Fusion Applications Release 8

My blogging has taken a back seat for the last few months while I've been doing a European Tour delivering bootamp training for Oracle Partners.  I've been to Turkey, Spain, France (several times), UK (OK I live in the UK, but sometimes it's felt like I'm just visiting!), Finland, Poland, Belgium, USA all in the last 3 months.  One of my colleagues kindly took on the trip to Dubai....   The bootcamps have covered Fusion HCM, Fusion Talent Management, Taleo Recruitment and Taleo Transitions.

While I've been away, Fusion Applications Release 8 came out and we are already working with it on a couple of our Fusion HCM projects.

It's a major release in terms of new functionality which has been introduced.  The obvious one is Time and Labour, which is a much needed additional to the scope of the application.  In future blogs, I will explore this in more detail.  The introduction of Time and Labour, also coincides with a rewrite of the Absence processes.

There's also some useful integration between Taleo Recruitment and Fusion HCM.  It's the first step, but looks promising as the two products become more integrated.  Again, more on that in future blogs.

Now, I'm off to Paris and London for more of those bootcamps...

Taleo Product Roadmap

I recently attended the OHUG conference in Dallas, TX.  The following notes came from a presentation on the roadmap for Oracle Taleo products.

The recruiting process benefits enormously from social media.  "Social sourcing" is a new phrase which we'll be hearing lots of in the future.  The acquisition of Select Minds adds to the arsenal of the Taleo social products.

Some facts:

1 in 7 of all humans are on Facebook.  1 in every 7 minutes online is spent on Facebook.  Every one of these users is a potential candidate for a job.

Employees are great sources of referrals.  Consider 100 employees each with 100 contacts and 2 degrees of separation.... that's a lot of connections.

15% of all US hires are made through Taleo systems.

In future releases of Taleo Recruitment, we will start to see the same social networking capabilities as we see in Fusion Apps.

We will also see more mobile capability.  Watch out for demonstrations of the new mobile capability at Oracle OpenWorld in September.

Taleo Recruitment will soon be integrated with Fusion Apps.  We will most likely see a convergence of UX and reporting will move to being based on OBI and BI Publisher (BIP).

OpenWorld 2012 T-2

So, there are 2 days to go before Oracle OpenWorld 2012 begins!  I'm making my final preparations and have built my schedule for the week. 

I'm focuesed on Fusion HCM and Taleo, so highlights for me will include:

• Fusion Human Capital Management: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap presented by Gretchen Alarcon
• Talent Management in an Oracle E-Business Suite Coexistence Model 
• Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager Deep Dive - presented by Mandar and Chitra
• An Introduction to Oracle Taleo Talent Management Solutions for Small Businesses
• An Introduction to Oracle Taleo Recruiting Solutions

.... and of course all the new announcements that are bound to come out during the week.

I'll also be attending the Oracle EMEA Partner Appreciation Reception as part of the Oracle Partner Network Exchange @ Openworld

Not forgetting, of course, the Annual Oracle ACE Dinner at the St. Francis Yacht Club!

I will be posting daily update.