Issue #59 – 23rd October 2013
This week is a double-edition as we missed last week due to the UKOUG Conference.
News and Latest Developments
The World’s Second Largest Software Company
Oracle has leap-frogged IBM to become the World’s 2nd largest software company with its sales edging ahead of its rival. This is of course, only software revenue (IBM’s hardware sales are higher than Oracle’s), and both are a good distance behind the clear leader (Microsoft). It’s still a nice little fillip for Oracle.
New PeopleTools patches released
Oracle has released the PeopleTools 8.53.08 patch. There’s a good mix of fixes to resolve issues with IE10 support, PUM, PTF, lots for pagelets plus some fixes from the recent Critical Patch advisory. Also released were PeopleTools 8.52.19 and PeopleTools 8.51.25 (Support Login required).
Functional
New Time & Labor Features in PeopleSoft 9.2
Succeeder Michelle (our in-house T&L guru) rounds-up the improvements in HCM 9.2 specifically for Time & Labor and is really impressed.
Hakan Biroglu has written up his experiences with the new Mobile Time Entry functionality that we mentioned and included a video of (last time). Hakan has done the research to enable any early adopters to get it installed and up and running quickly and easily.
Technical
Scheduling a Process from PeopleCode
Stephen ‘Digital Eagle’ Phillips shares the code needed to initiate a process via PeopleCode – something that most of us have done at some point or other – but augments it with some useful code for waiting while the process completes. Very handy!
Oracle Open World Presentations
Jim Marion has posted links to his three Open World presentations online. You can also access the presentations (where they’ve been uploaded) for other sessions here.
Reading
What Nest did Next
Former Apple Exec Tony Fadell started a new company a couple of years back named ‘Nest’, and they released a dramatically different home thermostat. Which household product did they target next? (Clue: most houses have them, but allegedly don’t use them properly as they’re too annoying!)
The Voice of Siri Revealed
The Voice of Siri Revealed 
The voice of Apple’s voice assistant Siri has been revealed as Georgia-based voiceover actress Susan Bennett. Rather amusingly, she had no idea until a friend told her. There’s a video at the end where you can see the similarities between the voices which dispels any doubt. (NB: she provides the voice for Siri for much of the globe, but not the UK)
Infographic
Rather than a single Inforgraphic, this week shows a collection of the very best. There’s a few to look at here, but our favourite is the ‘Wikipedia Edit Wars’ (3rd on the 3rd row) which highlights – by language – which topics are most controversial. Persians quarrel most over Politics and Religion, whereas the Portuguese argue over Music, Sport and Films/TV. Scrolling down, you can see the most contested articles, and it seems that the Japanese find Korean topics most constroversial, whereas Germans look for articles on Croatia and Scientology.
Training
Oracle have released some more free web-based training, this time three 30 minute videos on preparing for your PeopleSoft upgrade.
Watching
A six minute video walking you through the steps needed to create an Activity Guide. Some activity guides have been delivered in the 9.2 applications, and there’ll be more coming in the Feature Packs, but if you want to start creating your own this shows you how.
The answer is of course, no. This chap has some very impressive Word skills.
And Finally…
From the always entertaining Mental Floss blog, here are 65 amusing facts. How about “At one point in the 1990s, 50% of all CDs produced worldwide were for AOL”? or “The 50-star American flag was designed by an Ohio high school student for a class project. His teacher originally gave him a B–.” or “Barry Manilow did not write his hit “I Write the Songs.”
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