Since January 2010, Project Partners consultants, both in the US and India, have worked on-site with Oracle to test the Fusion Applications. An absolute win-win situation for everyone involved. It is our chance to see the live product in action, to test, test and test again to ensure quality, and to get hands-on experience and training using the best-of-the-best in Projects Applications. In exchange, Oracle receives a tremendous amount of feature validation, field expertise, and knowledge from those who live and breathe the world of Projects daily. Finally, this early look at the product before all the code is frozen helps guarantee the quality release we have all been waiting for.

So what are our first impressions?

Consistency across applications – Oracle has put tremendous effort into the user experience. Strict User Interface (UI) guidelines that all modules adhere to are obviously in place. For example, you go to the same place in each product to create a new line. When you enter a new screen, the continuity ensures you know where to go to do what you need to do.

User dashboards tailored to the overall business process flow – Each functional area is broken down into a work area. Similar functions are grouped and are much more streamlined according to how users would do their work. No more jumping around to different screens to achieve one thing – it’s flow-based, and navigation is much simpler and easier to follow. The result is increased user productivity.

More functionality on the screen – No more navigating five and ten screens down to find what you are looking for. Instead, you are never more than two to three clicks away from performing your task. Navigation is shallow and allows a greatly simplified approach to getting your jobs done. You can search for documents, create transactions, etc., from the same screen. And once again, it is consistent across the application, thereby decreasing the overall learning curve of the Fusion Applications and ultimately, once again, improving productivity.

Stay tuned as we chronicle our way through the Fusion testing and release preparation efforts. We will continue to blog our impressions, describe the tricks and techniques we learn along the way, provide you with the most up-to-date information, and share the vast amount of functionality we see with each new code freeze and release. The environments become more stable by the day, and more functionality continues to be included and integrated. Oracle Fusion is genuinely a “fusion” of the best-of-the-best in Oracle and Peoplesoft, not just the functionality but also the fusion of the various tech stacks underneath. Project Partners is excited by what we have seen so far and honored to partner with Oracle firsthand in the upcoming delivery of this new and improved release.

We will keep you apprised of our findings and experiences as we move forward and dig deeper into this new Oracle offering.