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Oracle announces that from July 2024, the Error Correction Support Baseline (ECS) for Oracle EBS R12.2 will move from 12.2.3 to 12.2.7. An update to at least 12.2.7 is required to bring the application back into full ECS.
Congratulations! You have successfully upgraded your Oracle E-Business Suite to R12.2.
Oracle has confirmed in their roadmap that this is the final major version of the E-Business Suite they will release. They also confirmed that R12.2 will remain in Premier Support for at least another decade, meaning no more application upgrades are required.
If only this were true...
What are Oracle Lifetime Support levels?
First, let's take a step back and examine what levels of Lifetime Support Oracle offer, these are:
- Oracle Premier Support - Provides comprehensive software upgrades for your Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications for five years from the general availability (GA) date
- Oracle Extended Support - Puts you in control of your database, middleware and applications upgrade strategy by providing additional maintenance and upgrades for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications for an additional fee.
- Oracle Sustaining Support- Maximises your investment protection by providing maintenance for as long as you use your Oracle software. Features include access to oracle online support tools, upgrade rights, pre-existing fixes, and assistance from technical support experts.
It's essential to remember that when a product enters Sustaining Support, it is no longer eligible for:
- Security updates i.e no more Critical Patch Updates
- Legislative updates (affecting Oracle Payroll)
- Oracle support will not log new bugs with development for any issues you raise in service requests.
- The software will not be certified with new third-party products (i.e. Windows, Office or browser updates for users)
It's therefore strongly recommended that you ensure that your Oracle software does not go into Sustaining Support but rather keep it at a level where it will remain in Premier Support.
Oracle Premier Support and Oracle EBS
Earlier versions of Oracle E-Business Suite – 11i. 12.0 and 12.1 – are now all in Oracle Sustaining Support
But the good news is that Oracle R12.2 is in Premier Support until at least 2033!
"Oracle E-Business Suite has moved to a Continuous Innovation model for the R12.2 release. This means that E-Business Suite provides support via regular Oracle E-Business Suite Updates that can deliver new application functionality and feature enhancements, underlying technology stack updates, as well as fixes that have undergone thorough testing without a major upgrade."
Oracle Applications - Oracle Error Correction Support (ECS)
This all sounds clear and positive – if you have moved to Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2, you don't need to worry about major upgrades ever again.
This is true, but it is not the whole story.
As well as the Lifetime Support Policy (LSP) levels for the major product version releases described above – Premier, Extended, Sustaining – Oracle also have a concept known as Error Correct Support (ECS).
This Error Correction Policy (ECP) documents the details of delivering fixes during the LSP phases and establishes policies for providing new fixes.
In practice what it tends to mean is a more fine-grained support policy for a product based on its minor version, and if that minor version falls outside the minimum baseline for Error Correction Support then it effectively drops into Sustaining Support since no new one-off patches will be released for a version of software that is lower than then ECS baseline
E-Business Suite 12.2 Minor Versions
Oracle are now on minor version 12 of E-Business Suite 12.2 – 12.2.12. A new minor version is released annually.
Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2 and Error Correction Support (ECS) Policy
The new change that Oracle has announced is that from July 2024, the Error Correction Support Baseline for E-Business Suite R12.2 will move from 12.2.3 to 12.2.7.
This means that all older versions of eBusiness Suite – 12.2.3 through to 12.2.6 – will drop out of Error Correction Support and will no longer be eligible for any new one-off patch. An upgrade to a version of at least 12.2.7 is required to bring the application back into full ECS. Note that Oracle has stated that even though they recommend that customers maintain their systems at the minimum level required for ECS, they will continue to make security fixes (CPU patches) available for eBusiness Suite 12.2.3 and higher.
If you are already on version 12.2.7, you are still covered by Error Correction Support. Still, given that Oracle has moved the minimum baseline for ECS once, they may very well do so again, and in the future, your current version may also drop out of ECS if it is left on its existing version.
Oracle EBS R12.2 Upgrade - Latest Release
The good news is that upgrading an earlier version of 12.2 to a later version is not on the scale of upgrading to 12.2 from an earlier major release, such as 11i or 12.1.
The update can be performed by using the online patching toolset included in R12.2 - this dramatically reduces downtime compared to prior upgrades, and requires no changes for the underlying technology stack.
There is no escaping that updating from 12.2.x to 12.2.12 requires careful planning with several practice iterations and full user testing, and an understanding of the impact on core functionality and customisations, and CEMLIs.