UPK (User Productivity Kit) is a software application that can be used to create simulations of tasks performed in a software application for, use during training on that application. It can also generate various forms of documentation—such as job aids, test scripts, and business process procedures—based on these same recordings. UPK's deliverables can also be incorporated into an application's online help system to provide in-application performance support.
UPK does all of this by capturing a user's interaction with an application (typically, to perform a discrete business task), and then repurposing this information to create the various output formats.
UPK has found a strong market in large corporations for developing training material for large-scale software implementations. Although it is most commonly-used for providing training on enterprise-level software applications, such as those offered by Oracle, SAP, Siebel, JD Edwards, and so on, UPK can be used to record and publish simulations for any Windows-based application. However, the success with which UPK manages to capture the context of the user's interaction with these 'non-targeted' applications may vary.
UPK is the latest incarnation of a product that has been around for over ten years. Starting as an offshoot from SAP Tutor (now itself called iTutor), UPK began life as OnDemand, which was developed and marketed by OnDemand Software. OnDemand Software was acquired by Global Knowledge Software (GKS), a division of Global Knowledge, Inc. In July 2008, GKS itself was acquired by Oracle Corporation. GKS was a long-time partner of Oracle, and OnDemand has been used extensively by Oracle and its customers for providing training on Oracle products.
As Oracle already had a product called On Demand (with a space), the decision was made to rename OnDemand to User Productivity Kit, or UPK. Concurrent with this, Oracle realigned the version numbering of UPK so that OnDemand version 9.1 was renumbered as UPK version 3.1. To confuse users even more, UPK 3.5.0 is, for all intents and purposes, a slightly enhanced version of OnDemand 9.1.7. This was the last official OnDemand release (and was itself released as UPK 3.1.7).
Oracle refers to "pre-takeover" versions of OnDemand as "UPK 2.x". I interpret "UPK 2.x" as referring to OnDemand version 8.x, and treat UPK 3.5 and OnDemand 9.1 as generally the same product, save some minor differences in functionality highlighted as such in this book.