to development. So it is possible to simplify our setup and if we put our minds to it I think all products could find easy (ie. low cost, low risk) ways to save implementors time. It’s too easy to just throw our hands in the air and say that ERP software is complex by nature and that’s why our set up is so difficult and time consuming, then add another profile option that customers need to set but only find out about when they log an SR because a feature has stopped working. People used to think personal computers and the internet were for geeks, but now my mum uses it to do her shopping.

What do you think, will we ever get ERP out of the box? Sound off in the comments.

It’s nice to feel wanted and I’m pleased a few people have asked why no blog posts for a while from me.  Is it Bloggers block, have I lost interest, has somebody got to me?  None of the above - I’ve been really busy working and traveling, now I am in a hotel room and not sleepy just yet so here I am.

I’m in Hyderabad all week spending some time in meetings with our Indian team based here, this is a long overdue trip and it’s really exciting to meet people and put faces to names, voices, IM buddies etc.  A nice example of the power of web 2.0 happened today too, Venkat noticed from my twittering that I was over here so he dropped by to say hello and tell me about his new blog, he isn’t in my division anymore so without twitter he wouldn’t have known I was around.   Nice story - anyone else in Oracle Hyderabad (or just Hyderabad for that matter) reading this - feel free to drop me a note.

Now to prove I really don’t have bloggers block, I need to write something of substance…

Written by David Haimes

Multiple Organizations Access Control or MOAC (pronounced MOW-ACK) to use the seemingly obligatory acronym, is a powerful, yet simple to implement feature available in R12.

Implementors spend a lot of time figuring out how to configure their Legal Entities, Ledgers and Operating Units. There are a number of options some restrictions, depending on what features you want to implement and where you are. See my earlier posts on Legal Entities and Operating Units for details on that. However it is worth remembering that change is the Status Quo (No, not the band of rocking all over the world fame - it’s latin, look it up) and flexibility is important, what was the optimal way to organize your transaction processing yesterday may not be right today. Many companies are creating shared service centers to centralize processing of financial transactions and a single user may process transactions on behalf of many different Operating Units(OU).

So MOAC allows you to create a security group which can contain many operating units and assign that to the User’s responsibility. All the forms that process OU striped data now allow you to pick an OU to work in from a list that contains all the OU you have access to. You will also find all the OU based reports have a parameter added for OU.

The Set Up is straighforward. You can define a security profile in the HR Security Profile form, adding Operating Units to it, then you must run Security List Maintenance program before you can assign the security profile to the profile option MO: Security Profile for a responsibility.

When considering R12 this is one of the quick wins that can be achieved after upgrade and I also noticed it mentioned by the PPM team in an interview on itssafeature too which prompted me to get a post out about it.

I appreciate the shout out from Jake, I’d like to get more opinions on this from other bloggers, particularly my colleagues in Apps (Are you listening Joe, Anne, Puneet, Meg, Gretchen?). So in this edition I explain how blogging saves you time and makes you more productive in your day job. If you are interested check out part 1 and part 2.

Avoiding Customer Calls

Floyd Teter mentioned to me that he expected we could use more customer interaction in
development. This is true in a way, even though I get a lot of requests for customer meetings, but there is only so much time in the day. This is where the blog comes in handy, when I have a Sales Consultant saying they have a customer with a few questions and they’d like to set up a meeting. I can just point them at my blog, let the customer take a look around there first and then maybe they will have specific questions and post them there. The answers can be read by others and at I’d like to think readers will answer each other’s questions and maybe mine - ok maybe some of this interaction belongs in a group on Oracle Mix, but you get the idea.

I still like to meet customers, in person and on phone calls and I don’t think I have ever turned down a chance to go to the Customer Visit Centre at Redwood Shores - the snacks and food there is awesome. However a blog is a much more scalable way of interacting with the user community, you can be fairly sure if one feature is a little unclear or ambiguous to one person there are many other who also appreciate some clarity around it.

I’ll also let you into a little secret - I direct people in product development to my blog all the time. This post on Legal Entites provides the same information that is in a number of design documents and I have presented it and talked about it many times, but I still get questions and now they get sent to my blog -no need to open a huge word document, one click and you’re learning Legal Entity set up… it doesn’t get any better than that.

In part 1 I talked about how a conversation on my blog took a frustrated customer with problems to a situation where they got sales to quote them for another Oracle product. Part 2 is a more personal branding issue.

Generating Consulting Opportunities

I contacted a reader of my blog who’d added some comments and I got the reply below:

<company X> is using Oracle as well, but they are not fully implemented across the globe. I’m noticing that we are having a hard time with intercompany transactions as they relate to foreign currencies.

I was researching the issue on google and I came across your blog. I think your blog is a great tool for questions, but I think I have too many question to ask on your blog. I was wondering if you did any consulting work?

Happy as I am in my job, especially now I’m working on GL too, it’s always nice to have other options. Of course this might lead to Oracle Consulting getting some work from this person, which would be nice too.

What is also really important to note is the research started with Google; not the user documentation, not support, not metalink or OTN, straight to google. I had a similar experience yesterday, I needed to know the IP address of my netgear wireless router. I didn’t go and dig out the instruction manual that came with it (not sure if I still have it), I didn’t go to netgear.com and start to navigate through that, I just googled it and I had the answer in seconds (192.168.0.1 for the record) and I have no idea what the source of the information was, I just know it worked. So if you have information about how best to use your products, you better get those tips and tricks out there so google can find them. I call it Help 2.0, but it seems other people have thought of that term already.

UPDATE: I now have added part 3 in this series.

One of the more powerful additions to Oracle financials in R12 is the Subledger Accounting Architecure (SLA or SLAA) and it brings new concepts and terminology which may be hard to figure out.

The good news is there is a blogger to the rescue.  Anne Wong is The Armchair Architect and she’s starting to get SLA content up on her new blog.  I’d like to claim some credit as I badgered her into starting the blog, hopefully she will get regular readership and positive feedback to keep her momentum and get all that knowledge from her head onto the web so we can all benefit.

One of the key features introduced with the new Advanced Global Intercompany (AGIS) in R12 of Oracle E-Business Suite is the ability to create documentation for Intercompany transactions. The correct documentation is required in many countries for Intercompany trading, this essentially means I need to provide a Receivables Invoice for the Legal Entity Providing the goods or service and a payables invoice for the receiving Legal Entity. These invoices should have any taxes that are applicable in the jurisdictions, for that type of service.

We do not firce you to create invoices for all Intercompany Activity, you can still create just a GL Journal entry if you prefer. The AGIS transactions flow is illustrated in the diagram below.

You can see that we check if invoices are required and there are two places that we look for that. First is the AGIS transaction type flag, seen on the AGIS Transaction Page in the Set Up Tab.

<click image to see full size>

You can also create a rule in the Legal Entity setup, we create that rule at the registration level. This is set by selecting the Legal Function ‘Create Intercompany Invoice’ when entering the Legal Entity Registration. If the this rule is set for one of the Legal Entity involved in an AGIS transaction it will take precedence over the Transaction Type rule and the invoice will be created.

We create an AR invoice (via an Invoice API or the Open Interface tables) at that point the eTax module will kick in and calculate the tax for you and add that to the invoice. When the AR invoice has been created we create the AP invoice (via the AP Invoice Interface) using the invoice number from the AR invoice - so should be easy to match those invoices. We also ensure that the same information required by eTax is on the AP invoice so the tax calculation will be the same on the AR and AP invoices.

On of the key aspects of AGIS is that we will not create an AR or AP invoice or a GL journal until both sides of the transactions have approved it and we checked that the appropriate periods are open in GL, AP or AR. This means that there is no possibility of one side of the transaction going through and then the other side rejecting or changing the Accounting Date so they hit different periods or anything else that will make reconciliation and elimination of Intercompany cumbersome.

Eddie Awad discussed an interesting oracle Press release in his blog and the reaction of the Wall Street Journal Tech Blog too it. Eddie mused that as he is not a network techie it doesn’t mean much to him, this is intentional. The pres release was made at a network industry conference and was aimed at that particular group of people who would understand it.

Since Oracle went on it’s acquisition spree a few years ago, it has started to focus on industry specific applications more and more. Examples are the purchase of retek, a retail industry software vedor and Portal which produces telecom billing applications. May of these indusrty verticals are organized in their own business unit and we don’t just want the Apps, we need the experts in that industry to help us build hte best apps, market, sell and support them. This focus on industry verticals is not unique to Oracle, for example most accountancy firms organize their business so partners specialize in an industry. One of the main reasons for this is so we can learn to speak the same language as our customers and better understand the business issues facing them.

Even when I talk to customers about Intercompany accounting, which is governed by strict laws and accounting rules the challenges vary from say a service based customer to a manufacturer.

So if you don’t understand this press release from Oracle, you don’t need to product they are selling you. Don’t worry though, I expect Oracle does has something that will speak to your particular business too, if not maybe we’re in the market for a company that does talk to you in your own language.

I was talking with Jake about how my blog was going, I recounted some stories of great outcomes that had surprised me since I stepped into the blogosphere a few months ago. “Blog those” was his reply, he’s a very active blogger and has already blogged our conversation. This is part 1 in a series of I don’t know how many describing business value in my blogging.

A Troubled Customer

I got a comment from Manish, who before explaining the problem he was facing wrote:

We have taken the plunge with R12 Financials, GL in particular and your blog is like what the doctor ordered. This post is sort-of related to Intercompany but not quite so I apologize but I am really troubled.

A troubled customer who needs help, turns out they had logged a service request with support and had got an answer that was correct, but did not address the subtlety of their business problem. This is the sort of situation that could result in an implementation failing, Oracle losing revenue and getting a lot of bad PR.

Manish sent me more details and I got answers from Seamus Moran and my boss and got a brief answer to him on the blog. Seamus also sent some documents and examples via old fashioned email and they had a follow up conference call to go over the details. In the call the Customer wondered if we had a better solution and another module was suggested that might help them. The next thing they have got their Oracle Sales team pricing the module for them*.

So we had a troubled customer unable to get our software to do what they needed for their business, after connecting to my blog they are a happy customer looking to buy more from us. Investment from development was minimal, a couple of hours at the most, the returns are:

• The $ value of the up-sell
• Avoided bad PR from them failing
• Saved support and license renewal revenue into the future
• Get positive PR for reacting fast and effectively to a problem
• Have material we can pass to Support to educate customers with the same issue
• Provide Sales with a nice in with other customers who may also benefit from the same up-sell
• I feel good and keep blogging

So the last point is stretching the point, but this is my blog so allow me my feel good moment. Now I have to convince some more of my colleagues, to take the plunge and start blogging.

Do you agree that development teams should blog? Are there particular development teams you would like to see blogs from, inside or outside Oracle? Or are you in product development and have arguments against blogging? Sound off in the comments.

*I have no idea if the deal has gone through, or any of the financial details and prefer not to in case I reveal any forward looking financial data - that would be bad.

UPDATE : Now we have Part 2 and Part 3 in this series