June 2007 Newsletter
DWS and Princeton Softech provide joint value to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers
PRINCETON, NJ - May 8, 2007 - Princeton Softech, the market leader in enterprise data management, today announced that it has signed a professional services agreement with Developing World Systems (DWS), Ltd., a leading consulting services provider and system integrator in the UK. This strategic partnership offers a strong joint value proposition to JD Edwards® EnterpriseOne sites across industries in the UK. Both Princeton Softech and DWS are Oracle® Certified Advantage Partners.
The new service partnership between Princeton Softech and DWS will offer a comprehensive and complimentary set of skills and the technology to promote full-lifecycle data management for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne sites. Together, Princeton Softech and DWS will deliver Princeton Softech's integrated Optim™ solutions to address IT issues, such as data growth management, upgrades, application performance and data privacy and data retention compliance, which resonate with many JD Edwards EnterpriseOne clients.
"Partnering with Princeton Softech will prove to be a highly beneficial experience for our clients," stated Barry Burke, Managing Director at DWS. "This collaboration will expand our value propositions and deliver the best possible service to our clients, helping them improve performance, streamline processes and reduce costs across their JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications."
DWS provides service and support to companies who want to customize JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and FormScape (now Bottomline Technologies) products. Formed in 1998, DWS has built a depth of application knowledge that is needed to grow its business. DWS is acclaimed as the largest JD Edwards EnterpriseOne specialist in the UK. Some of the services DWS regularly provides to its clients include health checks, implementation work, customizations, module design and development, upgrades, integration, conversions, long-term support and troubleshooting.
"Princeton Softech's Optim delivers the technology and the power that companies need to align continuous control of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application data with business objectives to optimize performance, control costs and mitigate risk," said Paul Winn, Chairman, CEO and President of Princeton Softech. "Princeton Softech's partnership with DWS will speed the implementation of our Optim solutions and enhance the enterprise data management capabilities we can offer our JD Edwards EnterpriseOne clients."
Princeton Softech enterprise data management solutions are available for Oracle® E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft® Enterprise, JD Edwards® EnterpriseOne, Siebel® Applications and Amdocs® CRM, as well as all custom applications.
Enter another dimension with DWS
Please click here to view an online demo of DWSDimension.
Oracle has made their roadmap for EnterpriseOne very clear after the Applications Unlimited announcement earlier this year. An EnterpriseOne customer can effectively stay on their current release indefinitely. There is no forced migration path, leaving the customer to make the decision to upgrade when they see fit.
As the EnterpriseOne product matures and the functionality available in higher releases becomes more attractive, we will inevitably see more E1 customers upgrade their JDE investment.
The problem is that upgrades are notoriously difficult to estimate. DWS want to take the guesswork out of estimating upgrades. We felt that a more scientific approach was required when evaluating the effort involved in uplifting modifications and extensions from a current release to a higher target release. So, we created our own product, called Dimension - we are a company of developers after all!
What does Dimension do?
- DWSDimension is a tool that identifies precisely all the enhancements to your system.
- Custom objects, modifications to standard and copies of standard interrogated and sized by scanning each object's code or definition.
- For enhancements and copies of standard, line-by-line comparisons are made between your objects and standard JDE, highlighting all differences from simple layout changes to complex structural code changes.
- Custom objects are sized in their entirety, and an upgrade estimate is then calculated using a complex algorithm.
How can it help you?
- Accurately assess costs to help with budgeting
- Plan your timescales and resources with more confidence
- Pinpoint problem areas quickly
- Provide substantial statistical data to backup budget
- Avoid desk checking huge excel spreadsheets - use your time more productively
- Reduce your margin of error when building estimates and assigning resources
Key Features:
- All extracted data written to ".dws" fully encrypted text files
- 100% Secure. Licence-key driven, read-only access to Central Objects
- Ability to analyse copied objects with their standard based-on counterparts
- Extract, on average, 70,000 lines of code per minute
- Analyse 000's of objects in hours, to the precise line
- Factors employed at the Release, System and Object levels to influence calculations depending on from/to releases and the levels of change
- Can 'baseline' JDE releases, allowing you to quickly determine levels of change between the systems/objects of standard JDE releases
- Analysis and comparison base data honed by DWS's development experience and many successfully completed upgrade projects
- Part-developed using E1 toolset
- Supports all JDE E1 releases
- Unique offering in E1 market
- Integrated with STAR, DWS's Project Management Suite
- Utilises best-of-breed extraction & comparison tools
- Highlights potential problem areas - save time by focusing resource at specific areas and key large enhancements
- Identifies Last Run Date of your UBEs - quickly eliminating unused objects
- Helps plan your upgrade efficiently and effectively
- Future: Output includes MS Project Plan for technical upgrade project
What do I do next?
- Call DWS to book your appointment.
Developers' Corner - Flat File Encoding
You want your flat file to come out as Unicode or a non-standard code page so that you can cater for characters from different languages, but it's coming out as a standard Windows 8-bit text file, then you'll need to check your system's configuration.
From EnterpriseOne 8.9 onwards, any function which outputs text files using the JDE APIs such as jdeFprintfConvert (eg: B34A1010) or Section Database Output will use the information on the F93081 Unicode Flat File Encoding Configuration to determine the code page that is used.
Use application P93081 to specify/override the output encoding of the flat file. The following formats can be specified:
| BIG5 | Chinese, Traditional |
| CP1250 | WIN-Latin2, Central Europe |
| CP1251 | WIN-Cyrillic |
| CP1252 | WIN-Latin 1, Western European |
| CP1253 | WIN-Greek |
| CP1254 | WIN-Latin5, Turkish |
| CP1256 | WIN-Arabic |
| GB2312 | Chinese, Simplified |
| IBM-1123 | EBCDIC-Cyrillic |
| IBM-37 | EBCDIC-Latin 1 or Western Euro |
| IBM-420 | EBCDIC-Arabic |
| IBM-858 | # PC latin1 with Euro |
| IBM-933 | EBCDIC-Korean |
| IBM-935 | EBCDIC-Simplified Chinese |
| IBM-937 | EBCDIC-Traditional Chinese |
| IBM-939 | EBCDIC-Japanese |
| KSC-5601 | Korean |
| SHIFT_JIS | WIN-Japanese |
| UCS2 | UTF16_BE/UTF16_LE |
| UTF-16BE | UTF16_BE |
| UTF-16LE | UTF16_LE |
| UTF8 | UTF8 |
For information on the various encoding formats, please refer to the following articles:
Developers' Corner - Snapshot Logging
Having problems with snapshot? It has to do a lot more than just copy your jde.ini, registry settings and rename the EnterpriseOne folder. There are plenty of other tasks that it has to do, especially with the latest releases, such as:
- Changing the system's environment path to include the E1 System folder and path to each environment's bin folder.
- Moving the BPM Broker folder in Program Files into the Snapshot folder
- Detaching and reattaching your local MSDE/SQLServer database
- Stopping your local Websphere Express web server or local OC4J server
- Backing up and restoring the configuration of your local web server
- Checking whether your local Web Services Gateway Integration Server is running
There are any number of things that could go wrong, so to track down any problems, Oracle has including a logging feature in Snapshot. However, it's not obvious how to turn it on, as the option is hidden in the registry. To turn on logging, edit the registry and add/change the following settings:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JDEdwards\SnapShot\LoggingEnabled = 1
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JDEdwards\SnapShot\LoggingLevel = 5
Both are string values.
The log will appear in the same folder as snapshot.exe.
Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following link to view the 'Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry' article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756
Be sure to always use the Snapshot.exe from the latest Tools Release that you have on your machine. Therefore, if a later Tools Release has been installed, then make sure that you copy the Snapshot.exe from the System/Bin32 folder and replace the Snapshot.exe that you normally run. It's a good idea to rename the file to include Tools Release level, eg: Snapshot 8.96_I1.exe, so that you know which version you are running, although you can always check the Tools Release level for a particular Snapshot.exe by looking at the Windows properties of the file. The description will include the release, eg: OneWorld Enterprise Server 8.96.I1_0701260005.
UKOUG - JDEdwards Communicating with Oracle Day
This is a special one off event in partnership with Oracle to promote the ways that JD Edwards customers can communicate with Oracle.
Topics will include: How to get in touch with Oracle, who is the right person to contact and how to raise your issues.
http://www.ukoug.co.uk/calendar/show_events.jsp?year=2007&month=07&day=04
Contract Win 8.12
DWS wins services contract on new EnterpriseOne 8.12 installation for a customer based in the north of England
Road to Fusion
DWS now offers customisation and extension services to Oracle E-Business Suite customers. As a result, we can also offer additional services to our E1 customers around the Fusion Middleware product set, including Web Services Gateway, XML Publisher, BPEL and Enterprise Service Bus.
E1 News - Why Upgrade?
A recently released PowerPoint on the PeopleSoft Connection site's Upgrade Guide summarises the latest functionality in the software that can form the basis for compiling a compelling business case to upgrade.
Click here for the PowerPoint: http://www.peoplesoft.com/media/cupa/pdf/e1upgrade_value.ppt
E1 News - 8.97 Statement of Direction
Oracle has announced proposals for a number of exciting new features with Tools Release 8.97 including native support for web services and a new Server Manager tool.
For further details, see the PeopleSoft Connection website: http://www4.peoplesoft.com/contdoc.nsf/0/AF13DE5C2CF51AEB882572EC006F4C7F?OpenDocument