Every year I find myself saying the same.... "The PeopleTools team keep on delivering". Oracle is certainly not in maintenance mode with PeopleSoft. There's a huge amount of investment going into making PeopleSoft better and better each year. If you're running PeopleSoft then it's a safe place to be. In fact beyond being safe it's an exciting place to be. The challenge, as always, will be to find the time and money to take advantage of all these new developments so that our organisations reap the benefit.
Today there were some great session for PeopleSoft customers. Here's just a quick listing of some of my favourites,
1. PeopleSoft Selective Adoption Experiences from the Front Line. This session was led by Cedar Consultant, Oracle ACE - The PeopleSoft Tipster - Duncan Davies and Mark Thomas (IT Director at Hays). This was one of 9 other sessions across the week on Selective Adoption - a major theme of this OpenWorld Conference. Practical insight into how Selective Adoption works and is bringing new efficiency to Hays' PeopleSoft software lifecycle.
2. Fluid UI Component Design and Development. From Dave Bain (Product Manager, Oracle). This was the other major theme of this years OpenWorld conference. Dave is a great presenter and you may have heard him on the Selective Adoption Spotlight Videos. He gave a run down of the important things to consider when build a new Fluid page or when converting a Classic page to Fluid.
3. Rolling Out PeopleSoft’s Suite of Lifecycle Management Tools. Michael Krajicek, Vice President - Oracle PeopleSoft Application Architecture Development gave a great talk on what's coming in 8.55 from PUM and PTF. I think one of the most exciting new features is that you will be able to load up into the PeopleSoft Image a project of your customisations and then when the Change Package is created it will flag up which Updates are going to affect your customisations.
4. PeopleSoft Technology: Executive Panel. Always a popular and candid session featuring customers vs the PeopleTools senior strategy and product management team. Here's a few of the questions and my interpretation and paraphrasing of the answers.
Q. What improvements are going to be made to Application Designer?
A. We want to make the development tools as easy to use as possible. I can't share our plans in detail but you can expect new tools for developers similar to what you've seen at OpenWorld this week. (GS: My take on this is that we saw some very cool drag and drop web based forms builder in Fluid. I wonder if we might one day see a web based page builder for Fluid? It's all just meta-data underneath.)
Q. When will PeopleTools 8.55 be released?
A. Sometime in the next 12 months. (GS: but more likely sometime in the next few months).
Q. When will Elastic search be available?
A. Not with the GA of 8.55 but sometime in 2016.
Q. Will we be able to take advantage of Elastic search as a service?
A. Initial release to customers will be on installed on premise or in cloud like we do at the moment with SES but Elastic service offering will be looked at.
Q. What is the PeopleTools team doing to help customers secure PeopleSoft on the public internet.
A. (paraphrasing here) Not a great deal. In the same as PeopleSoft does not provide you with Anti-Virus for your PC or network switches PeopleSoft does not provide the networking security components to secure client to PeopleSoft web server.
Q (to audience). Who is using Interaction Hub under the PeopleTools limited free license?
A. No one. (I didn't see any hands go up). Conclusion? Consensus from people around me in the session hall was that most customers couldn't justify the cost of the separate PeopleSoft instance required for IH.
CONCLUSION
I'm sure to blog more over the coming months about specific things talked about at OpenWorld but I'd like to end this week with saying just how wonderful it is to be part of this community called PeopleSoft. The people involved in developing and supporting PeopleSoft are all first-class technology professionals who are on the forefront of thinking in our rapidly changing and sometimes volatile IT industry. And then there's the customers and partners who bring a wealth of ideas, questions, challenges and solutions. They all make this global PeopleSoft community such a pleasure to be a part of. Thank you!
Today there were some great session for PeopleSoft customers. Here's just a quick listing of some of my favourites,
1. PeopleSoft Selective Adoption Experiences from the Front Line. This session was led by Cedar Consultant, Oracle ACE - The PeopleSoft Tipster - Duncan Davies and Mark Thomas (IT Director at Hays). This was one of 9 other sessions across the week on Selective Adoption - a major theme of this OpenWorld Conference. Practical insight into how Selective Adoption works and is bringing new efficiency to Hays' PeopleSoft software lifecycle.2. Fluid UI Component Design and Development. From Dave Bain (Product Manager, Oracle). This was the other major theme of this years OpenWorld conference. Dave is a great presenter and you may have heard him on the Selective Adoption Spotlight Videos. He gave a run down of the important things to consider when build a new Fluid page or when converting a Classic page to Fluid.
3. Rolling Out PeopleSoft’s Suite of Lifecycle Management Tools. Michael Krajicek, Vice President - Oracle PeopleSoft Application Architecture Development gave a great talk on what's coming in 8.55 from PUM and PTF. I think one of the most exciting new features is that you will be able to load up into the PeopleSoft Image a project of your customisations and then when the Change Package is created it will flag up which Updates are going to affect your customisations.
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| Change Package showing a green flag in the 2nd column indicating a customisation impact for this Update - Nice! |
4. PeopleSoft Technology: Executive Panel. Always a popular and candid session featuring customers vs the PeopleTools senior strategy and product management team. Here's a few of the questions and my interpretation and paraphrasing of the answers.
Q. What improvements are going to be made to Application Designer?
A. We want to make the development tools as easy to use as possible. I can't share our plans in detail but you can expect new tools for developers similar to what you've seen at OpenWorld this week. (GS: My take on this is that we saw some very cool drag and drop web based forms builder in Fluid. I wonder if we might one day see a web based page builder for Fluid? It's all just meta-data underneath.)
Q. When will PeopleTools 8.55 be released?
A. Sometime in the next 12 months. (GS: but more likely sometime in the next few months).
Q. When will Elastic search be available?
A. Not with the GA of 8.55 but sometime in 2016.
Q. Will we be able to take advantage of Elastic search as a service?
A. Initial release to customers will be on installed on premise or in cloud like we do at the moment with SES but Elastic service offering will be looked at.
Q. What is the PeopleTools team doing to help customers secure PeopleSoft on the public internet.
A. (paraphrasing here) Not a great deal. In the same as PeopleSoft does not provide you with Anti-Virus for your PC or network switches PeopleSoft does not provide the networking security components to secure client to PeopleSoft web server.
Q (to audience). Who is using Interaction Hub under the PeopleTools limited free license?
A. No one. (I didn't see any hands go up). Conclusion? Consensus from people around me in the session hall was that most customers couldn't justify the cost of the separate PeopleSoft instance required for IH.
CONCLUSION
I'm sure to blog more over the coming months about specific things talked about at OpenWorld but I'd like to end this week with saying just how wonderful it is to be part of this community called PeopleSoft. The people involved in developing and supporting PeopleSoft are all first-class technology professionals who are on the forefront of thinking in our rapidly changing and sometimes volatile IT industry. And then there's the customers and partners who bring a wealth of ideas, questions, challenges and solutions. They all make this global PeopleSoft community such a pleasure to be a part of. Thank you!
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| Paco Aubrejuan - Senior VP, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle |
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| Oracle Appreciation Party |
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| Jeff Robbins - PeopleTools Strategy, Oracle |
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| Howard Street - normally full of traffic- this week, full of Oracle people |
Comments
"Q. What is the PeopleTools team doing to help customers secure PeopleSoft on the public internet.
A. (paraphrasing here) Not a great deal. "
PeopleSoft does work, and always has worked, with multiple partners, including Oracle's broader product suites, to assist our customers in implementing the most secure enterprise possible. There are some sample deployments suggestions in the "Securing Your PeopleSoft Application" Red Paper, and the Security Check List, see the following post for links: https://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/entry/were_you_at_alliance_collaborate
regards - Greg
E+OE and views expressed are my own.
The new PUM feature providing customization impact also sounds promising and essential.
A year ago if you wanted to put PeopleSoft on a mobile device you had to go to a partner that had done all the work to "mobilise" the PeopleSoft application. Today, it's part of the product. I think what was behind the question at OOW was "are we going to see anything *new* coming in PeopleSoft to help us secure our systems". For example, two factor authentication as standard, ERP firewall functionality as standard, location based security as standard, built in security analytics, built in security alerting, etc, etc. With more customers introducing Fluid apps to their users the demand for putting our PeopleSoft apps on the public internet will naturally increase.
Thanks Greg for replying and continuing a most useful discussion.
PeopleSoft delivers a number of frameworks which assist PeopleSoft customers to incorporate the application into a broader secure enterprise. Security solutions require niche expertise and robust, ongoing, support and maintenance. Two, or multi, factor authentication is a very small part of access control. ERP Firewall, like IDS and IPS is infrastructural for a number of reasons, not application specific, although application centric.
You may remember the old topic of "PeopleDollars". Where do you think customers want those "PeopleDollars" invested?
regards - Greg
E+OE and views expressed are my own.