OpenWorld 2016 - Day 4 - Wednesday

The Oracle Key Message of OOW16

Day 4 of this "epic" conference began with one of the PeopleSoft big themes this year - Getting the Most Out of PeopleSoft: PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface.  With lots of useful reminders and advice from Oracle's Matthew Haavisto, Pramod Agrawal and blogger/developer Sasank Vemana from Florida State University.




Here's my takeaways from this session.

• PeopleTools 8.55 now has Fluid 
• Activity Guides
• WorkCentres
• Navigation Collection pages
• Simplified Analytics
• Related Actions
• Advised customers to follow the PeopleSoft UX Design Standards http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E65859_01/fluid_ux 

Sasank gave a useful overview of the universities mobile strategy involving a blending of various technologies including PeopleSoft Fluid, ModoLabs and PeopleMobile and ERP Firewall from GreyHeller.  

Matthew, Ramasimha and Kevin 

ElasticSearch Update

Only one session at the conference on PeopleSoft and ElasticSearch featuring Oracle's Matthew Haavisto and Ramasimha Rangaraju (Product Development) and Kevin Antoff from Wells Fargo.

Key Elastic Take-Aways

ElasticSearch is a proven, robust and high performance search engine and the PeopleTools team are committed to making the transition as easy and as painless as possible.  Wells Fargo have been working with Oracle to test performance and get the integrations ready and the results have been very positive.  Wells Fargo volumes are large enough to keep most PeopleSoft customers satisfied with over 4.5 million job applications a year indexed.  They've seen a 50% improvement in indexing speed and a "dramatic" improvement in search speed.  

Elastic Transition Steps

Customers will need to get Elastic software from Oracle as a few additional integration components have been added.  The installation will be done using a new DPK package but supported platforms will be limited to only those that are certified for Elastic - Windows and Linux (so no support for Solaris).  PeopleSoft have engineered the Search Framework configuration so you can define the new Elastic search instance and simply re-use the existing search definitions all while the existing SES search instance is operational.  The effect of this should be zero down time as transition occurs. 

All the front end search interface and index design pages all stay the same with the new Elastic search and the process of performing an initial full index followed by incremental partial indexes will also remain the same.  However, a particularly nice design change that has been made is that the Elastic search server will now subscribe to Integration Broker messages generated by the PeopleSoft indexing process.  With SES it's the other way around in that PeopleSoft pushes data to SES.  What this means in practice is that as PeopleSoft publishes data changes, Elastic will immediately subscribe to them and update the indexes.  This opens the way for PeopleSoft transaction page updates to publish a single update message which Elastic will immediately pickup.   No more out of date indexes.  

The one missing bit of information is which PeopleTools 8.55 patch Elastic will be available on.

Fluid Approvals

With FSCM Image 020 the MAP based approvals have been completely replaced with Fluid Approvals.  (MAP and Fluid are the two mobile platforms available in PeopleTools). This needs a longer write-up as there's some exciting things here but for now here's just some highlights:

• Fluid Approvals is part of Enterprise Components not PeopleTools
• MAP as a PeopleTools integration / mobile technology is not going away (in fact is being enhanced in 8.56)
• Each pillar will adopt Fluid Approvals in an Update Image (HCM will come in image 020).
• Cross pillar unified approvals view (ie showing approvals from both HCM and FSCM say) will not be possible unless both pillars are using the Fluid Approval framework.
• Page Composer is used to configure the approvals list and detail views.  Page Composer is only supported for use with Approvals at the moment and whilst nothing has been announced by Oracle it's pretty clear the vision for Page Composer is far broader than just approvals.  Could be the way we build Fluid apps in the future (see my prediction #7 here)

Fluid Approvals is clever. But needs some explanation (coming soon)

Customer Appreciation Event at the AT&T Stadium

And then on to the home of the San Francisco Giants with 50,000+ conference delegates. Just a few photos from an interesting musical experience with Gwen Stefani and an awesome blast of nostalgia from Sting.