Re: Tools Release 9.1
Mike
I have been working with the various iterations of tools 9.1 since October. I have helped to install it for three different clients now, and it has been well received.
The breadcrumbs feature in 9.1.0.4 is very handy. One thing to keep in mind. If you navigate down four or levels, it generates a nice bread crumb trail. If you close the app, the breadcrumb trail disapears. That is as designed, but it does make you climb down the tree again. In this case, I wanted to test out two apps ajoining each other in a menu four levels deep to compare them. The second time down the tree, I kept the app open, then clicked one level up on the bread crumbs to get the second app for comparision. No bug, just a learning curve.
The favorites feature is nice. You can get at favorties from the drop down menu and you have favorites in the "carosel", a Mac-OS like icon strip at the bottom of your browser. In the favorites, you can add in apps (obviously), but also entire sub menus. I added in the System admin menus to my favorites so save me a bit of navigating time. In the favorites tab of the carosel, it displays the individual apps that I have added and it allows me to shuffle them around to fit my work habits. One thing Oracle hasn't figured out yet is how to display a menu structure in the favorites tab of the carosel. If you use that feature, you need to get at it from the drop down menu. No real hardship.
Also in the carosel is a tab for your open apps and a tab that takes you to WSJ and your ten most recently viewed reports. The "carosel" can be easily hidden to give you a bit more room when you need it.
Besides the user interface change, the other major shift for this tools release is the installer. Tools 9.1.x uses the Oracle Universal Installer rather than the old installer. That takes a bit of getting used to for us old hands. When you make the jump, and you start to upgrade your fat clients, be sure to fully unistall JDE on those fat clients first. Do a thourough delete, right down to the registry. Then do your clean install of JDE using OUI. If there are old remnants of JDE under the old installer, then the new installation can get a bit messy. If you start the install on a fresh fat client, or one totally clean, the install goes in nicely.
- Gregg