OOW2011 Thursday Day FOUR

Last day of conference... loads to try and squeeze in.  Here are the highlights.

Spent a brilliant hour with the PeopleSoft platforms team (Mark Johnston & Friends) in the hand-on-labs building a virtual machine using on the Oracle VM templates.  Very easy to if you know a bit about Linux (I know nothing) and if you have access to an Oracle Virtual Server platform to host your new VM (not many people do).  Some discussion about the value of providing an ISO disk image that would work with local PC based VM clients such as Virtual Box or VMWare.  It really can be done in minutes.

One of the last sessions of the day was a useful panel discussion with PeopleTools product management.  From left to right there was Jeff Robbins (PT Strategy), Binu (PT Development), Willie Suh(PT Strategy), Ravi Shankar (PT platforms development),  Virad Gupta (PT Dev - IB & Reporting) and on the end is Mike (PT tools development).

Discussed were topics such as

• release date of 8.52 - A: very soon.
• more auto setup in Apps Portal
• 8.52 to split out PS_APPS_HOME
• IB Integration Network in 8.52.  Aims to simplify setup, monitoring through auto-discovery.
• Support for FireFox and Google Chrome. When a tools version is released Oracle will support minimum versions at time of release.  Aim to certify each new version of browser being relseased.
• 8.53/4 plans to allow LDAP authentication for 2-tier tools connections.

Very usesful session on PeopleSofyt Reporting.  Jody (PT development)  covered subjects such as

• rename of XMLP to BIP (Businesss Intelligence Publisher).
• BIP now with Rich Text and Image support
• BIP Query data sources can now be transformed before rendering using XSLT
• Connected Query performance significantly improved.
• Drilling URLs in Query now have free form URL structure

And so, finally, to my companion Smurf to tell us of this conference MAIN MESSAGE.

Hadware and Software - Engineered to Work Together.