primavera unifier tips and tricks

Copyright © 2014 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. |

Oracle Advisor Webcast Primavera Unifier Tips and Tricks Ahmed Fadel Senior Technical Engineer May 06, 2015

2


Objectives

• Understand how to Work Effectively With Oracle Support

• Follow Unifier hot topics

• Top issues logged by Primavera Unifier Customers

3


Agenda

1

2

3

Working with Support

Unifier Information center

Unifier functional Issues

4


How to work effectively with Support?

5


• Firstly explore the Knowledge Base in My Oracle Support.

• Secondly, visit the Community, ask questions review popular answers. The community is staffed with the same Oracle Support Engineers who handle Service Requests.

• Thirdly, if you are unable to find a solution, Log a Technical Service Request. Be sure to upload any requested log files or support information to enable the Support Engineers to start reviewing your issue.

6

Helpful Tips in working effectively with Support

Answer or Solution may already exist!


Search the Knowledge Base

• The chances are, that an answer or solution already exists for your issue. Oracle recommends you explore the powerful knowledge base as your first step towards resolving your issue

• How to use My Oracle Support - Searching and Browsing - Part 1 of a 2 Part Series [ Video ] (Doc ID 1543724.1)

7

Useful hints for using our Knowledge Base.


Engage the Community

• Engage with your peers and Oracle Subject Matter experts in My Oracle Support Community. My Oracle Support community is a multi-channel interactive community consisting of 190+ communities, 400,000+ community members, and 16,000+ threads/discussions each month. Pick your product and post your question. Read and answer other users questions. Many commonly asked questions are featured in the community and it's available to you 7x24x365

• My Oracle Support Community (MOSC) - How to Video's, Documentations, Webcast Schedules and more ... (Doc ID 1616733.2)

8

My Oracle Support Communities - Primavera


Create a Technical Service Request (SR)

• Unifier team of Oracle professionals resolve your Service Requests when logged via My Oracle Support or phone

• Your service request will be routed to the next best available engineer

Note: Service Requests are for support related issues for Oracle Products.

9

Creating and Managing Service Requests


Assigning SR to the next best available engineer for your issue based on:

• Product - Pick the correct product -> as this determines which engineer will receive the problem. There is no frontline/backline at Oracle. The SR is routed based on the product and the skill level of the engineer.

• Service Request Content - Provide a comprehensive description of the issue. Include diagnostic data as it is a vital element for engineers to investigate your issue. Ensure you attach any support files that is recommended based on your problem selection. Attaching the right content enables product families who have automated diagnostic features to fast track your Service Request.

10

How Oracle Support handle your Service Requests.


Attach any support files

• For examples

– Detailed screen shots

– step-by-step instructions so that the engineer can run the appropriate test case.

– For Self-Hosted(on premise) customers it is highly recommended to provide a DB dump or If it has been already provided under another service request and wish the engineer to use that copy, simply provide the service request number associated with the database upload

Note: How to Upload Files to Oracle Support (Doc ID 1547088.2)

11

How customers Work effectively with Oracle Support


• Within your service request. Ensure you select how you want to be contacted, so that Oracle can reply to you quickly and via your chosen/preferred method.

– Email

– Fax

– Web

– Phone

12

Choose your preferred method of contact.


• Severity - Verify that the severity level is set appropriately and represents the business impact.

Note: Not every issue is a Severity One - the Severity level you select is defined by the Oracle Support Policy you have purchased

• Severity 1 prioritization

– Production down situations.

– Go-live/show stopper

– Major business impact

13

Understanding our Service Request Severities


Severity levels description

• Severity 1: Problem or product defect causes complete loss of service, regardless of the customer environment, and/or work cannot reasonably continue.

• Severity 2: Severe loss of service; no acceptable workaround; however, operations can continue in a restricted fashion.

• Severity 3: Minor loss of service; impact is an inconvenience that may require a workaround to restore functionality.

• Severity 4: No loss of service; minor error that does not impede operations or an enhancement request.

14

What does each Severity mean?


Service Requests General Notes

• Service Requests submitted with a language request will encounter delays as the Service Request will need to be translated prior to being assigned.

• Are routed based on time of day, product and availability of the next qualified engineer to support your issue.

• One issue per Service Request.

• Service Request creators should be knowledgeable with the product they are logging the SR on.

15

Helpful hints for when creating Service Requests


Reasons to request your SR be escalated to a Manager?

• Changes in business impact of the problem that requires escalation.

• Changes to the Business or implementation milestone, critical date(s) (milestone date or resolve by date), along with the type of business or implementation milestone.

• Unsatisfactory Support received during the lifecycle of the open SR.

• To increase visibility. Call into Oracle Support or update your service request and request a manager callback.

16

When would you need or want to engage the Support Escalation Process?


• Start the escalation process by updating the SR or by calling Oracle Support requesting escalation.

• Provide a thorough explanation about why you are escalating.

• Prove a reason for escalation, including business impact of the problem that requires escalation

Please provide full details of who is requesting escalation and their contact details. email address

• The service request will then be assigned to a manager who will call you back within 30 minutes to discuss your SR and agree an action plan to address the escalation reason.

17

Steps to Escalate your Service Request


My Oracle Support Portal

• My Oracle Support portal is a one-stop shop for knowledge, community, proactive best practices, capabilities, diagnostic tools, information centers, upgrade advisors and much more. Take advantage of the available resources and get the most out of My Oracle Support, today.

18

Learn more about our My Oracle Support Portal


Technical Support Policies

• Global Customer Support is available to assist in the troubleshooting and diagnosis of problems that Customers experience during the implementation and use of Oracle products.

• Support is not staffed to deliver Education or Consulting Services nor is this type of service priced into Support fees. When implementing Oracle software, customers should always plan for the cost of educating the project team and consider Oracle Consulting or Oracle University if assistance is required in performing an implementation/upgrade.

19

A guide to our Technical Support Policies


Technical Support Policies (Cont’)

Some specific areas that are outside the realm of Support include:

– Mapping business requirements to product functionality

– Educating project team members on how to run scripts and how to maintain/use the operating system

– When there is a performance issue, and the System is found to be HW error or fault free

– Customizations

– Assisting with custom queries or reports against Oracle delivered tables/views (including performance tuning)

– Application development to include creating code or examples

Debugging custom code, demo code, or sample code

20

A guide to our Technical Support Policies cont’d


Technical Support Policies (Cont’)

Some specific areas that are outside the realm of Support include:

– Providing data fixes for issues caused by user errors

– Reconciling financial accounts

– Assisting with schema and attribute design, and the proper tuning of indexes or search filters used against Oracle software products.

21

Final points on our Technical Support Policies


Unifier Information Center

22


Hot Topics

• New Troubleshooting and Problem-Solution Documents

– Read recently published Troubleshooting and Problem-Solution documents about your product

• New Knowledge Documents

– Read recently published documents about your product

• Most Popular Community Discussions

– View the most viewed Community discussions for this product

• Recently Answered Community Discussions

– View recently answered community discussions for this product

23

Learn more about our Unifier Information Center


Hot Topics (Cont’)

• Alerts

– View the most up-to-date high impact and urgent issues for your product.

• Best Practices

– Unifier Support Best Practices and other interesting data (coming soon).

24

Learn about our Unifier Best Practices


Resources

• Most Popular Troubleshooting Documents

• Most Popular Knowledge Documents

• Product Documentation

• Oracle University

– Take advantage of Oracle University courses

• Oracle Community and Forum Links

25

Key and Helpful Unifier information


Unifier Functional Issues

26


After adding a new Data View (or updating an existing), it is only available from the

Company level (UDRs and Data Cubes), not the Shell level.

• Cause

– The SQL Definition of the Data View does not have project_id in the SELECT statement. For a Data View to be available to Shells, it must select the project_id column from one of the tables in the query.

• Solution

– To resolve this, add the project_id column from the main table on the query.

1- Locate the affected Data View within Unifier (Company Workspace Administration Mode > Data Structure Setup > Data Views).

2- Set its status to Draft.

27

Data View not available from Shell Level


• Solution

3- Open the Data View.

4- Update the SQL Definition to include the project_id column from the main table in the query:

Example of a SQL Definition experiencing the issue:

SELECT mm.due_date, c.record_no, c.title

FROM unifier_uc c left outer join unifier_umm mm on (c.id=mm.ugencontractrefbp);

Example of the SQL Definition after adding project_id

SELECT mm.due_date, c.record_no, c.title, c.project_id

FROM unifier_uc c left outer join unifier_umm mm on (c.id=mm.ugencontractrefbp);

28



• Solution(Cont’)

5- Save your change.

6- Set the status of the Data View to Published.

7- The Data View can now be used with Shell level objects.

29



Why doesn't data show in fields for one user and it does for another user?

• This behavior is seen from time to time when a particular local host (user's machine) isn't configured according to the unifier guide a third-party browser extension is enabled, a bug/virus or other like Maleware program, or other software/hardware conflict is at play. Advise checking those items and/or making a side-by-side machine comparison between one that returns the results as expected and the one that does not. When checking Unifier recommended settings be sure that the Custom Settings outlined for the Privacy tab are applied to both the Internet and Trusted Sites zones.

30

User cannot see data in a field but another user can


Why is the "No active user selected for the next step" Alert being thrown trying to send

a workflow record to the next step when there is a user in the "To" field under Action

Details section?

• This behavior is known to show itself when there is some destination, child, or auto-created, record that is supposed to be created but doesn't have the Auto-Creation tab defined in its Setup. The solution is to ensure that any destination, child, or auto-created, BP Setup has this Auto-Creation defined in Administration Mode.

31

No Active User Selected For The Next Step


Integration operates using two methods: CSV files and Oracle Primavera Web Services.

Integration feature supports:

• Cost BPs

• Line item BPs

• Simple BPs

• Text BPs

• Document BPs and documents

• Asset Manager classes

• Code-and-record-based configurable manager classes

32

Upload the bid package through the exported template it gives an error: "integration not defined"


Integration feature supports(Cont’):

• Planning Manager planning items

• Shell Manager shells

• Space Manager levels and spaces

• Resource Manager resources and roles

• User Administration

33



Navigation Steps

• menu -> Print Preview -> PDF

• Error in Logs

2015-03-26 11:25:23,807 ~ [[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '6' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] ~ERROR ~ Target.Exception ~ 2PcbVT0MmtwJpdlZ5yv8gBCs2j3C5pthJVGzTzFCQnJ1MVKt9L1t!2110319114!1427354668199 ~ unifier:/studio/print/open throws an exception at /studio/print/action.xml:303: ~

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: sun/awt/X11/XToolkit

37

Trying to print record in Unifier as PDF but I got strange file


Cause

• Weblogic server is located inside a headless server. i.e headless mode.

Solution

• Check the -Djava.awt.headless parameter value for JAVA_OPTIONS. should be as below.

Open the startWeblogic.sh in the domain, and append parameter -Djava.awt.headless for JAVA_OPTIONS

should look like: JAVA_OPTIONS="{JAVA_OPTIONS} -Djava.awt.headless=true"

38

Trying to print record in Unifier as PDF but user got strange file


Cause

• The business process has either not been added to user mode via the user mode navigator, or the appropriate user mode navigator record has not been re-deployed.

Solution

1- Go to the company workspace and switch to administration mode.

2- Expand Configuration and click User Mode Navigator.

3- Double click the Project / Shell record, to open it.

4- Move the appropriate business process from the right pane into the desired place in the left pane and click the OK button.

5- Single left click the Project / Shell record, to ensure it is highlighted and then click the Deploy button.

39

Business Process Not Added/Deployed In User Mode Navigator


How can users from one partner company instance be moved to another company

instance? Can a user be Deleted?

• Users within Unifier cannot be deleted in any company instance, owner or partner, once they are created, nor can they be "moved". The solution is to inactivate the account in the old/wrong company instance and create an account in the new/correct company instance as needed, noting that the Login Username is a unique key so the new account will have to have a different Login Username

40

Moving and/or Deleting Users


Summary What we covered today

• How to work effectively with Support

• Unifier Information Center

• Unifier Functional Issues

41


Top Articles and Community Links

42

• Working Effectively With Oracle Support - Best Practices (Doc ID 166650.1)

• Information Center: Primavera Unifier (Doc ID 1565536.2)


Learn More Available References and Resources to Get Proactive

43

• My Oracle Support Essentials Webcast Series https://support. oracle.com | Doc ID: 553747.1

• My Oracle Support Blog https://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal/

• Get Proactive in My Oracle Support https://support. oracle.com | Doc ID: 432.1

• Ask the Get Proactive Team [email protected]

https://support.us.oracle.com/

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=553747.1

https://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal/

https://support.us.oracle.com/

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=432.1

mailto:[email protected]




Q & A

44

• To ask a question on the phone line, select *1 on your phone.

• To ask a question online, use the CHAT area within the webex.

• Your question will be read aloud in the order received.

• Question can also be asked on the My Oracle Support Communities


THANK YOU

45