Steve Chan has a link to an iSeminar from Cliff Godwin with some real meat about details on how the technical upgrade to Fusion is planned to work.

The screenshot from the presentation on Steve's website nearly made me spit out my drink though. The actual title of the tool is called "Upgrade Assistant for Fusion". One of the bullet points says "Leveraging the best ideas from PeopleSoft Change Assistant".

Don't get me wrong; the PeopleSoft Upgrade Assistant (which became Change Assistant after it learned how to deal with maintenance as well as upgrades) is a whole heck of a lot better than some of the old manual processes in PeopleSoft upgrades, but most PeopleSoft customers aren't huge fans of Change Assistant. Change Assistant has been around for awhile now¹, so a lot of folks have forgotten how much of an improvement that it really was.

In fact, when we first started Grey Sparling, we considered doing product packaging as Change Assistant Change Packages (A "Change Package" is essentially just a .zip file that obeys Change Assistant's structural conventions about what files/directories are in it; similar to the Java .jar file format), but we got a lot of pushback. Customers told us that they didn't use Change Assistant for anything beyond just standard PeopleSoft maintenance, and therefore didn't have it up and running in demo and test environments, which is typically where people install our evaluation versions.

What Change Assistant Needs

What does Change Assistant really need, even before Fusion? Two things.

One is to beef up the logic for dealing with large volumes of patches and fixes. There's one bug in particular that rears it's head regularly where there will be pauses of several minutes between each file being copied. I've seen this in action at customer sites and it came up as a question during one of the OpenWorld sessions as well. It's not a slow file copy; each file gets copied quickly. It's more like some sort of "don't swamp the network" logic swung the pendulum too far on the conservative side. People really hate this.

The other is a bit more focus on using Change Assistant as part of the regular customization process. Application Designer actually has support for PeopleSoft customers to create their own Change Packages when doing custom development, but it's not well documented or supported. This forces customers to require other procedures in place for moving customizations around (since even to this day, there are almost zero PeopleSoft shops that don't have any customizations). Since customers end up dealing with this, learning (and understanding; see item 1) Change Assistant is viewed as an extra cost.

In keeping with that second item of better integration with customer development processes, we here at Grey Sparling will have some Change Assistant integration for our version control product. Since we're already dealing with all of the pieces of a Change Package anyways (App Designer projects, SQRs, Crystals, etc.), it makes sense to go ahead and add knowledge of what a Change Package is to the product so that you can version your PeopleSoft Change Packages just like anything else and have that more deeply integrated into your development processes.

1) The number one hit on Google for "Change Assistant" is a link to the original Change Assistant Flash demo from back in early 2004. If you watch the actual demo and pay close attention you can actually see one of the demo environments labeled APOGONOS.

Andrew "Pogs" Pogonoski was the original product manager for a bunch of the work that went on to actually have PeopleSoft be able to deal with all of the Customer Connection integration and hosting the Web Services that provide Change Assistant with it's data. All of the actual demo that you see in the movie is him working away.

It's safe to say that without Pogs' diligence at the large amount of cat herding involved that Change Assistant never would have gotten off of the ground.

Labels: 2008, Fusion, Sysadmin, Upgrade, VersionControl

Well, I was going to just ignore this whole Oracle blogs tagging thing, but Rich is a good guy and he tagged me. Besides, some other normally curmudgeonly folks have ponied up (of course some others have not), so what the heck.

1. I once tried to get Baer Tierkel to start a second PeopleSoft company band doing nothing but punk covers. The band was going to be called the "Sex PSTools".


2. Both of my kids were born in the same hospital as me.


3. I've crossed the equator around 45 times, been to 35 different countries, 49 states (Alaska still eludes me), and 6 continents.


4. I have given PeopleTools presentations completely in Spanish before (but I'm a bit rusty these days though)


5. I went to the same high school as Rick Bergquist (where's that blog Rick?) and Anthony Damaschino. Knowing Anthony is what actually got me into PeopleSoft to start with. Anthony had gotten our friend Doug Ostler (also, no blog, but makes up for it by being in the Hopyard "Hall of Foam") into PeopleSoft, who then helped get me into PeopleSoft. I helped the chain along by getting Willie Suh to join PeopleSoft. Willie is still there as a Director of development in PeopleTools.


6. As a direct result of item 4, I have actually done a SQL Alter on a PeopleTools system table in the middle of a presentation. A beta version of PeopleTools 7 had a weird bug where the related language table expected 3 columns when INSERTing new items, but 4 columns when doing UPDATEs. There wasn't enough time to swap the base language before the presentation, so the SQL Alter trick was needed.


7. I invited a new sport called "car hiking" in the Swiss Alps. My wife still gets nervous thinking about it.


8. I'm wearing "footie" pajamas right now. Seriously.

No time for lengthier explanations than that though. Gotta get back to my yak shaving.

Labels: 2008, Personal