Issue #11 – 8th March 2013
News and Latest Developments
Oracle ramps up battle with Salesforce 
Analyst Chris Kanaracus has written a blog entry about how Oracle has laid out details on how it intends to compete with the likes of Salesforce.com in the highly competitive arena for next-generation marketing software. The Eloqua purchase is a big part of this drive.
Apps UX Team at Benelux Connect 2013
The Oracle Apps User Experience (UX) team will be present at OBUG Benelux Connect in Antwerp, Belgium. They are on quite a mission to show the world the UX journey that they’ve been on to get to Fusion, and those who’ve seen the roadshow speak highly of it.
Functional
Social Recruiting: A Big Opportunity for Oracle Apps 
Mike Mallin, Oracle Product Strategist, talks about the increase in Social Recruiting, and why this beats other methods for finding the best hires. He also touches on one of Oracle’s recent acquisitions – SelectMinds.
Answers to Fusion Questions
Following on from the previous issue’s “Conclusions after 6 months with Fusion” item, here’s the same author fielding some of the questions he received after publishing the article (scroll down to read the article).
Technical
Floyd Teter discusses the imminent release of the Oracle 12c database, with its pluggable user databases and hints that this will enable Oracle to deliver ‘fully’ multi-tenant Fusion (some other vendors are only multi-tenant at the Application level, not down to the database level – something that we’re sure Larry is looking forward to mentioning).
Alex Hansal’s 5th part in the CRM Composer series focuses on Server Scripts (linked above). Although much of this will also be within the Page Composer available in other Apps Modules. He’s also posted part 6 here.
Infographic
Fusion / Taleo and the fight for the best Talent 
We love a good infographic. This one contains some great stats on Recruitment and HR Transformation but the one that stood out was that 95% of HR systems globally run on Oracle.
Reading
Fusion: A birds eye view
Succeeder Dave spotted this high level overview of Fusion Apps. This is the first Fusion related post that we’ve seen on the Hexaware site so hopefully it’s the start of a new series.
Listening
Oracle ERP Cloud Service
A 9 minute podcast describing how Oracle’s Cloud Service combines with ERP Applications to transform back-office functions. (Make sure that you’re using headphones as there is a sudden burst of loud music early on.)
and finally…
Turn your Company into a great place to work
Everyone at some point in their careers will work somewhere where it isn’t much fun. LifeHacker has some ideas for how you can improve things.
My tips to make your meetings better 
Kate Matsudaira is a prolific and entertaining blogger who posts on a wide range of topics. This one covers how to improve meetings. Her piece contains some great links too, including 7 rules of better brainstorming and How to make boring meetings interesting.
The Oracle Cloud Weekly 