Out with the Old
We watched Dick Clark, drank Champagne, and sang Auld Lang Syne. We also began work on our year-end close, just like so many of the PeopleSoft customers who read our blog. This must mean that 2006 is over and 2007 is beginning. It was such a great year for us that we felt we would be remiss not to blog the year.

In with the New
2006 marked the first full year of operations for Grey Sparling Solutions. It was a great year to be part of the Oracle/PeopleSoft world. 2005 was a year of uncertainty for PeopleSoft customers (what is Oracle going to do? what is Fusion all about? who planned the PeopleSoft content at the 2005 OpenWorld?), but 2006 was a huge improvement.

Oracle announced Applications Unlimited at the Collaborate 2006 conference, and that has been hugely popular. Oracle also announced that the PeopleSoft products would have their own General Manager structure, with longtime PeopleSofter Doris Wong heading things up. Another interesting metric is that all of the system integrator companies that we work with seem to have more business with PeopleSoft projects than ever before

The Grey Sparling Effect
We saw a significant increase in the number of customers using Grey Sparling products. That wasn't too hard since we shipped our first product in November 2005, but we have more customers than employees now, which I always remember as being a key statistic for enterprise software.

It also helped that we have several new products that we shipped this year:

• nVision Drilling Snap-On
• Report Explorer
• PSIDE Helper Snap-On
• Desktop Single Signon
• nVision Context Helper Snap-On

All of that helped us turn a profit for 2006. Woo hoo! Well, it wasn't a very large profit, but it still feels pretty good to hit profitability in our first 18 months of operation. We also became an official Oracle partner this year.

PeopleSoft Experts on the Road
Aside from folks that became Grey Sparling customers this year, we talked with a large number of people at various conferences. We were extremely flattered to be asked as subject matter experts by conference organizers to give Oracle (versus vendor) presentations. This allowed us to connect with over 2,000 PeopleSoft customers in person in 2006.

• Financial Services Industry User Group
• Alliance Conference (Higher Education User Group, State and Local User Group, Federal User Network)
• Northern California PeopleSoft User Group
• Mid-Atlantic User Group
• Quest Mid-West
• Oracle OpenWorld
• UK Oracle User Group
• Santa's Helpers User Group (just seeing if you're still reading!)

PeopleSoft Experts Online
In addition to physical meetings with folks, we also met lots of people via our weblog. I'm always surprised that there aren't more PeopleSoft bloggers out there - we certainly know plenty of people with lots to say about PeopleSoft!

We were also proud to be credited with inspiring some new bloggers out there.

• Marion Crkon
• Dan Iverson
• Jim Marion

2006 Blog Entry awards.
We figured that if Time Magazine can have its set of top 10's, we should too.:

• Most Unusual blog entry. Who would have thought about integrating instant messaging with PeopleTools? Chris, of course!
• Most Humorous blog entry. Before it was posted on YouTube, the top link to see SAP's take on Larry Ellison was from our site.
• Most Historical blog entry. Think scoping a PeopleSoft release took lots of analysis and effort? It did, but if certain features made it in, the world may actually have come to an end.
• Best Fusion Preparation series (Java and PeopleCode 1, Java and PeopleCode 2, Java and PeopleCode 3). J2EE and Web 2.0 your PeopleSoft application, because that's a big part of Fusion!
• Most popular blog entry that almost didn't get written. Is anybody really thinking about Setids and Business Units any more? Apparently Yes!

Top Grey Sparling Conference Stories of 2006
While we're putting together our top blog entries, we might as well list out our top conference stories of the year.

• Best Sales story. At Oracle Open World, we literally had a PeopleSoft customer come up to our booth on the first day and ask us how quickly we could generate an invoice for our Desktop Single Signon product. We did a remote install using the Open World wireless, and they were using the product live within 2 weeks for their 2007 Open Enrollment. Initial contact to Production in less than 2 weeks!
• Runner-Up Sales story. At the FSIUG in New York after demonstrating the nVision Drilling Snap-on, we did a remote installation of a trial version at a customer. This customer was able to use WebEx to show it to end-users who were not at the conference, and decide to purchase it right then and there.
• Best Cheapskate story. This had to be at the Alliance Conference, where we discovered how expensive it would be to rent an additional table for our booth for the 3 days the exhibition hall was open. Bert Laws of BearingPoint (a local of Nashville) was kind enough to make a run to Costco and buy a table for us (yes, it was significantly less expensive to buy a table than to rent it). We ended up giving the table to the folks at the Dell booth next to ours at the end of the conference (it would have been too difficult to check with our baggage).
• Best Clueless travel story. As good interenet users, we used Google Maps to print driving directions for all the places we were going in the UK while we were there for the UKOUG (knowing that Chris's mobile account for his Blackberry wouldn't work there). I don't remember the last time I had to look at a map to get where I needed to go in the states. This didn't work too well in the UK, and we ended up getting hopelessly lost many times on the trip. We ended up buying a map to help us make it through the trip.

2007 - The Year Ahead
The coming year looks to be an exciting one as well. With the success of the conferences we attended last year, we're signed up for lots of conferences this year as well. Although the sessions haven't been formally approved for these conference, expect to see us at:

• 2007 Northern California Training Day
• 2007 Alliance Conference
• 2007 EMEA Conference
• 2007 Collaborate
• 2007 Open World

From an engineering perspective, we've got two new products that we're partnering with customers to build in the first half of the year:

• nVision Bolt-on. This will address most of the outstanding nVision issues that we had hoped to address while we were still at PeopleSoft.
• Workflow Notifications. This is a product requested by a long-time Higher Education customer who saw our email notification functionality in our report distribution product, and are currently grappling with the best way to deploy workflow with eProcurement and HCM applications.

We also have plans to add some new features to our existing products, so if you've already licensed something from us, you'll probably hear from us soon.

Labels: 2006, Events, nVision, PeopleCode, PeopleSoft, Reporting, Security, User