Preface

Intended Audience

Welcome to Release 12.1 of the Oracle Sales Offline Implementation Guide.

This guide assumes you have a working knowledge of the following:

To learn more about the Oracle Applications graphical user interface, read the Oracle E-Business Suite User’s Guide.

How To Use This Guide

This document contains the information you need to implement Oracle Sales Offline.

See Related Information Sources for more Oracle E-Business Suite product information.

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Documentation Accessibility

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Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

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Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

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Structure

1  Introduction to Oracle Sales Offline
2  Implementing Oracle Sales Offline
A  Descriptive Flexfield Information

Related Information Sources

Integration Repository

The Oracle Integration Repository is a compilation of information about the service endpoints exposed by the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. It provides a complete catalog of Oracle E-Business Suite's business service interfaces. The tool lets users easily discover and deploy the appropriate business service interface for integration with any system, application, or business partner.

The Oracle Integration Repository is shipped as part of the E-Business Suite. As your instance is patched, the repository is automatically updated with content appropriate for the precise revisions of interfaces in your environment.

Online Documentation

All Oracle E-Business Suite documentation is available online (HTML or PDF).

Guides Related to All Products

Oracle E-Business Suite User's Guide

This guide explains how to navigate, enter data, query, and run reports using the user interface (UI) of Oracle E-Business Suite. This guide also includes information on setting user profiles, as well as running and reviewing concurrent programs.

You can access this guide online by choosing "Getting Started with Oracle Applications" from any Oracle E-Business Suite product help file.

Guides Related to This Product

Oracle Quoting Implementation Guide

Oracle Quoting enables organizations propose product solutions and negotiate prices, while enforcing consistent business rules throughout the sales cycle. This guide describes how to set up quote statuses to indicate the evolution of a quote to an order, define status transition rules, set up defaults for an operating unit, and define credit check rules. You must also set up integration with Oracle Sales Contracts, Oracle Incentive Compensation, Oracle Territory Manager, and Oracle Approvals Management.

Oracle Sales Offline User Guide

Oracle Sales Offline is a mobile sales application that uses templates to enable sales representatives remotely manage their day-to-day sales activities. You do not have to log into Oracles Sales to download and upload the template and template data. Oracle Sales Offline works with Oracle Sales and with Oracle TeleSales to create a virtual sales team that enables the sharing of opportunities, contacts, notes, and other customer information between sales team members. You can use Oracle Sales Offline to manage leads and opportunities, build forecasts from opportunities, manage customers, maintain and develop customer quotes, and create and manage assigned tasks.

Oracle Sales Implementation Guide

This guide enables you to set up users, user groups, and roles, define forecast categories that group products and services to be included in a forecast, set up and enable currency conversion, and set up the sales dashboard linking the sales funnel to sales stages of a sales methodology. You can also set up Oracle Sales and Oracle Telesales interoperabiliy and set up Oracle Sales for integration with Oracle Territory Manager, Oracle Marketing, Oracle Quoting, Oracle Proposals, Oracle Trade Management, Oracle Partner Management, and Oracle Incentive Compensation.

Oracle TeleSales Implementation Guide

This guide describes how you can set up Oracle TeleSales so telesales agents can convert a sales inquiry or a customer call into an order. You must set up agent and customer interaction tracking, enable web directory assistance for agents, enable web collaboration, set up opportunity forecasting so agents enter forecast amounts for a product line and receive sales credits, and set up marketing source codes to track the marketing activity responsible for a sale or a sales activity. Oracle TeleSales interacts with Oracle Scripting, Oracle Email Center, Oracle Marketing, Oracle Territory Manager, Oracle Product Lifecycle Management, Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment, Oracle Universal Work Queue, Oracle Sales, and Oracle Quoting.

Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide

This guide enables you to define entities in the TCA Registry, create relationships, search, prevent duplication, and control access. In addtion, you can use this guide to define time zones and phone formats, configure adapters for the processing of data in the TCA Registry, define sources that provide data for specific entities, and create user-defined attributes to extend the registry. You can administer these TCA tools and features from the Administration tab using the Trading Community Manager responsibility. This tab is also available in Oracle Customers Online and Oracle Customer Data Librarian.

Oracle Trading Community Architecture Technical Implementation Guide

This guide provides technical information on the various integration features such as APIs and business events that you can avail to connect into external systems and transact data between these systems through a data hub using the Trading Community Architecture data model. This means that you can create or update in one system and ensure that the change is reflected in the other systems. You can manipulate data at the granular Oracle Trading Community Architecture entity level such as party site or party relationship or at the higher business object level such as person. Use this guide to learn about available APIs, their functions, parameters, and validations and how to use them. You can also find details on the business events and how to subscribe to them.

Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide

Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) maintains information including relationships about parties, customers, organizations, and locations that belong to your commercial community in the TCA Registry. This guide enables you to use the features and user interfaces provided by TCA and by other Oracle E-Business Suite applications to view, create, and update Registry information. For example, you can import batches of party data in bulk from external source systems into the TCA Registry, merge duplicate parties, sites, and customer accounts, generate time zones for phones and locations, and run various customer reports.

Installation and System Administration

Maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite Documentation Set

This documentation set provides maintenance and patching information for the Oracle E-Business Suite DBA. Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Procedures provides a description of the strategies, related tasks, and troubleshooting activities that will help ensure the continued smooth running of an Oracle E-Business Suite system. Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Utilities describes the Oracle E-Business Suite utilities that are supplied with Oracle E-Business Suite and used to maintain the application file system and database. It also provides a detailed description of the numerous options available to meet specific operational requirements. Oracle E-Business Suite Patching Procedures explains how to patch an Oracle E-Business Suite system, covering the key concepts and strategies. Also included are recommendations for optimizing typical patching operations and reducing downtime.

Oracle Alert User's Guide

This guide explains how to define periodic and event alerts to monitor the status of your Oracle E-Business Suite data.

Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts

This book is intended for all those planning to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, or contemplating significant changes to a configuration. After describing the Oracle E-Business Suite architecture and technology stack, it focuses on strategic topics, giving a broad outline of the actions needed to achieve a particular goal, plus the installation and configuration choices that may be available.

Oracle E-Business Suite CRM System Administrator’s Guide

This manual describes how to implement the CRM Technology Foundation (JTT) and use its System Administrator Console.

Oracle E-Business Suite Developer's Guide

This guide contains the coding standards followed by the Oracle E-Business Suite development staff. It describes the Oracle Application Object Library components needed to implement the Oracle E-Business Suite user interface described in the Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface Standards for Forms-Based Products. It also provides information to help you build your custom Oracle Forms Developer forms so that they integrate with Oracle E-Business Suite. In addition, this guide has information for customizations in features such as concurrent programs, flexfields, messages, and logging.

Oracle E-Business Suite Installation Guide: Using Rapid Install

This book is intended for use by anyone who is responsible for installing or upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite. It provides instructions for running Rapid Install either to carry out a fresh installation of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, or as part of an upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12. The book also describes the steps needed to install the technology stack components only, for the special situations where this is applicable.

Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide Documentation Set

This documentation set provides planning and reference information for the Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Configuration contains information on system configuration steps, including defining concurrent programs and managers, enabling Oracle Applications Manager features, and setting up printers and online help. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Maintenance provides information for frequent tasks such as monitoring your system with Oracle Applications Manager, administering Oracle E-Business Suite Secure Enterprise Search, managing concurrent managers and reports, using diagnostic utilities including logging, managing profile options, and using alerts. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Security describes User Management, data security, function security, auditing, and security configurations.

Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface Standards for Forms-Based Products

This guide contains the user interface (UI) standards followed by the Oracle E-Business Suite development staff. It describes the UI for the Oracle E-Business Suite products and tells you how to apply this UI to the design of an application built by using Oracle Forms.

Other Implementation Documentation

Oracle Applications Multiple Organizations Implementation Guide

This guide describes how to set up multiple organizations and the relationships among them in a single installation of an Oracle E-Business Suite product such that transactions flow smoothly through and among organizations that can be ledgers, business groups, legal entities, operating units, or inventory organizations. You can use this guide to assign operating units to a security profile and assign this profile to responsibilities such that a user can access data for multiple operation units from a single responsibility. In addition, this guide describes how to set up reporting to generate reports at different levels and for different contexts. Reporting levels can be ledger or operating unit while reporting context is a named entity in the selected reporting level.

Oracle Approvals Management Implementation Guide

This guide describes transaction attributes, conditions, actions, and approver groups that you can use to define approval rules for your business. These rules govern the process for approving transactions in an integrated Oracle application. You can define approvals by job, supervisor hierarchy, positions, or by lists of individuals created either at the time you set up the approval rule or generated dynamically when the rule is invoked. You can learn how to link different approval methods together and how to run approval processes in parallel to shorten transaction approval process time.

Oracle Diagnostics Framework User's Guide

This guide contains information on implementing, administering, and developing diagnostics tests for Oracle E-Business Suite using the Oracle Diagnostics Framework.

Oracle E-Business Suite Flexfields Guide

This guide provides flexfields planning, setup and reference information for the Oracle E-Business Suite implementation team, as well as for users responsible for the ongoing maintenance of Oracle E-Business Suite product data. This guide also provides information on creating custom reports on flexfields data.

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway Implementation Guide

This guide explains the details of how integration repository administrators can manage and administer the entire service enablement process based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) for both native packaged public integration interfaces and composite services - BPEL type. It also describes how to invoke Web services from Oracle E-Business Suite by working with Oracle Workflow Business Event System, manage Web service security, and monitor SOAP messages.

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway User's Guide

This guide describes how users can browse and view the integration interface definitions and services that reside in Oracle Integration Repository.

Oracle e-Commerce Gateway Implementation Manual

This guide describes implementation details, highlighting additional setup steps needed for trading partners, code conversion, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It also provides architecture guidelines for transaction interface files, troubleshooting information, and a description of how to customize EDI transactions.

Oracle e-Commerce Gateway User’s Guide

This guide describes the functionality of Oracle e-Commerce Gateway and the necessary setup steps in order for Oracle E-Business Suite to conduct business with trading partners through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It also describes how to run extract programs for outbound transactions, import programs for inbound transactions, and the relevant reports.

Oracle iSetup User's Guide

This guide describes how to use Oracle iSetup to migrate data between different instances of the Oracle E-Business Suite and generate reports. It also includes configuration information, instance mapping, and seeded templates used for data migration.

Oracle Product Lifecycle Management Implementation Guide

This guide describes how you can define hierarchies of items using structure types, catalogs, and catalog categories, and define change categories and configure them for revised items or request lines. Oracle Product Lifecycle Management provides several predefined catalogs such as the Product Catalog, Asset Catalog, and the Service Catalog and predefined change categories such as change orders and ideas. Use this guide to learn how to define additional catalogs for browsing and reporting purposes and new change categories specific to your business needs. You can then learn how to set up users and responsibilities that provide or restrict access to these catalogs, catalog items, and change management objects.

Oracle Product Lifecycle Management User Guide

This guide describes how to create and manage catalogs, create and maintain product attributes and attribute values, and manage item statuses and lifecycle phases. You can learn how to create change categories, create task templates for change orders, and create change management reports. In addition, you can use this guide to create roles, map roles to privileges, and maintain these roles.

Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator Implementation and Administration Guide

Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator brings Oracle E-Business Suite functionality to a spreadsheet, where familiar data entry and modeling techniques can be used to complete Oracle E-Business Suite tasks. You can create formatted spreadsheets on your desktop that allow you to download, view, edit, and create Oracle E-Business Suite data, which you can then upload. This guide describes how to implement Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and how to define mappings, layouts, style sheets, and other setup options.

Oracle Workflow Administrator's Guide

This guide explains how to complete the setup steps necessary for any Oracle E-Business Suite product that includes workflow-enabled processes. It also describes how to manage workflow processes and business events using Oracle Applications Manager, how to monitor the progress of runtime workflow processes, and how to administer notifications sent to workflow users.

Oracle Workflow Developer's Guide

This guide explains how to define new workflow business processes and customize existing workflow processes embedded in Oracle E-Business Suite. It also describes how to define and customize business events and event subscriptions.

Oracle Workflow User's Guide

This guide describes how Oracle E-Business Suite users can view and respond to workflow notifications and monitor the progress of their workflow processes.

Oracle XML Gateway User’s Guide

This guide describes Oracle XML Gateway functionality and each component of the Oracle XML Gateway architecture, including Message Designer, Oracle XML Gateway Setup, Execution Engine, Message Queues, and Oracle Transport Agent. It also explains how to use Collaboration History that records all business transactions and messages exchanged with trading partners.

The integrations with Oracle Workflow Business Event System, and the Business-to-Business transactions are also addressed in this guide.

Oracle XML Publisher Administration and Developer's Guide

Oracle XML Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that merges XML data with templates in RTF or PDF format to produce outputs to meet a variety of business needs. Outputs include: PDF, HTML, Excel, RTF, and eText (for EDI and EFT transactions). Oracle XML Publisher can be used to generate reports based on existing Oracle E-Business Suite report data, or you can use Oracle XML Publisher's data extraction engine to build your own queries. Oracle XML Publisher also provides a robust set of APIs to manage delivery of your reports via e-mail, fax, secure FTP, printer, WebDav, and more. This guide describes how to set up and administer Oracle XML Publisher as well as how to use the Application Programming Interface to build custom solutions. This guide is available through the Oracle E-Business Suite online help.

Oracle XML Publisher Report Designer's Guide

Oracle XML Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that merges XML data with templates in RTF or PDF format to produce a variety of outputs to meet a variety of business needs. Using Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat as the design tool, you can create pixel-perfect reports from the Oracle E-Business Suite. Use this guide to design your report layouts. This guide is available through the Oracle E-Business Suite online help.

Training and Support

Training

Oracle offers a complete set of training courses to help you master your product and reach full productivity quickly. These courses are organized into functional learning paths, so you take only those courses appropriate to your job or area of responsibility.

You have a choice of educational environments. You can attend courses offered by Oracle University at any of our many Education Centers, you can arrange for our trainers to teach at your facility, or you can use Oracle Learning Network (OLN), Oracle University’s online education utility. In addition, Oracle training professionals can tailor standard courses or develop custom courses to meet your needs. For example, you may want to use your organization structure, terminology, and data as examples in a customized training session delivered at your own facility.

Support

From on-site support to central support, our team of experienced professionals provides the help and information you need to keep your product working for you. This team includes your Technical Representative, Account Manager, and Oracle’s large staff of consultants and support specialists with expertise in your business area, managing an Oracle server, and your hardware and software environment.

Do Not Use Database Tools to Modify Oracle E-Business Suite Data

Oracle STRONGLY RECOMMENDS that you never use SQL*Plus, Oracle Data Browser, database triggers, or any other tool to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data unless otherwise instructed.

Oracle provides powerful tools you can use to create, store, change, retrieve, and maintain information in an Oracle database. But if you use Oracle tools such as SQL*Plus to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data, you risk destroying the integrity of your data and you lose the ability to audit changes to your data.

Because Oracle E-Business Suite tables are interrelated, any change you make using an Oracle E-Business Suite form can update many tables at once. But when you modify Oracle E-Business Suite data using anything other than Oracle E-Business Suite, you may change a row in one table without making corresponding changes in related tables. If your tables get out of synchronization with each other, you risk retrieving erroneous information and you risk unpredictable results throughout Oracle E-Business Suite.

When you use Oracle E-Business Suite to modify your data, Oracle E-Business Suite automatically checks that your changes are valid. Oracle E-Business Suite also keeps track of who changes information. If you enter information into database tables using database tools, you may store invalid information. You also lose the ability to track who has changed your information because SQL*Plus and other database tools do not keep a record of changes.