Personalization vs Extension vs Customization

May 23, 2011 4 Comments


In Oracle EBS development, the terms Personalization, Customizations & Extensions are often used interchangeably. It often creates confusion among developers regarding the meaning of these terms. These terms are critically important terms that developers must understand and use properly. Let’s discuss them briefly here to simply understand what they are.

What is Personalization?

Personalization is the process of making changes to the User Interface (UI) from within an Oracle E-Business Suite Form/Page. It is possible to make personalization to both Form-based and OA Framework based pages.

What is Extension?

Extension is the process of making changes to the programmatic (i.e., PL/SQL or Java) elements of an E-Business Suite form/page. It is possible to extend both Forms based and OA Framework-based pages.

What is Customization?

Customization is the process of creating new forms/pages. While Oracle does provide tools to do this (i.e., Oracle Forms and JDeveloper 10g with OA Extension), this is the least supported option.

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4 Responses to Personalization vs Extension vs Customization

  1. Kale Avinash says:
    May 24, 2011 at 8:12 am

    Firstly I want to say thanks to you for such useful blog on apps.
    I am new to apps and it helped me a lot to understand customization, personalization and extension.

    Reply
  2. Rahzzz says:
    May 9, 2012 at 6:42 am

    How we can identify a customized OAF page ??

    Reply
    • Dibyajyoti Koch says:
      May 10, 2012 at 9:26 am

      Got to the ‘About this Page’ and see the naming conventions of the EOs, VOs and COs. Normally developers put different namings (say xx) when they customized a seeded VO,EO or CO.

      Thanks
      Dibyajyoti

      Reply
  3. Martin Doherty says:
    September 13, 2012 at 1:52 pm

    I disagree. There is no widely agreed definition of ‘customization’, it means different things to different people. To provide a more concrete definition, Oracle On Demand came up with the acronym CEMLI which stands for ‘Configuration, Extension, Modification, Localization, Integration’. There is a short Wikipedia article on CEMLI that is worth reading.

    Configuration: Altering the look or behavior of the product without adding or changing any program code e.g. flexfields, standard profile options, folders, menus etc. Personalization is a specific type of configuration. Generally means data changes only.

    Extension: New program code added to provide new or changed functionality. Might be all new code, or might start with a renamed copy of a standard code object. I would put CUSTOM.PLL into this category, since Oracle has purposed that file for customer extensions. Reports fall into this category.

    Modification: making code changes to standard code. Should be avoided, but may be done if absolutely no alternative. if Oracle sends out an update to that code object, the mod will be obliterated, so document the hell out of it because you may need to redo it in future.

    Localization: A change to the system to take into account local currencies, languages, date formats, government regs etc. Could be in form of code or data, and is generally provided by Oracle, but could also be done by customers if Oracle does not cover their specific need.

    Integration: interface development for moving data in & out.

    Since the word ‘Customization’ can refer to any or all of the above, depending on the speaker, I think it’s better avoided if clarity is needed.

    Reply

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