Upon reflection, I decided it was important to give credit to many of the folks that were involved in tree manager other than the heads of the teams involed in its creation, development, enhancement.

Based on my experience with the product, here are several of the folks who deserve credit other than Dana Quitsulnd, John Malatesta, and Baer Tierkel.

• Jack Whitney - From my understanding, Jack was involved in much of the early development of Tree Manager, and from personal experience, he was able to help me through several customer issues when I was consulting on it. As far as I know, Jack's still at Oracle.
• Cregg Lund - Again from my understanding, Cregg was one of the folks who was responsible for making tree manager work for both HR and Financials. He also was one of the first people to recognize that the use of tree manager was moving beyond the limitations of the original code that was developed (and that tree manager needed a major re-architecture back in PeopleTools 3). As far as I know, Cregg is an independent consultant doing PeopleSoft work.
• Nathan Vause - Nathan was what one would call the utility innfielder for the reporting development team (he was involved an practically every early reporting inititiative at PeopleSoft, tree manager included. He is one of those geniuses who can develop practically anything (and was Dana Quitslund's right-hand man in the early development stages of nVision). I believe Nathan is at SalesForce.com (as one of the many PeopleTools developers who left to go there).
• Kathy Fong - Kathy was one of the first developers tasked with fixing many of the issues created by the addition of tree branches to the product. At the time that I joined the tools team, she was diligently working through the customer issues and addressing them.
• Cynthia Share - Although I hired Cindy to work on Crystal's integration with Crystal, I recognized that the issues with tree manager required additional resources to address. I ended up moving Cindy to work with Kathy on re-architecting much of tree manager, which was a great fit because the two of them worked extremely well together and Cindy's experience as a developer with Primavera was perfect for what we needed to do with Tree Manager (albeit much later than Cregg Lund's original set of requests). This also paved the way for me to hire Brian Sparling to complete the Crystal integration (in case you don't know who Brian is, check out the following link. Cindy is still at Oracle working in the Tools Team.
• Brian Thill - I think I mentioned Brian in my original posting. Originally, Brian was hired at PeopleSoft to do the Financial Services work in EPM, but we were lucky enough to get him to do the Tree Manager port to the web from the windows client (PSTED.EXE). He then moved to do the same thing for PS/Query. He was the visionary for Data Objects, which Rick Bergquist demonstrated in the 2004 PeopleSoft Users Conference. Eventually Brian took over the whole PeopleSoft Internet Architecture development. Brian is an independent consultant working in the Portland area on different business intellige nce initiatives.
• Mikhail Dumay - Mikhail came to PeopleSoft with the acquisition of Intrepdid Software (there's a history of ingenious web developers from russia in the PeopleTools team). Mikhail took Brian's development one step further with drag and drop support. He also did much of the prototyping of the release 9 version of nVision that never made it out the door. Mikhail is still working in the PeopleTools team at Oracle.

I'm sure there are several other folks that I'm missing in this post and I'll apologize for missing them here (although I'll do my best to give them credit when I'm made aware of it).

Labels: History, Tree_Manager