FSM in Romania

Last week I went to Oracle Romania in Bucharest to deliver a Functional Setup Manager course.

Bucharest is an interesting city, lots of history and lots of potential for the future.

I've lost track how many times in the last year I've taught FSM, but each time I learn something new myself.  The students on the course were all internal Oracle employees and many of them already know something about Fusion Applications.  It is this sort of group that is the most challenging (in a good way) as they ask intelkligent questions from a basis of knowledge.

We built some example implementation projects and then analysed the structure of the task lists and the way in which FSM gives us added value above just simply being a mechanism to route us to the correct UI to perform some setup.

So, here's a brief summary of the questions that were raised:

• Why does FSM let us allocate tasks to people who do not have the correct permissions to perform the setup tasks?

• Why does FSM not highlight or deal with duplicate tasks?

• If FSM can add new setup to a target environment and update changed setup, why can't it deal with deleting redundant setup?

I'm sure the product teams are well aware of these questions, but it would be interesting to know if and when they will be tackled.

Thanks to all the students on my course for a fun and reqarding couple of days!  Looking forward to going back to Bucharest some time soon.

FSM in Fusion Version 4

I've just finished delivering a training course on Fusion Functional Setup Manager.  We've been doing these courses for some time now, but this week we used a version 4 (RUP3) environment.

FSM is a fundamental component in Fusion Applications, and as such it hasn't changed much since the original releases of Fusion.  There are a few subtle changes in Version 4, and sometimes, it is the little things that matter....

Take for example the assignment of tasks to implementation consultants.  This is something that the project manager does via FSM.  It was always a pain that the project manager could assign a task to a person, but that person didn't have the correct Role Based Access permissions to execute the task!  Thankfully, the developers have taken this on board, and now there are 2 new columns in the task assignment pages.  1 shows whether the assignee has the correct permissions and the other shows the roles which do have the permissions and therefore helps if you need to assign a new role.

Nice work, Oracle!