Well, at least in terms of conference parties.

Labels: 2007, Events

This was the same session I gave last year at Open World. Jodi Runstadtler, the development manager for Reporting Tools gave it this year.

Instead of providing a set of development tips and techniques, Jodi went through the most asked questions she saw from the support as well as other things that she felt that people should know. For those who already read my Reporting Tools Roadmap session entry, you'll see several circumstances where I deferred providing more details to this blog entry.

XML Publisher Data Sources
Is there a difference between different supported data sources for XMLP?

• PS/Query-Rowsetsd
• XMLDoc
• XML File

Relational data services, such as PS/Query and Rowset will involve processing to align relational with XML structure. (recommend to extract data into XML yourself). Query does create the XML for you, but rowset can be an issue. Even XML doc goes to XML file before going into XMLP.

Bursting in XML Publisher

How do I do Bursting in XML Publisher? A common use case is needing to run reports for every department in a global operations.

You will want to design your report for bursting. The fewer transformations you have to do to the data to get it in the better it's going to perform. Definitely make sure you sort by the fields you're grouping on, so the XML file will be easily generated.

When bursting, XML publisher allows you to select a tag in your XML data for spliting up a single report into multiple. This tag must be at the highest level repeating group in the XML data. If you are using Query, this means that you are limited to bursting on a single field. Workaround is to concatenate in an expression.

One additional feature is that you can have different templates by values you're bursting on, so that different sets of data can have the results formatte specifically for them. One nice thing is that you don't have to enumerate every value you burst on to identify which template you want to use. You can set a default template and override where you want to.

Query Performance

After upgrading from 8.3 to 8.9, many customers saw that their Query security joins started causing performance issues.

Prior to 8.44, the security record was joined once for two records with the same one. This caused data to be missing in some circumstances. If you do not want multiple inclusion of security join (insert into psversion(Iobjecttypename, version) values ('qryselfj',1))

XML Publisher Templates

XML Publisher for peoplesoft means we have more decisions regarding report templates. How do I choose?

PDF templates are more limited than RTF templates. PDF templates don't support sub-templates, runtime paramters, translation files, output formulas, flexible field-data mapping (xpath vs simple name matching), charts, or custom/dynamic output where RTF does.

PDF performinga better, though, for large reports. Keep in mind that you need professional version of adobe to create/modify a pdf template that you're not getting from an external source. Mentioned can generate PDF output from RTF, though. Finally, 4 charts are available with bi publisher.

Subtemplates in XML Publisher

What are subtemplates?

Subtemplates allow defining re-usable templates that are imported into a parent template (similar to an include statement) . Each primpary template can import multiple subtemplates and they can include images, text, xsl templates, etc.

They are stored in content library, so there is no definitional link to primary templte (imported).

When previewing, you need to know that there are two places to do this. One is from within PeopleSoft PIA and the other is directly in the template builder within XML publisher. This is because the template designer works on a sample of the data and is stand-alone when it is launched (it doesn't know about PeopleSoft). Whereas the preview in PIA is the run-time environment within PeopleSoft.

Using Subtemplates as Headers

This is probably the most important reason to use subtemplates, because organizations will want to define a standard report heading. Unfortunately, word headers and footers do not support variables, which is how this is done. To do this, you need to code the highlighted area, which is the string that pouts the form/field in the header/footer. This is a manual coding step.

The following blog entry shows the sort of thing you need to go through to embed external data into word when word doesn't automatically handle it from a UI perspective.

Production Reporting
We need production reporting, but the report processing is consuming my server.

For Query, you should look at Query administrator. If you have administrators who don't want to use a PeopleSoft page, you could use PeopleCode APIs to examine the query statistics. These API calls mirror the fields in the PSQRYSTATS table (which you could also query to get this information). However, delete is an API call available, which isn't in the table and you wouldn't want to do yourself in SQL, because PS/Query has a lot of references.

Finally, Jodi mentioned performance monitor, where teh 355 event shows real-time and historical performance.

Although this is valuable information, I don't consider it Production Reporting, where you have reports run automatically on a schedule and you have to distribute results to end-users. Did I mention we have a product that does that?

Office 2007 and nVision

Oracle is now supporting Office 2007 with nVision. However, there are some issues with it.

Microsoft has changed the file format to be a standard XML format. Once a file is saved in this format, it is not compatible with older versions. Because of this, when you migrate to Office 2007, you will have to make sure the version of Excel on your process scheduler servers matches those on the desktops of the end-users. Office 2007 save this as XLSX.

Organizations will also need a specific version of XMLP for office 2007.

Migration of XMLP between environments

When I migrated my XMLP reports from test to produciton, the translation files were missing.

You will need to follow sequence for doing this. Need to include both the data source defin query. Select XMLPDataSrcDefn (also select query) Select XMLPReportDEfin to include all components. A report may incorporate multiple FileDefnobjects... tempalte data, translations, pdf maps.

Deletion and cleanup. To delete XML Publisher metadata objects, use project delete. Sometimes can cause orphaned definitions, so they created an app engtine progrm to clean it up. Identify orphans, and clean up orphans.

Picking the Right Reporting Tool

This is a common question that I used to get hit with all the time as well. When should one use each reporting tool?

The criterion for this falls under the following categories:

What is the structure of the Report?

• Forms-based?
• simple tabular?
• sub report?
• matrixed?
• Does it include application metadata?

What are the formatting requirements?

• Pixel Precision?
• MICR?
• Graphics/logos?
• Charting?

How is the report being run?

• reporting with logtic/processing?
• scheduled on temand?
• ad-hoc?
• bursing?
• drilldown,?

What platforms will you use?

• Windows
• Unix
• OS/390
• Excel Integration?

She showed a matrix of tools and which of the above features are suppported to help through the process.

Crystal and Hyperlinks

After the session, Sarah Hahn from the Benton Public Utility District recognized me from presenting this session at the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group meeting earlier in the year. She wanted to know more about drilling from Crystal.

Although I plan to record a demo of this and write a blog entry, here's what you would do:

• FInd the element in the crystal reort that will have the hyperlink attached to it.
• Select it and use the Insert Hyperlink menu in Crystal.
• Instead of typing a Hyperlink into the edit box on the dialog, you will want to click on the button next to the edit box to open the formula editor (it has an X>)
• Finally, you compose the text of the hyperlink by using field references, string functions, and text.

Labels: 2007, Events

This session was a throw-back to the old PeopleSoft Talk-back sessions, where customers could ask the development managers and strategy any question they would like. On the panel were the following:

• Jeff Robbins - PeopleTools Product Strategy Director and moderator
• Binu Matthew - VP of PeopleTools Development (the boss of everybody else on the panel)
• Colleen Murray - Director of Reporting Tools Development
• Hind Robous - VP of PeopleTools Support
• Chris Kuwada - Director of QA
• Willie Suh - Director of Core Tools Development
• Ravi Shankar - Director of Platforms

Here are the questions and answers I could capture:

Q: Keynote mantioned how support will be enhanced to 2025. How does this change things?

A: Binu - This isn't too surprising, because from my perspective, PeopleSoft is very important to Oracle. For example, HCM is flagship application. This means we need to have continued investment.

Q: PeopleCode is messy hybrid - Is there a plan to depracate the old method of writing PeopleCode versus the API version. Error handling for command-based is worse than API side.

A: Willie said that there was no plans to depracate any of the pre-PeopleTools 8.4 style writing of PeopleCode, but would like to know what issues they're having. Chris Heller (my notorious sidekick) suggested that if an organization is trying to standardize on the newer-style, thgat providing warnings when the old-style is used, so that folks will use the preferred method.

Q: What is the future for those who use primarily PeopleTools for building their own custom applications? Specifically, there's a lot of discussion on Oracle tools, such as BPEL. Will we need to use that?

A: Strategy is that PeopleTools will continue to be enhanced where it drives value for PeopleSoft applications. Core PeopleTools will be enhanced and enhanced heavily. Tools is getting heavily enhanced (8.48 is one of the biggest enhancements in a long time). For Hypbrid environments, where PeopleSoft isn't a major component (there may be other applications such as Siebel or custom-developed applcications, then it is our recommendation to look at the Oracle tools.

Q: Training does not talk about Application Classes or Iscripts.

A: Willie responded: I agree with you and am not happy with status quo... curriculum is on old releases. Binu also chimed in: The issues are in selected areas. For example, the integration broker class has been completely updated. However I agree with you that app classes hasn't been added, though.

Q: It is my understanding that upgrade assistance for fusion migration will be part of enterprise manager Will this be available for PeopleSoft moving to fusion?

A: We are looking at it, but isn't part of an explicit plan.

Q: Anything going on with RFID?

A: PeopleTools isn't doing anything specific, but the supply chain team has done integration.

Q: End-users refuse to use nVision on the web, because of how difficult it is to drill from web reports. I remember lots of discussion about new enhancements for release 9, but that seems to have disappeared. Any chance to get it in place?

A: Colleen talked about how she was involved with much of the planning for web nVision in PeopleTools x (yes... I remember lots of hours in conference rooms with her flushing out the functionality, prototyping it, and discussing potential issues). Although she focused on answering that aspect of the question and how she still has a long-term vision for brininging some of that to customers, she didn't discuss drilling at all. Did we mention that we have a product that fixes drilling with nVision? All joking aside, this product is intended to address all the issues customers have with drilling on the web with nVision.

Q: PeopleBooks... We have a problem with PeopleBooks and can't find what we want. Is there any way to cut a CD and provide to customers?

A: No plans to date for this. Do have a plan to improve search. 8.48 PeopleBooks is on OTN (hosted). Posted in PDF form as well.

Q: Batch... With app engine (we're tyring to use it more), and using XML publisher. In fusion, nobody is saying how you code your batch. What do we do to prepare for fusion... Java?

A: This is an ebusiness area of ownership, which means they would provide a better answer. However, from the discussions we've had with them, they are working on another language... will have their own scheduler. However, addressing the migration itself, keep in mind that the data model will change significantly, which means code you write today will probably nhot doesn't think code will move cleanly. Go with PSFT architecture for now and don't worry as much about fusion impacts.

Q: Why isn't BPEL included if that's what we should be using.

A: Jeff answered: we will continue to deliver functionality for the PSFT stack. Things that go outside of PSFT is where you will want BPEL.

Q: 8.48 includes a lot of new functionality in integration broker. How much work will we need to do as part of upgrading. Will our existing IB definitions work out of the box?

A: Colleen: we have rearchitected the objects and you really need to understand it. As you go through the upgrade, we have done the mapping and an upgrade script that does the conversion. We need default values prior to running the script because new fields exist in new world.

Q: When will you certify of 2-tier query on vista on PeopleTools 8.46, although we're planning to move to 8.48.

A: No plans to backport that support to 8.46. Require 8.48 for vista.

Q: Any plans for code coverage from testing perspective? Can put code in place to enforce development standards?

A: Binu-- plans for version tracking and other developer productivity tools.

Labels: 2007, Events

Those who know who I am may find it wierd that I'm blogging this session as an attendee versus a presenter. This presentation was given by Colleen RinehartMurray, who I have a good history of working with (she took over the management of the reporting development team from me and allowed me to take on a pure product management role). You may also recognize her from past presentations where she and myself covered this exact session.

This session covered 3 things:

1. A review of how all the tools fit together.
2. A review of recent features made available in PeopleTools 8.48
3. A summary of planned items for PeopleTools 8.50

Tool Overview
Colleen discussed the different reporting tools, Crystal, XML Publisher, nVision, SQR, and Query and how they fit together. The slides did a pretty good job of covering that aspect, so I won't go into more detail on this part, except to say that Oracle is more aggressively positioning XML Publisher as an alternative to Crystal for new report development.

XML Publisher
There are several new features coming in XML Publisher. One thing to note is that many of these features are core XML publisher features, versus PeopleSoft-specific feature enablement. Here is the list:

• Subreports in XMLP. You can embed reports within other reports (from a template perspective). Examples of where you would want to do this is page headings and footings (there's a limitation in this covered in Jody Runstadler's Advanced Reporting Techniques session, which I will cover in my write-up for that session)
• Performance improvements for rowset and query feeding into it. Because PeopleSoft has to convert the data froma query and a rowset to an XML file on the server and then feed it into XML publisher, there could be potential performance issues. Development is working on an automated way of handling this in a manner similar to PS/Query.
• Email distribution. The delivered email distribution in process scheduler is currently only supported for nVision, Crystal, and SQR. This will be added for Query and XMLP (did I ever mention we have a product that already does this for any output type?)
• New versusions. They will add support for BI Publisher and 11g.

nVision
Started by making sure that the audience knew that nVision was not going away. For nVision, much of the discussion was on longer-term futures (8.50). The exception is for Office 2007 support.

• Not in tree criteria. This is something that we've seen a need for. It's mostly valuable when you want to capture data from of values that may not have been added to your tree (we approach it a little differently by proactively facilitating the addition of values to the tree as part of the maintenance process with this product instead of showing it after the fact)
• Multiple effective dated trees in same report. This allows organizations to compare the implications of tree changes side by side in a single report. Although you can see the changes pretty easily by exporting your trees to file and compare them there using tree mover, this allows you to see the dollar impact of the change.
• Query prompts. This is one of the features that I've heard a lot about over time. If you have a prompted query in an nVision report, those prompts can only be displayed in the windows nVision (not web). This will be an interesting feature if they really can get it in, because if they do it right, they may be able to add additional features as well. I'll put together a follow-up blog entry on the issues with this.
• Private reports in 2-tier. This is one of those things where there was a new feature added to the web that wasn't also added to the 2-tier nVision. You will now be able to secure your report requests on 2-tier as well.
• Excel 2007 adoptions of server performance improvements. This is something that I've had some discussions with Microsoft about and am very excited about. One of the biggest places where we had issues with nVision is stability and performance on the server. This is because Excel is a client tool where nVision automates it on a server. Excell 2007 has a server version that can be used very nicely with nVision, and they are adopting it. This will be a big win for anybody who moves to it (but my understanding is that Office 2007 is only supported on PeopleTools 8.49 or greater due to the file format changes imposed by microsoft. I'll have a lot more of that in my discussion on Jody Runstadtler's session.

Crystal Reports
Reiterated Oracle's commitment to continue providing Crystal as part of PeopleTools

• Includes Bobj XIr2.
• Mupltiple PeopleSoft instances sharing BOE server. When I scoped this feature for PeopleTools 8.48, this was one of the items that was very important to Business Objects (the business terms of this OEM were negotiated based on the fact that Business Objects would be able to re-sell additional licenses of Business Objects Enterprise for non-PeopleSoft applications). Much of the value of the up-sell is removed if there's one BOE environment for PeopleSoft and a different one for all other reporting, because that would cause users to have to sign into a different system to get one type of report than another.
• Note: per Colleen Murray, support for subreports has not been discontinued --> Discontinuation of Crystal Subreports. Now, this was news to me, and I'm curious as to the reasons why this is occurring. I'm sure it isn't an overt effort to steer customers to XML publisher from Crystal (although cynical folks could think that, based on the fact that subreports is a new feature in XMLP). I'll have to dig in more as to what technical issue cropped up for them.

Query
From a short-term perspective, much of the new functionality is in the area of extending the use of Query as a means of getting data out of PeopleSoft, specifically to use it as a means of quickly developing a web service.

• Subreport support. There wasn't much discussed in this area, but I'm pretty sure it's the work done in the Query Access Service (QAS) to allow multiple queries to be run concurrently through the same session.
• Connected query. Again, not a lot discussed, but again, I'm pretty sure this is the ability to use the query service to refresh data in excel without having to navigate to PeopleSoft to re-run it (support for pull as well as push).
• Extend web service enablement of query. I'm glad to see this one. There are a lot of situations where it would be valuable to take a query definition and add criteria on the fly and run it through a web service. Although I was planning a blog entry on doing this using a component interface, there were enough issues with the way the Query API works that I ended up not doing it.

Trees
On the tree side, there wasn't much to report in terms of new tree manager functionality, with the exception of web service enablement for trees. This would allow the Tree Classes to be exposed as web services. Also very valuable when you have two systems that you want to do lookups and updates across them (anybody have an HR Department tree and a Finance Department tree?). By having web services for this, you can do the lookups as you update one tree or the other. Very cool stuff.

Cube Manager
This was the big shocker for me. After many years of neglecting this product, I was sure it was going to die penniless and alone (although you wouldn't catch me writing that out formally). I've included the history of cube manager in this larger post on tree manager, in case you want to know why. Looking back on the Hyperion acquisition, it makes a lot more sense to keep cube manager alive.

• Support for new version of Essbase and PowerPlay. Yes. The versions being supported will finally be updated after 5 years. This will make many companies who have been staying on an old version of Essbase and PowerPlay because cube manager does what they want, and it just plain works (by the way, the kudos of this goes to a certain Brian Sparling, who created cube manager... Ever heard the name Sparling before??)
• Drop PeopleSoft star schema. The history of the PeopleSoft star schema is a very interesting one (but not one I can readily share in written form). Because it was created for EPM, but EPM is using Data Mart Builder to build its star schema, it makes sense that this feature should be dropped. Colleen did put to the audience that they should let her know if that feature is important to them, though.

Reporting Metadata
As mentioned above, much of the reporting metadata (queries and trees) are now going to be exposed as web services. This was reiterated.

• Using Query as a web service development tool. Talked about QAS (which was created for BOBJ enterprise)
• Exposing definition and designer capabilities for trees and queries. This facilitates support for OBIEE, sharing data, etc. It may also be interesting for Web Intelligence in Business Objects (with universes). I may have to talk to my friends at Bobj about this.

Reporting Infrastructure
As many folks who've gone to other sessions of mine will know, I spend a lot of time talking about the infrastructure to support reporting (metadata, security, scheduling, distribution). Colleen talked about what's coming in this as well.

• User Experience with respect to scheduling and monitoring reports. She mentioned that they're working on the ability to find reports that are older than 99 days. I'm sure that there's more in this area that they're not talking about. Did I mention that we have a product that fixes the user experience in this area?
• Making role-based security in report manager. The issue being fixed probably should have been a blog posting. Essentially, when you run a report to a role in process scheduler, it decomposes the role to its individual users at the time the report is run (take a look at the table PS_CDM_AUTH, you'll see that there is an OPRID field, but not a ROLE field). This means that if you move people in and out of roles, the reports associated with the role a person performs do not stay with the role.

Q&A
Although there were several questions on different partners and products, there is one that I want to make sure gets listed here. This was the question on XBRL support in PeopleSoft (which, for those who were at the session, may notice that I was the person who answered the question).

You can really think of XBRL as a standardized report format in XML for publishing financial results. In other words, it's a form (like your W-2 is a form). Because of this, the XBRL support by PeopleSoft is done by the applications groups (just like the support of W-2 is done by the Payroll development team). This support was provided in Financials 8.8 (and I remember the meetings with the developers to come up with the approach for doing this).

Here's the announcement of XBRL support: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2003_Sept_15/ai_107753879

Labels: 2007, Events

One of the things that we showed during the version control presentation at OpenWorld was editing some files was using the open source Notepad++ text editor.

Notepad++ is a great programmer's editor with a whole bunch of cool features that will contribute to your productivity. They go into great detail on their website about them, but I wanted to show a couple here that we can apply a PeopleSoft slant to.

One is the ability to define color-coding rules for your own programming languages. Notepad++ understands numerous programming languages right out of the box; SQL, HTML, Java, .ini files, etc. It doesn't understand things like SQR and PeopleCode though, so we can define our own. Here's what SQR looks like.



It's easy enough to change the color scheme if you don't like the ones that we've put together.

Here's PeopleCode.



We've gone ahead and defined the code folding words for both SQR and PeopleCode. Here's an example with PeopleCode.



In order to use this, you'll need to get Notepad++ and then download our file that defines the syntax rules.

On the Notepad++ download page, you can grab the Notepad++ installer. There's also a section on that page for user contributed language files, which includes the instructions for how to install the user defined languages into Notepad++. If you're feeling so inclined, you can even grab files there for COBOL syntax highlighting :-)

One last cool Notepad++ tip is that you can dynamically select which language rules should be applied to any given file. Normally this defaults by the file extension (e.g. .sqr and .sqc get SQR highlighting), but sometimes there are files that don't have the correct extension for their language.

An example is the .cfg files for the application server and process scheduler domains, along with the backup files that psadmin automatically creates for these. If you open one of these files, and select the "MS Ini" option from the language menu, then you'll get some nice color coding and collapsible sections. Much nicer than psadmin for an editor :-)

Labels: 2007 Oracle OpenWorld Version_Control, PeopleCode, SQR

This presentation talked about how to benchmark the performance of your finance organization. It discusses it from a Hackett Group perspective, who does a lot of this.

What is Benchmarking?
This is different from what your DBA calls benchmarking. Essentially, they're looking at efficiency and effectiveness of a given business function. This gets into many of the concepts important to embedded analytics, because you're aligning the measurement with the business processes.

Impact to a Finance Organization
For a finance department, the focus on cash flow optimization as key driver as effectiveness of finance organization.

The slides had some very good information related to business processes that occur in a finance organization (for most folks, it's a bit more nebulous than the business processes for HR, for example, where you hire, incent, manage, and terminate employees as business processes)

Here are many of the processes that span SG&A

• Cash disbursements
• revenue cycle
• accounting and external reportring
• tax management
• treasury (cash) management
• compliance management
• planning and financial performance management
• businsess analysis
• function management

Here are the Procurement business processes

• supply data mangement
• requisition and po processing
• supplier scheduling
• receipt processing
• compliance management
• customer management

He then went on to illustrate how for each process, you should think about benchmarking. He showed the following formula:

Demand drivers + structural factors = performance metrics

or

processes organizations perform + how organizaitons structure themselves and conduct those processes = Measurement of how well the organization is doing

one last translation

Business Operation + Dimension = Key Performance Metric

Summary

One of the things I liked about this presentation was how it identified the business processes that are part of a finance organization, and how you can align the things you measure with those operations you're performing. Although this isn't a BI presentation, much of what was illustrated translates well into the BI world, where analysis isn't easily tied to the tasks that people perform (and ultimately, what organizations need to continuously improve).

Labels: 2007, Events

Charlotte Skawski of the Hartford (who I know from my participation in the Financial Services User Group) presented her upgrade.

She did a great job of dealing with technical issues (her powerpoint was not where it should have been, and she had to start without one). Fortunately, whe was able to provide her high-level overview prior to the point in which she needed the powerpoint to show additional detail (specifically her upgrade timeline).

Much of the presentation was a good discussion on the methodology for approaching an upgrade, getting buy-in from the stakeholders (especially the end-users who are responsible for doing the fit/gap analysis of the new release as well as testing the data conversion and functionality prior to going live). Also, because the powerpoint covered the topics pretty well, my notes centered on the Q&A.

Q: Could you migrate security in the upgrade?
A: They didn't have the opportunity to revisit the security rules and kept things pretty much as they were. (this is the place for a shameless plug for a product we're working on, which I didn't do in the presentation)

Q:DID YOU USE ANY AUTOMATED TESTING TOOLS?
A: Yes for performance... Use Mercury LoadRunner. All other testing was done manually, although they're looking to find a solution in this area.

Q: How many test move to productions?
A: Did 3 or 4 originally scheduled. One thing that was a challenge for them was that they couldn't even get through scripts as originally delivered by Oracle without some tweaking from a performance perspective.

Q: How many customizations were removed due to functionality versus not needing any more.
A: My gut feel is that there were a lot of both. Perhaps half and half.

Q: Did you have issues with your functional users getting pulled from the upgrade to do other things?
A: There were a good number of end-users involved (about 1 dozen), and this was a concern. She talked about how important it was to have a steering committe with executives and how this minimized the amount of pull-back because they had buy-in. Get commitment up-front and show timelines.

Q: Can you tell me more about how you assessed the 8.4 versus 9.0 functionality, including your customizations?
A: We use stat to move code from development to production. We did have documentation on every single piece of code that was moved. Used excel to analyze dumps of the checkin glogs for every piece of code to determine whether it was needed. THis was done in combination with upgrade compare reports.

Q: What about freezing changes and locking down new functionality?
A: We were frozen at end of august for november release. At what point did they lock-down on new functionality.

Q: Did I read that you started on Feb 06 and are still going for the upgrade?
A: No. That must have been an error. It's a 1 year upgrade Feb-07 to FEb-08.

Q: HOw did table changes affect reports?
A: We didn't have to rewrite our nVision reports. Most of our queries... We have a lot of queries out there... Ton of public and private queries... we migrated them all over. Not a lot of table changes, so it went smoothly.

Q: Why not upgrade to 8.9?
A: Because the PeopleTools 8.48 enhancements were adopted by the applications. The decision between 8.9 and 9.0 is relatively easy because 9.0 doen't have that many application changes.
Workflow... THey re-built their existing ones because the workflow engine is completely different in 9.0 (tools 8.48)

Comment from Oracle Development: We will now package upgrade directly to service packs versus taking to the GA of 9.0 and requiring customers to apply the maintenance packs themselves.

Labels: 2007, Events

This is the session that Chris Heller and Myself gave at the conference (based, in part, on the following blog entry).

We started out by having some pretty significan technical issues with our demo environment. For those who aren't familiar with how we present, we believe that conference sessions should show something that people can't find simply by reading a powerpoint presentation. Therefore, we generally go pretty far out on a limb with our presentations (it's relatively safe to talk through bullets... to show a live system where you're making changes in front of the audience... now that takes some work).

We thank our audience for being patient with us as we brought up a back-up environment (actually, we used VMWare's revert to snapshot feature, which allows us to bring the environment back up without those pesky little blue-screen-of-deaths).

The good news is that we eventually did get things going, and the people who were patient with us were able to see lots of interesting things, such as code distribution to the process scheduler, automated versioning of report development, and even versioning of PeopleTools objects. We made a brief mention at the end of the presentation that we were planning to take what we showed them, add the ability to have more granular control over the PeopleTools objects, and a direct plug-in into application designer. There were a bunch of folks who came up after the session who expressed interest in the product versus trying to do the work themselves.

Labels: 2007, Events

Well, I ended up taking Oracle up on the Blogger registration for Open World (see here for background).


The first session I attended is the Financial Services User Group Meeting. Since we have a long history with this user group (many of our customers are very involved in this group), I felt it was important to see what things they've been thinking about.

Here are the concerns that I've been hearing that I was looking to get answers for:

Future of FSI Analytic Apps

Most of the Financial Services organizations we've been working with have made a significant investment in PeopleSoft EPM, notably in the analytic applications supporting Financial Services on that platform. They've been getting mixed messages about the future of that product, including some last-minute cancelled sessions to discuss the future of CPM at Oracle. The rumor mill is saying that Oracle is killing EPM in favor of its eBusiness-driven data warehousing products, but that doing Financial Services vertical applications was not in the plans.

Future of reporting tools

Again, most of the Financial Services organizations use PeopleSoft nVision pretty extensively for management reporting. They would like to know the plans for investment in this product and what will happen in Fusion.

Here is what I learned from this session

Discussion of the future of the FSIUG:

Laura Stobbs of Everett Jones in st louis was the facilitator for meeting. She talked about how the FSIUG has recently moved to be under the Quest umbrella instead of being completely independent. There was a good amount of discussion about the enhancement request process as part of this.

Discussion on positioning for fusion:

Citigroup mentioned that they are getting mixed messages from Oracle's field organization with respect to moving to fusion. Specifically that their salespeople have told them to migrate to the eBusiness Suite to be ready for Fusion, since fusion will be built off of it.

Patric Boyle replied that customers should not expect to move to Fusion before 2012 - 2013. It is his belief that this would be the earliest that fusion would be avilalbe for FSI customers. Too much is being brought over from PeopleSoft from a data model perspective: effdt, allocations, trees, and that it will take some time to rationalize that.

Development Update:

Amira Morcos discussed the development plans with respect to financials and financial services. Here is what she discussed:

9.0/9.1 Status:

• Combo edit performance improvements in 9.0 and request to backport to 8.9. This has been done.
• Re-write of allocations from Cobol to App Engine caused rounding errors for allocations. This is targeted to 8.9. Amira asked for more use cases. The issue is balancing accuracy with performance (row-by-row versus set-based). Development is hanging on this.
• Allocations enhancement - include not equal to to reduce the number of allocation steps
• There will be new workflow enhancements included. PeopleTools currently has new workflow functionality that eliminates the need to to customize the application to get approvals (aka virtual approver). 9.1 will have workflows built into the product using this technology. Customers upgrading tools without the application upgrade can take advantage of this, but it will include some customization if done prior to applicaiton adoption of this.

9.2 priority status

• Back-date transactions (value date). Development needs to know what that means and needs additional use cases from the user group on this feature.
• Lead-in to missing functionality (daily close as a modification by CitiGroup)
• Combo edit on fields or data sets other than chartfields (development wants to know what they are, needs details)

Amira followed-on by asked more long-term planning. In 3-5 years, where do folks want to be from an ERP perspective.

• Citigroup responded by saying that it is having troubles because they want to do all reporting in EPM, but they have special projects that have operational requirements, which causes challenges for them. The challenge is a disconnect between ERP and EPM.

Amira followed up by talking about Collaborative workspaces, which is a PeopleTools product that originally was developed for the as part of the Portal product. Collaborative workspaces provides a means of defining a set of tasks, assignments, and calendar related to a set of goals a group share (and enable the colloboration across members). She felt that building out workspaces that support the key business processes in financials, such as closing and reconciliation. She asked to have the user group provide other business processes that would fit into this from a Financial Services Perspective.

There was an unofficial discussion on upcoming releases (the people in the conversation will remain nameless to protect them).

• 9.1 should be rolled out in latter part of 2008 (8.50 tool dependency). HR is planned to release first, then followed by other suites. Financials could have its 9.2 release in the middle of 2009 (but will deny)

New Global Business Unit
One of the biggest announcements is that ORacle will be forming a Financial Services Global Business Unit (I think I heard 10,000 people, but that sounds to be too many). This group will include both field-level and corporate resources. This group is currently gathering information for PeopleSoft 9.2.

Although no details were discussed (there is a session specifically talking about the new business unit), it is my belief that this organization will be tasked with figuring out (and potentially developing) the future analytic applications for fusion supporting this industry.

Labels: 2007, Events

First, Oracle acquires Hyperion. Next, SAP announces an acquisition of Business Objects. Today, IBM announced it will acquire Cognos. It looks like the only major independent BI player is MicroStrategy.

This acquisition provides a lot of food for thought. With the combination of Ascential and Cognos, IBM will have a complete technology solution from data acquisition, cleansing, all the way through data access. Additionally, these technologies are best-of-breed technologies brought together in one umbrella.

Technology Play
Although this is a good technology play, I'm still of the belief that the days of building your own BI solution from soup to nuts is not the way the market is going. This is a good strategy under yesterday's model. It's my belief that Oracle and SAP have the right long-term strategy, which is to provide analytic applications using their own technologies. Companies don't want to build expensive data warehouses and their own analytic applications if they can buy one that somebody else has developed. Also, by bringing together analytics with their business processes, organizations can achieve benefits that can't be achieved with a BI framework that is silo-ed off from their transaction systems.

Why not Analytic Applications?
Back in 2002, IBM had the opportunity to get in the applications business. We at PeopleSoft were hoping that IBM would be our white knight and save us from Oracle. There was quite a bit of effort going into discussions in this area, but in the end IBM didn't want to get into the applications space. They wanted to stay a technology/consuulting organization. Now, that opportunity is pretty much gone unless some sort of mega-merger occurs between IBM and SAP or Oracle (which I can't see happening). So, it will be very interesting seeing which strategy works better. My money is on Oracle/SAP with Cognos becoming less relevant, but this assumes that Oracle and SAP are successful in integrating their new BI acquisitions (Oracle seems to be doing a pretty good job, at least from a PeopleSoft perspective).

Labels: 2007, Business, Cognos, Reporting

We're still writing a longer blog post about the actual session, but here are the slides from the presentation.

Labels: 2007 Oracle OpenWorld Version_Control