Oracle EBS Asset Model and Reporting

EBS FA is an old model and the application is widely deployed in most of EBS sites.

Almost all companies has assets and need to report their assets in their accounting reports.

While many people, including Oracle, has provide some reporting solutions for EBS FA, I think that doing it right in a most optimal way is often.  It affects the time required for monthly or year end period closing and a reporting solution that allows the deploying company to quickly see the change they made and continue working is essential for their business.

Historical Information

EBS FA stores asset historical information. 

SAML Single Sign On Scenarios

There are two main categories of scenarios:

• SP-Initiated: A user attempts to access a protected resource from the service provider
• IdP-Initiated: A user logged on and access the IdP and then access a protected resource from the service provider.

The second case is the one I mentioned earlier as portal.
Here is a web site with a comprehensive list of scenarios.

Understand Single SIgn On

Here are my notes.

1. The sign on process protects the software and the data stored within or accessible by the software. from unauthorized access.
2. The sign on process is to ask the user to provide something, such as password, to verify himself.  Only those people who have the right answer is allowed to get in
3. SSO, from user perspective, is about using the same sign on password and sessions for multiple applications.
• SSO allows the users to not remember multiple passwords.
• SSO can be used to avoid the user to provide the same thing over again (within a browser or even across browser)
4. SSO, technically speaking, is to by pass the login screen from the applications and use a login screen from the SSO server.
• Once the SSO is enabled, the application login page should not be seen by the users.
5. SSO allows the user information (password) used for authenticating the user to stored centrally, not in each apps.  The sensitive information can thus be protected.
6. However, applications can ask the SSO server to provide additional attributes about the users
7. The login page redirection from the apps to SSO server is a typically way to enable SSO.
• If the SSO server is also providing a portal service, in the other word, the applications are listed centrally, the redirection from an application URL may not be important.
• We cannot avoid the users to use a browser bookmark to access to the application.  Redirection from the apps to SSO is almost always required.  Also.  It may be from any page, not just the specific login page
8. Browser Cookie is a way to make the browser to "remember".  It is used to communicate between the SSO server and the apps. 

Here are notes about SAML:

Out of Box cross product integrations

I have been working on application integration since the day one I started my career in enterprise apps development. It is really an interesting topic.

On one hand, we would like to ship the integration out of box, so the customer can buy the individual products, as well as, "buy" the integration solution.

On the other hand, we may also not want to enable integration out of box and assume all customers are using all products.

If the product is reflecting the best practice and would like demonstrate the best way to utilize the product, we may want to build and ship the integrated solution.

What is the guiding principles?

I think that the targets should be

• Provide the solution - We should not expect the solution is a customization just because it is hard to deliver the solution.
• Make the solution OOTB as an option- It is a product the customer can purchase, but do not assume that everyone has it
• Easy to disable and enable it - We also need to document how to enable or disable it.

Also, pre-packaged apps is designed based on the majority of the customers who are the targets of the products. If most customers are looking for the OOTB solution, we can ship the enabled integration and let the customer to disable it. If most of customers are not yet ready for an integrated solution, we can disable it in the OOTB solution and let the customers to enable it.