All,
Steven Chan had this information on his blog in January 7th, 2010 (below) and has recently repeated the same note as a reminder.
I’ve also blogged about it earlier on this blog (below) and OAUG Connect and it’s in the last eNews newsletter, other newsletters and the OAUG Insight magazine.
A lot of customer sites do not have the FREE Patch Wizard utility running nor the FREE patchsets.sh running on a regular basis which indicates exactly how far you are behind on the Family Packs and Mini-packs for your Release 11i environment. A new Patch Wizard version (soon to be released by Oracle) uses document 883202.1 to examine your specific installation for the patches necessary for Release 11i and Extended Support.
http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/01/ebs11i_minimum_patching_baselines.html
http://justadba.com/announcements/release-11-5-10-2-rdbms-10gr2-and-discoverer-10g-extended-support-and-fees/
I’ve tried to escalate this as much as I can via presentations, blogs, etc but the document outlining the minimums was released in January of this year and Steven has covered it extensively although how many technical folks have paid attention to it is unknown.
I’m positive that a lot of business owners have no idea that this patching effort must be completed by November 30, 2010.
I knew about this document and we started this project at my current customer back in the April/May timeframe. We only have Oracle Release 11i financials for the most part and need to apply three Family Packs, approximately 30 Mini-packs (FULL and SHARED are required) and assortment of pre-requisite and one-off patches. We are up to 50 at this point in time and have applied these patches in our patch environment.
We will be migrating them next week to our development and configuration environments to see what customizations/extensions are broken in development and to determine what business processes, features do not work as they did before in the configuration environment. Then we start remediating…:-(
Make sure your DBAs download a new patchsets.sh and provide you with the Report_11i.txt output file (which will show you exactly how far you are behind on patching) and that they configure the latest Patch Wizard while CLOSELY review documents 1116887.1 and 883202.1 for minimum 11i Extended Support patching requirements.
Ensure that they run all identified patches through the Patch Wizard tool and not try to manually determine the patch impact. The Patch Wizard use the Patch Information Bundle (PIB) file, InfoBundle11i.zip which is updated NIGHTLY by Oracle with all high priority, critical patches and patch pre-requisites which your DBA will not be able to determine just by reading the patch driver file.
Please let me know if you have any questions. You have 13 or so weeks to be patched current including technology patches but the majority of these patches are for product modules and will require significant FUNCTIONAL testing.
thx,
John

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