Vegas, Baby!

On Saturday night, I head to Las Vegas for Collaborate 2012 (http://collaborate.oaug.org). For the Oracle E-Business Suite community, this is one of the biggest events of the year.

For the uninitiated, Collaborate is the annual conference hosted by the Oracle Applications User's Group (http://www.oaug.org). Unlike Oracle OpenWorld, which is largely an Oracle Corporation marketing event, Collaborate is a community-oriented conference. While there are Oracle Corporation presentations focusing on the latest and greatest products and features, the vast majority of the papers and presentations at Collaborate are from actual users of the Oracle products.

Many of these are actual war stories. Walk-throughs of actual implementations and upgrades. Solutions that that others in the E-Business Suite community have put together for their sites to solve real-world problems that they've encountered. Very often, these are things that are not covered (or are covered poorly) in Oracle-provided documentation.

And it's not just E-Business Suite DBA topics, either! There are plenty of presentations on module-specific issues given by others who have already "been there, done that".

In addition to the standard white-paper presentations, there are also panel discussions and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The panel discussions and SIGs are usually very lively Q&A sessions with recognized industry experts on a wide range of topics.

Planning an upgrade? There's the two-part OAUG Upgrade SIG (Sessions #10522 and #10722)

Having troubles with cloning E-Business Suite? There's an E-Business Suite Cloning Panel. (Session #9360)

Thinking of moving to Linux? There's a panel for that too! (Session #9361)

I will be giving my presentation, "#9554 - Anatomy of an Upgrade to 12.1.3 (Including Platform Migration)" on Wednesday, April 25^th from 11:00am to 12:00pm i(South Seas E) and I will also be on the Migrations to Linux Panel (#9361), also Wednesday, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm (South Seas F).

And, while you're at it, stop by the RedRiver Solutions booth (Booth #1226). I will be hanging out there and helping to pass out updated versions of John Stouffer's books Oracle E-Business Suite Patching 101 and Oracle E-Business Suite Apps DBA 101.

I hope to see you there!

– James