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This morning’s session with the OAUG Upgrade SIG was accented by the attendance of Stephen Chan, who many of you probably recognize from his well-known blog.

During the session there was a discussion on the future of R12 updates and he noted that there are plans to to release one more Financials Family Pack for Release 12 of the E-Business Suite before Release 12.1 appears.  Currently the base release is 12.0.4 with a RUP 5 that included Family Packs for Financials and Payables.  So plan for another release from 12.0.5 to 12.0.6.

Also discussed was that all reports should be migrated from Oracle Reports formats to XML Publisher format by the time R12.1 appears.  Release 12 included a mixture of reports in both formats, but Oracle continues to migrate the application reports to the XML Publisher format.

One of the panelists works in Oracle support and noted that about half of the support requests are now generated by R12 clients.  John Stouffer noted that could be because 11i is so stable and R12 is still showing growing plans.  Probably true since there have been lots of patches to the new release.

I discussed support issues with him afterward.  He noted that many clients underestimate the need for R12 User Training because they mistakenly assume the the user experience with R12 is very similar to 11i.  “Everyone thinks it’s like upgrading within 11i, and that’s just not the case.” was his best comment.

He noted that he has actually had a customer calling for production support because they couldn’t figure out how to print out Payable’s checks!  He mentioned that changes to the setups in Payables and Receivables have been challenging for users.

Bottom-line, he highly recommends that companies considering an upgrade make time in the schedule to allow the key users plenty of time to get used to the new screens and features before going live.