OpenWorld 2018 - Day 2 Tuesday

"The World's Most Intelligent..."

The second day of OpenWorld begins with a morning at the demo pods chatting with the PeopleSoft team about Cloud Manager 08 (coming soon), Drop Zones and new 8.57 features of Change Assistant.  

Did you know:  In 8.57 Change Assistant jobs can now be run in "Subsequent Pass" mode and not just Initial and MTP modes?  It always seemed a bit odd doing a Move-To-Production against my UAT or Test system!

Dave Bain (Oracle PeopleTools)

Next stop was to the main PeopleSoft session of the day... Applications Technology Update and Roadmap for PeopleSoft presented by Dave Bain (Oracle PeopleTools Strategy).   Two main news items here PeopleTools and PeopleSoft Cloud Manager.  Here's a quick summary:

• PeopleTools 8.57 went GA in September 
• Support for Drop Zones.  This is the ability to add custom fields/subpages into delivered application pages that have been enabled for Drop Zone.  We should start to see delivered pages enabled for Drop Zones from Image 30.  Sounds like this is for Fluid only initially.  This will eventually be a great addition to the Configuration tools now available in PeopleSoft.
• Personalised Analytic Notifications.  This adds a feature into existing Pivot Grid technology to allow a user to create their own threshold alerts on the Pivot Grid data itself.  (eg notify me when my number of unapproved Purchase Orders exceeds 20).  Currently the notification can be a push notification and/or email but their working on adding SMS to this too. Nice feature!
• More PUM Analytics to help understand customisation impact.
• Improved multi-facet search selection in Elasticsearch
• Fluid page preview in App Designer
• Event Mapping visibility in App Designer
• and more....
• PeopleSoft Cloud Manager Image 07 also released at the same time
• Read my blog here for detail of "The Magic Upgrade Button".  Nice shout-out from Dave on the work that Cedar Consulting have been doing in running PeopleSoft on OCI.
• New features coming in Cloud Manager Image 08 include
• Bare Metal shape support
• Adding custom scripts (.sh and Python) to pre and post build
• More granularity over defining nodes (ie web only or web and app).
• Ability to import Oracle databases and features to support RMAN (that's Oracle backup and restore for anyone not using Oracle DBMS)
• GA could be later this year (2018)

Cedar Consulting & PeopleSoft 8.57 in OCI - Upgrade Magic

The PeopleTools team continues to deliver on their commitment to:

1. Optimize the user experience
2. Provide tools to help isolate customisations
3. Help customers migrate PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
4. Automate the lifecycle processes (patching, app updates, install, config, etc)
5. Prepare to adopt new technology (ie chatbots, digital assistants, etc)

(left to right) Me, Dan Iverson & Kyle Benson (psadmin.io),
Jim Marion (jsmpros.com)
and Ranjith Ramachandran (Presence of IT)

One of the most valuable aspects of any conference is that you get to meet some great people - share stories, dream up solutions together and share ideas.   Hanging out with these people helps me to learn more, get different perspectives and also to share my own experiences and knowledge.

My next session of the day was a set of partners all working with PeopleSoft in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  Customers Using Oracle Cloud for PeopleSoft - featuring Cloud specialist Presence of IT, Astute, SpearMC and Cedar Consulting.  Fielding questions from the audience I found this session really useful even though I was one of the panellists.  

And finally, another customer success story - Customers Using the Modern User Experience of PeopleSoft HCM from Oliver Fix at Deutsche Bahn.  These guys MAKE TRAINS and they're pretty successful at it too.  I knew I was in the right session when the speakers first slide looked like this below.  Never mind PeopleSoft... tell me about the history of German train engineering!  

Another PeopleSoft Train fan !

The customer talked through the business benefit of creating a compelling user experience and how they achieved it using Fluid branding, Homepages, Tiles and Navigation Collections combined with Interaction Hub and a few neat plugins from Portal champions Intrasee.  I have to say... it looked pretty good... in fact ... it looked outstanding.  Important tip of the day "don't ask a developer to do the visual UI design - hire a professional UI designer". My photos below really don't do it justice. 

Interaction Hub Landing Page

Employee Self Service - Personal Details

And finally the view from the Quest party venue overlooking San Francisco bay bridge. Another great networking time with customers, partners and the Oracle PeopleSoft team.