I really liked this session, as it allowed 4 beta customers of PeopleTools 8.5 discuss their experiences with the release as well as how they feel they will benefit from adopting it. It consisted of a panel of 4 people (all of whom, coincidentally, readers of our blog... so of course I have to say how much I enjoyed the session ;-)

Here are the people and organizaitons on the panel

• Tina Thorstensen - Arizona State University
• Adrian Alvi - Boise Corporation
• David Coveney - Boeing, Corp.
• Graham Smith - Oxfam

Arizona State University

Tina started by providing an overview of her organization. Here are several of the salient points she made about her experience with the PeopleTools 8.5 beta:

• Their customers are students. 18-24 year olds do not really understand why a product like PeopleSoft might not have the user experience of Myspace or Facebook. User Experience is very important to them
• The new menus and personalization options are important
• Modal messages are also important

For them, the justification was primarily for the User Experience and Developer enhancements.

For their plans, they will be doing a Tools-only upgrade next year. Later they will do the business justification for the application upgrade as they are more extensive (and the tools upgrades are already budgeted as part of their normally yearly maintenance).

Boise

Adrian at Boise had similar comments to Tina. Here is their feedback on their PeopleTools 8.5 beta experience

• They like the grid enhancements
• They like the psconfig home and how it will allow them to manage their binaries separately from their logs and configuration settings
• New menu system
• Improved performance
• Installation was straightforward after understanding key changes
• Oracle is listening to their feedback.

From an upgrade planning perspective, they plan to go to Financials 9.1 on Q3 of 2010.

Boeing

David discussed his experiences with PeopleTools 8.5 as follows. First he discussed their goals for the beta:

• Allow for earlier testing
• Answer the question "Does it meet the hype?" (answer is definitely yes)
• Identify testing requirements for upgrade
• Identify any potential issues or items
• Validate fixes from reported issues in current tools release
• Gain an early understanding of the usability features and the opportunity to demonstrate them to customer community
  prototyping of new features that they use...
  • usability enhancements
  • related content
  • rss in query, etc.
• continue to build parnter relationship

Installation feedback

• no more involved than prior releases
• Pay attention to secure ps home
• Also, tux env settings removed from psconfig.sh
• Finally, verity is a separate install

Usability feedback

• Features can be personalized and turned on/off
• Grid enhancements - ability to customize/drag and drop for journal entry with all the fields. Very nice.
• Users liked modal lookup prompts
• Liked new menu - recent visit was huge for them. Easier to manage than favorites
• Also liked type-ahead

Performance Feedback

• Felt that partial page refresh would increase productivity - Used Allocations example - hundreds of allocations, where they had to add the values in pool and other values. When modifying them, there was no refresh waiting. This made the users more productive withless waiting. Quote: "you know it's already there... start typing"

Feedback regarding added functionality that was important to them

• related content
• rss feeds

One last quote was "It was fun for the development team to play with new items such as related content."

Next steps - upgrading to tools in may 2010

Oxfam

Having Graham as part of the beta program was very smart from Oracle's perspective. Oxfam has has software requirements and deployment topologies that are an order of magnitude more challenging that just about any other business we've seen. When your office is a tent in the mountains of Afghanistan with a couple of machines connected to a satellite dish and a diesel generator and you can conduct business using your ERP software, you can probably get it working anywhere.

As expected, Graham was very worried about chattiness and network traffic.

In addition to saying that although there are some issues with network traffic, he's comfortable that they can and will be addressed quickly and easily by the development team, Graham really likes the collaboration features available in the portal. He also liked the org charts.

Question Session

The session ended up with a question and answer session

Platform requirements - does the IE6 requirement cause issues? How are you addressing them? They're going to upgrade (boise). They have to figure out because they have some products that require ie ie6, etc. Boeing may redirect folks to firefox and away from internet explorer. Havent really found issues with ie6 as testing occured.

You (Jeff) mentioned a free portal license in your last session... what is it? Jeff's response: The best place to learn more is to obtain our document in demo grounds which explains exactly what it is. You will be able to create your own collaborative workspaces, but You cannot use it to create a portal...

In your testing, how did integration broker work... Boise hasn't tested any yet. ASU didn't test either...

As you worked in the beta program... how would you adjust your resource estimates for the upgrade... Tina --> pleasantly surprised that install went so smoothly. biggest hurdle was finding 64-bit servers to get started... got comfortable with it and adopting aggressive schedule. Graham... the potential danger with new features is to be too aggressive in adopting features... David... will not need to increase the staffing... But, need to be careful... enabling a grid was a click-box, but related content was easy, but a bit more.

What are your plans for training and support... with personalization options, how support somebody who heavily customized their page when what you see is different from them. Tina --> Not going to re-up the training documentation to support just the tools upgrade. They will be upgrading the app later, so look at it them. Pretty easy "restore the default" setting, so the idea is to have the help desk be know how to restore to defaults. Graham -- regular 2 minute videos of features, etc. Licensed UPK for training as well...

Comment from David Coveney - We like that 8.50 training is available today. However, we'd love to see a PeopleTools 8.50 delta class. Each developer writing interanal documentation in the meantime...

How do you get your teams up to speed on 8.5. Graham -- divy up each part and have half a day each week to go over what learned. LIttle bit at a time. JEff suggested using free license to create a peopletools 8.50 collaborative workspace.

Labels: Events, PeopleTools