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| September 2021 Edition Oracle Integration & Process Partner Community Newsletter |
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| Grow the Oracle Cloud business and connect, extend & innovate Oracle SaaS solutions. |
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| Connect, Innovate & Extend SaaS Partner Launch Webcast |
Want to increase the Oracle Cloud business? Create new service offerings for Oracle SaaS solution based on the Oracle Cloud Platform?
Watch this webcast with Suhas Uliyar, Vice President Oracle Product Management.
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SaaS solutions like HCM, CX and ERP Cloud need to be integrated and customized:
• Oracle Integration connects SaaS solutions with out of the box adapters. • Oracle Digital Assistant innovates SaaS solutions with pre-build chatbots. • Oracle Process and Visual Builder extends SaaS solutions with customized UIs and workflows.
Speaker: Suhas Uliyar Vice President Product Management Digital Assistant, AI & Integration Oracle HQ |
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| Innovate PeopleSoft with an Intelligent Chat Assistant |
PeopleSoft is the first Oracle packaged application to build and deliver chatbots using the Oracle Digital Assistant Skill Store.
The PeopleSoft digital assistant, PICASO, now supports skills from several different business areas and PeopleSoft pillars. You’ll see a demo, hear what it takes to license and deploy to customers, and what the plans are going forward. It comprises of: |
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• Absence Skill • Benefits Skill • Payroll for North America Skill • Requisition Inquiry Skill • Expense Inquiry Skill
Speaker: David Bain Schedule: September 28th, 2021, 16:30 - 17:30 CET (Berlin time) For details please visit the registration page here. |
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| Cloud Platform Partner YouTube Update September 2021 |
The September video includes three topics: • Promote your services & events • Integration Bootcamps • Innovate PeopleSoft with a Chat Assistant Webcast
For regular updates please subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Thanks for your likes and sharing the video on YouTube and LinkedIn.
For the latest integration & process information please join the PaaS community. |
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| Integrate SaaS Hands-on Bootcamps Webtraining |
Attend the Oracle Integration Bootcamp, a three days hands-on training for Oracle partners.
Oracle Product Management is pleased to invite Oracle Partners to attend a 3-days hands-on workshop on how to integrate with ERP & HCM applications using Oracle Integration Cloud. |
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Free Oracle Cloud platforms 30 days cloud trial are available here. Your Oracle partner manager can extend this trails.
For SaaS trials please visit https://demo.oracle.com. For support please contact the OPN Team.
This Invite-Only hands-on workshop will be delivered at No-Fee to Partners. It will consist of presentations, demos, and hands-on labs.
Schedule: • On-Demand Training • EMEA, October 19th , 21st & 26th 2021 • US & Canada, October 5th, 7th & 12th 2021 • Asia, September 21st, 23rd & 28th 2021 • South America, September 8th, 9th & 10th 2021
For additional location please visit our website here (community membership required). |
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| Oracle Implementation Certifications |
Enablement and certification are key to cloud success!
At the Oracle Competence Center and Online Learning Library partners can attend free on-line classes and certifications.
Additional we offer the latest implementation exams ($245 or free vouchers) for: |
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Integration Cloud or SOA Suite? By: Phil Wilkins
A periodic conversation I get involved is the the relationship between Oracle’s SOA Suite and Integration Cloud. We’ve long held a view based on our conversations with Oracle product management. There is a formal statement of direction for SOA Suite available …. The bottom line as we read it: • SOA Suite isn’t going to be scrapped and customers will not be forced onto Integration Cloud. • Future changes are going to be on making transitions easier to the cloud, and a customer decision to adopt OIC. • Releases will focus on keeping things up to date and aligned with the underlying technologies from Java 8 to Java 11 as a long term release of Java. WebLogic version updates. • We’ll see mechanisms to cloud deliver integrations as the primary focus.
Our interpretation…
So SOA Suite isn’t going away. This doesn’t surprise, we’ve held this view as the customer base is significant. As SOA Suite often goes hand in hand with customers using EBusiness Suite (EBS) which is going to be supported into the 2030s there will be a lot of resistance to replace the software central to getting data in and out of EBS.
Function development in the document doesn’t feature very highly. This reflects the fact that firstly SOA Suite is pretty mature, and the principles of abiding by the standards such as BPEL constrain evolution. While SOA Suite is not going away, the bulk of development effort is going into OIC such as functionality that can provide the features like the Managed File Transfer (MFT) extension to SOA and B2B (support for edifact data flows.
Development is driven by largely by the underpinning technologies such as WebLogic which has seen some significant changes to support more cloud native deployments such as containerisation. Plus the newest versions of the J2EE standards. This where we believe most changes to SOA Suite will come from. Read the complete article here.
Create Free Trial OIC Instance for one Month | Oracle Integration Cloud By: Kabir Yadav
To Create Free Trial OIC Instance you must have Oracle Cloud Free Tier Account. If you don't have already and want to see the signup steps for it, Please access my previous blog (Click here). You won't be charged unless you select to upgrade the account. After one month your free instance will automatically get closed.
STEP 1 : Sign in to your Oracle Cloud Free Tier Account. STEP 2 : Search Integration & then Select Application Integration. STEP 3 : Select the (root) Compartment and then click Create Read the complete article here.
Basic Knowledge About Oracle Integration Cloud Service | Oracle Integration Cloud Tutorial By: Kabir Yadav
Oracle Integration Cloud Service is a complete, secure, but lightweight integration solution that enables you to connect your applications in the cloud. It simplifies connectivity between your applications and connects both your cloud application and on-premise application.
Oracle Integration Cloud Service provides native connectivity to Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Right Now Cloud, and so on.
After integrating the application and activating it to the runtime environment, the dashboard displays information about the running integrations, so you can monitor the status and processing statistics for each integration. The dashboard measures and tracks the performance of your transactions by capturing and reporting key information, such as throughput, the number of messages processed successfully, and the number of messages that failed processing. Read the complete article here.
Migrate Your Oracle Integration Cloud Classic Services to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) By: Elizabeth Earle
Oracle encourages you to migrate the following integration cloud resources from OCI Classic to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI):
• Integration Cloud Service (ICS) • Oracle Integration (OIC-C) • Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS)
OCI is Oracle's modern cloud platform that's based on the latest cloud technologies and standards. It provides more consistent performance and better features. Oracle continues to invest in OCI, including the addition of new regions, services, and features. Note also that new features are continuously being released on Oracle Integration.
Please watch the below 3 minutes video which summarize the benefits of migration to OCI:
Migrate Integrations and Processes to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
For more information about how to migrate from classic to OCI please review the following migration guides:
• Migrating Oracle Integration Cloud Service and Process Cloud Service Instances to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure • Migrating Oracle Integration Classic Instances to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Read the complete article here.
Oracle Digital Assistant – Backend Integration with the Oracle Integration Cloud By: Daniel Teixeira
With the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) custom components (powered by Bot Node SDK) we can establish connectivity to anything that has a REST endpoint.
What if we need to connect to a SOAP endpoint, or if we need to always re-use existing integrations? Then we can leverage the Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) for this, and invoke that Integration (REST) from the ODA custom component.
Below is a simple example of that implementation, where we receive an OrderId and call an OIC endpoint that takes OrderID as parameter and returns OrderStatus. Read the complete article here.
Oracle Assistant for OIC By: Niall Commiskey
The artificial intelligence capabilities of OIC have been augmented by the introduction of the Oracle Assistant for OIC. This compelling new feature of the August release is a great resource for folks new to Oracle Integration and also for those who are not so new.
Usage is simple - here are some examples – read the complete article here.
OIC Integration Lifecycle Using REST Endpoints By: Amy Simpson-Grange
Out-of-the-box, Oracle provides a bunch of REST endpoints available to interact with your Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) instance or the components in which you have built. In this post, we will look at how we interact with an OIC integration using the available REST endpoints throughout it’s lifecycle. This post will not cover all available endpoints and ways to utilize, but rather the key use cases and those that I think are really useful! The full list of available endpoints can be found here.
OIC supports OAuth 2.0 authentication mechanism. Before you can get started using these APIs, you will need to ensure you have the appropriate details to authenticate, retrieve a token and use in your REST calls. For information on doing this, see the Oracle Documentation.
When you call any of the Oracle Integration REST endpoints, the response header returns one of the standard HTTP status codes defined here.
I should also point out that all of this activity can also be completed manually within the OIC service console but these endpoints are specifically useful if you want to script/automate the lifecycle processes. Read the complete article here.
OIC Scheduling for End of Month style processes – Tip #11 By: Phil Wilkins
Setting up calendar schedules that aren’t simply reoccurring, such as a specific date in a month like 28th or third Friday, become more of a challenge with the OIC Scheduler. The calendar works with the ical standard set by the IETF standard 2445. If you review the standard’s section 4.3.0, this describes the re occurrence options, whilst able, not able to address these needs.
Reoccurring on specific dates can, in theory, be set. If you review section 4.3.4, you will see a date has the potential to be defined as a comma-separated list. So multiple dates for month-end can be provided as a list. Note, this is predicated on the calendar attribute supporting date-mday (DATE). The DTSTART and DTEND attributes accept DATE with no indication that the date-mday is not supported.
Specifying the dates explicitly overcomes the problems of national holidays. The downside is that you need to know when the list needs to be extended and, in the case of OIC, the means to edit the scheduler format safely.
NOTE: we have not tested whether the OIC scheduler is compliant with the use of date-mday at the time of writing.
Complex formulas for scheduling and more manageable scheduling..
There are several options for managing reoccurring events, such as month-end, year-end accounting, payroll and expenses payments etc.
In most options, we assume that we have a simple reoccurring schedule that triggers an integration that determines whether the trigger is legitimate. This could be as simple as daily. If valid, then invoking the main integration with the business process. Read the complete article here.
OIC and Blue Prism RPA By: Niall Commiskey
I downloaded the BluePrism trial this morning, along with a set of 10 beginner labs they make available online.
Blue Prism Design Time
The focus of this post is not on how to design automations with Blue Prism; the 10 labs do a great job of that. The focus here is on how to invoke such from OIC. I will use the following process as an example - this is actually Lab4 Blue Prism offers a rich set of process design actions -
Some of these have been used to add robustness to the process model, very important for mission critical automations.
The process shown above is very simple - it opens the Blue Prism website in InternetExplorer and searches for a specific topic - e.g. Coca Cola
So it is doing the following, from an automation perspective -
1. open the page in IE 2. enter data - the search string - in the search box 3. press the search button.
I test this within the Blue Prism Design Studio and it works fine. The search value - Coca Cola - is hard coded, as you can see in the Data Items block above.
Now say I want to expose this functionality as a service - I will then need to define an input variable for the search string. This can be easily defined in the Start action. Read the complete article here.
OIC & Blue Prism part 2 By: Niall Commiskey
This post goes into a bit more detail, especially on the Blue Prism side. The use case today is that of updating an excel sheet - Here's mine - today we are doing employee assessments and we will leverage Blue Prism to automatically assign performance values, based on the employee rating. Apologies to any Liam Mellows fans out there.
The employees have been rated - the performance fields just need to be updated. Our digital worker will take care of this.
The OIC process will invoke Blue Prism, passing the name of the excel sheet to be processed.
The Blue Prism process is as follows -
Thanks to the following page for the instructions on how to create the above.
The logic is simple enough -
• Open workbook - Open the excel sheet • Get Collection - here we copy the workbook contents to the Employees collection • Loop over each employee entry o Update each employee performance field based on their rating • Write Data - update the Excel sheet • Save Data - Save Excel Sheet • Close Workbook - Close Excel Sheet
The process leverages the Blue Prism VBO(Visual Business Object) for Excel. This VBO is pre-seeded in the product. Think of this as an Excel adapter, providing us with functionality such as open close, write, save etc. You see on the left a Data Item - Workbook Name. This is the variable which holds the name of the excel sheet to be processed. Read the complete article here.
Business Identifiers in Oracle Integration By: Ankur Jain
A Business identifier in Oracle Integration helps you to track the messages from the monitoring dashboard quickly and easily.
Without enabling the Business identifiers, you can not activate the integrations.
Max 3 business identifiers can be assigned during the design time. One is primary and the other two are secondary.
To understand how to enable Business Identifiers and how to use them to track the runtime integration, Read the complete article here.
OIC Activity Stream to OCI Log analytics By: Shreenidhi Raghuram
OIC Activity Stream to OCI Log analytics
Introduction
We know that Oracle Integration Activity stream logs can be downloaded from OIC using the Monitoring console. Here is the reference link - Monitoring OIC A commonly implemented solution by customers is to automate the download of activity stream logs periodically using monitoring REST API and store them in repositories like FTP servers or Object storage for offline analysis and diagnosis.
However the Activity stream download is governed by size of the activity stream log file. Refer - activity stream logs retention. Due to this size limitation, customers could have an issue with the ability to reliably download activity stream logs for a definite period of time, say last 1 hour. For instance, during periods of heavy activity on the OIC instance the log file may only cover a portion of the period due to the size limitation.
Solution
Good news ! This requirement has now been addressed as part of the August 2021 release of Oracle Integration. OIC now allows activity streams to be sent to OCI Logging service. OCI Logging service provides persistence as well as real time analysis on the OIC activity stream messages. Read the complete article here.
Ways to download connectivity agent Oracle Integration By: Ankur Jain
The connectivity agent is used to establish the communication between SaaS and on-premises applications. Before you create the connection with on-premises applications in Oracle Integration, you must have to download the connectivity agent and install it on the host machine.
There are various ways to download the connectivity agent. So, in this short article, we’ll describe various options to download the connectivity agent of Oracle Integration.
1. Using Oracle Integration Console
The easiest way to download the connectivity agent is using the Oracle Integration console.
To download it using the Oracle Integration console follow the below steps:
1. Login into the Oracle Integration Console. 2. Navigate to the Integrations -> Agents page 3. Click on the Download -> Connectivity Agent option from the upper right corner of the page. Read the complete article here.
Leverage Oracle MySQL Database Service (MDS) with Oracle Integration Cloud By: Arpit Narula
The primary objective of this blog is to detail out how Oracle's MySQL DB can be provisioned on OCI Gen -2 and integrate it with Oracle Integration Cloud. MySQL Database Service on Oracle Cloud might prove out to be a very cost effective and performance enhancing solution for many use cases. A few such use cases are:
• Custom Logging and Error Handling Frameworks • Implementing Parking Lot Patterns for Integrations • Building Data Stage for VBCS applications So let's jump into the fun sections where we will cover the following topics in detail.
a) Create an MDS Cloud Instance
b) Setup compute instance (that will connect to MDS)
c) Create an OIC Instance and Agent Setup
d) Build a sample integration Read the complete article here.
Convert JSON to String Oracle Integration By: Ankur Jain
I have seen multiple target applications which accept the JSON data as a String in a single element. So, it is necessary to convert the JSON to String before you call the target endpoint.
Convert JSON to String Oracle Integration
For example: Below is the JSON which you may get from the source system: { "firstname": "ankur", "lastname": "jain" } and you need to map the above JSON as a string in the following single element: { "data" : "{\n \"firstname\" : \"ankur\",\n \"lastname\" : \"jain\"\n}" } So, in order to achieve this, first, you have to write the JSON to the temporary location using the Stage File action and read it using the opaque schema as a String. Here is the opaque.xsd code which you need to use to read the JSON from the stage: Read the complete article here.
Tips and Tricks for handling numbers in BPEL or OIC By: Pranav Davar
While integrating with multiple systems and moving data from one system to the other, we generally come across scenarios, wherein we need to change the format of the number or perform operations like floor, ceil, round, divide, multiply, add, etc. on numbers. We will be going through various mathematical functions available in XSLT 1.0, which would be helpful in such scenarios, and also some generic errors which we encounter usually.
- Mathematical Operations
1. Divide 2. Multiply 3. Add 4. Subtract 5. Square-root 6. Round 7. Floor 8. Ceil 9. Advanced Number formatting - Common Errors Mathematical Operations 1. Divide To divide 2 numbers, we can use the div operator to divide two numbers. Syntax: $num1 div $num2 Example: Let us assume we want to divide 120 by 7. Read the complete article here.
Free Webinar: CI and CD for Oracle SOA and OIC by Dan Goerdt & Dan Reynebeau Take a deep dive of FlexDeploy's support for the SOA Suite, WebLogic resources, and the Oracle Integration Cloud. The Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Integration Cloud provide a wealth of features for integration, but most customers struggle to create fast and repeatable deployment processes to manage changes across their on prem and cloud environments. In this webinar you will learn how FlexDeploy can: • Automate the entire Build, Deploy, and Release process. • Remove the need for scripting and manual activities. • Integrate seamlessly with tools such as Jira, Soap UI, and ServiceNow.
Use Oracle Integration to Connect E-Business Suite with Financials Cloud Moving Oracle E-Business Suite to the cloud brings many opportunities to modernize and integrate with other cloud services. Many times, these projects relate to the adoption of new SaaS applications which add more functionality and business processes. One example is modernizing the infrastructure of EBS running the manufacturing operations by bringing to Oracle Cloud and connecting with a new implementation of Oracle Financials SaaS. Oracle Integration is an Oracle Cloud regional service with a powerful set of adapters, providing connectivity and integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, cloud services and technologies, and SaaS applications as Oracle Financials Cloud. This architecture presents a topology for connecting an EBS instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Financials SaaS using Oracle Integration. Architecture
This architecture shows the deployment of Oracle E-Business Suite in a single availability domain inside an OCI region, along with integrations built using Oracle Integration. Oracle Integration is connected to Oracle E-Business Suite using Oracle E-Business Suite Adapter deployed with the Oracle Integration Connectivity Agent. The architecture includes two compartments, both of which have Cloud Guard enabled to provide maximum security based on Oracle's security best practices. In addition, the compartment where the database system and the autonomous database private endpoint are deployed is a security zone compartment.
CI/CD for Oracle Integrations with Visual Builder Studio by Shay Shmeltzer The new version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio adds support for automating continuous deployment of Integrations created in Oracle Integration from one instance to another. This can help teams easily promote changes to integrations from their development instance to their test and production instances. In this blog we'll show you how to achieve this. Oracle Integration is a cloud service that allows you to integrate data from multiple sources and create data APIs for other apps to consume. For example, many of the customers who are developing user interfaces with Oracle Visual Builder rely on Oracle Integration to get the data shown in the UI. Oracle Integration has adapters that can help you easily connect and extract data from multiple systems. Oracle Integration provides a web-based interface where developers visually create integrations and manage versions of those integrations. For customers who are looking to automate the process of migrating integrations between instances (such as from dev to prod) - Oracle Visual Builder provides an easy-to-use solution that simplify export and import of integrations. Automating Integration CI/CD We added specific Oracle integration functionality into Visual Builder Studio in both the Environments and Build areas. In the environments section you can define multiple environments and map them to integration cloud instances. We can scan your tenancy for instances, and you can also provide a pointer to other instances in other cloud tenancies.
Updating SOA Polling Frequency through WLST by Ahmed Aboulnaga Have you ever wondered how you can update the PollingFrequency of an inbound adapter such as the FileAdapter or FtpAdapter using WLST? Taking a look at an Oracle SOA 12c composite in the EM console, when you click on your service, you can navigate to the Properties tab to view and update the polling frequency of the inbound adapter at any time during runtime. We experienced a strange issue. For example, the inbound FileAdapter would be configured to poll the folder every 10 seconds. However, we noticed that in some cases (which we can't explain), the file never gets picked up. It may sit there for hours. A restart of the SOA managed servers took care of this. We also found out that updating the polling frequency re-triggers or re-initializes the inbound file polling for some odd reason. |
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| Business Process Management & Innovation Section |
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Extend HCM Cloud with workflow process in Oracle Integration Cloud by Mani Krishnan Introduction Oracle Integration Cloud provides rich work flow capabilities that can be integrated with Oracle SaaS applications. Oracle HCM cloud provides approval and work list capabilities for most needs. However, there are use cases where a complex workflow with multiple approvals and ability to enrich approval data from multiple applications will be necessary. In this post, let's look at seamlessly integrating integration cloud process user interfaces with HCM cloud. Overview Instructions in this post are applicable to Oracle Integration cloud on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Each OCI tenancy is associated with an IDCS instance, which supports identity federation with Oracle SaaS applications. Enabling identity federation with IDCS also allows seamless integration with many other Oracle PaaS products. The high-level steps are: • Enable federation between IDCS and HCM Cloud • Add Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) to a Identity provider policy • Embed process UI in HCM cloud Here is a depiction of the SAML federation solution: User logs into HCM Cloud and opens a page with an embedded OIC process page. The OIC process page should display content specific to the currently signed-in user without requiring user to log into IDCS or HCM Cloud. Steps 3,4 and 5 are transparent to the end user. Enable identity federation between IDCS and HCM Cloud Before identity federation can be validated, users and role assignments also must be synchronized between HCM Cloud and IDCS. There are several ways to achieve it. Follow instructions at this link to use the ESS Job in SaaS to synchronize users and role assignments. This task can be entirely performed by customers as self service.
Embedding the Oracle OICS Process Workspace Application in an iFrame by Siming Mu Introduction Oracle Process Cloud Workspace is a web application that a user uses to interact with human activities in BPMN processes. It is a stand-alone web application in Oracle Integration Cloud Service (OICS). In some use cases, customers want to embed the Workspace application in an iframe of their own web page. Out of box, this is not possible because all HTTP responses from the Workspace have an X-Frame-Options header set to "sameorigin". It does not allow browsers to embed response data into an iframe from a different domain. This post demonstrates a work-around solution to this problem by using a proxy server. The idea is to use a proxy server (OHS or Apache) to remove or modify the X-Frame-Options header from all responses from the Workspace. Demo Environment My demo environment, shown in the image below, includes an OHS server installed on localhost:7777. I have my OICS instance running on a VM. I have a simple test web page with an iframe installed on the OHS. Check the Problem First Let's verify the problem exists first. The following two screen shots show the Workspace accessed directly without the proxy. Now we create a simple web page "myworkspace.html" on our OHS instance. The page contains an iframe that points directly to the Workspace. |
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| Additional New Material for PaaS Community |
• August 21 – New OIC articles by Phil Wilkins • Premier League debut The Premier League began the 2021–22 football season with a new player on the pitch: Match Insights — Powered by Oracle Cloud, which provides AI-driven statistical insights on how teams organize, their changing win probability through the game, and the likelihood of a goal in the coming moments. • 5 smart city success factors Cities, such as San José, California, are harnessing smart cities technology to help reduce poverty, protect natural resources, and otherwise make themselves better places to live and work. Learn about five factors that drive success. |
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| Top Tweets PaaS Community |
Send your tweets #PaaSCommunity Follow us on Twitter. |
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| Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups |
Want to learn more about developing Enterprise-grade Cloud Native applications on the Oracle Cloud Platform, covering topics like Microservices Architecture, developing in Node, Python and PHP, using Low Code development tools to build Mobile apps, and much more?
Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups if you want to follow Oracle’s solutions in this area or participate in the events and hands-on labs we organize:
- Utrecht, Netherlands
- Brussels, Belgium
- Cairo, Egypt
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Lille, France
- London, UK
- Madrid, Spain
- Istanbul,Turkey
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
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| PaaS free trial Accounts |
Free Oracle Cloud Accounts 30 days cloud trial are available here. Your Oracle partner manager can extend this trails.
For SaaS trials please visit this page. For support please contact the OPN Team. |
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My private corner – onto a new workflow! Since many years Ralf is the tall person behind the process in the background. For both Oracle Process architecture and during the Summer Camps and Community Forums. |
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| Your excellent understanding of architecture combined with outstanding product knowledge is guidance for the Oracle Cloud and the community. Thanks for presenting keynotes, webcasts and hands-on trainings. My university adventures would not have been possible without you! Looking forward to continue the workflow of personal advice - maybe on another swimlane. Success and fun in the APEX community #PaaSCommunity! |
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