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

Preface

Readers should note that this post is about PeopleTools 9, not PeopleSoft 9 applications. PeopleSoft 9 has shipped to customers. PeopleSoft 9 applications are based on the PeopleTools 8.4x codeline.

Take One

When I was reading Larry's post about the history of Tree Manager I said

"Hey Larry, late 1998 wasn't PeopleTools 8. "

"It wasn't?"

"No, it was PeopleTools 9. "

When work first started in late 1998 on what is now known as PeopleTools 8, the code base was originally named PeopleTools 9, but was later renamed to PeopleTools 8.

Part of the problem was that the PeopleTools group was ready to start working on that release before there was much of an applications plan in place. The general thinking at the time was that the release would be too large to have it just be a ".5" release (1).

There were already designs / proof of concept code in place for things like

* Application Messaging (using this new fangled thing called XML)
* Component Interfaces (these were originally known as Business Components, which is why all of the Component Interface tables are prefaced with BC)
* Business Interlinks
* Unicode
* Java in PeopleCode
* LDAP / Roles / Signon PeopleCode

That's quite a bit of stuff for one release, and this is even before the whole "no code on the client" stuff appeared.

As proof of how much work went into the release prior to going completely browser-based, look no further than the "Insert" menu in Application Designer.

Notice that option for inserting ActiveX controls? That was actually built for the Windows client, not the browser. Technically it is still supported with the 8.1x tools, but I would strongly recommend against using it. The menu option should have been removed when 8.4 came out (code cruft is a topic for a separate blog post some day).

I don't remember how the decision to rename it as PeopleTools 8 happened though. There was lots of turmoil inside PeopleSoft then (falling sales, layoffs, new CEO, Vantive acquisition, etc), so it's hard to say. I do know that build managers just love writing scripts to rename everything though. Not!

Take Two

So when did PeopleTools 9 next show up? Believe it or not, in late 2001. We were planning on having a small new version of PeopleTools to clean up a few things in the 8.1x codeline that we wished we had been smart enough to think about before shipping it. This would have been similar in scope to 7.5 PeopleTools; a follow on release after a major technology shift that served to be a long term stable base, while new development continued on. There was even talk of just calling it PeopleTools 8.2 and making it a mandatory release for customers. While that was going on we began working on the Next Big Thing for PeopleTools 9.

A couple of things conspired against that go around for PeopleTools 9. One was that the name "PeopleSoft 8" had some off the chart brand recognition (at least according to our marketing folks), so there was some senior management push to not lose that name right away.

The other was that customers were still wrestling with a lot of the details of running large scale PeopleSoft 8 deployments and there was quite a bit of pressure to make the follow on release deal with a lot of those issues.

So work on PeopleTools 9 was (mostly) halted to put all hands onto what ended up as PeopleTools 8.4. Why 8.4? Mainly to leave room for a potential 8.8 release. That ended up happening for the applications, along with 8.9 releases. Heck, the CRM group almost did an 8.95 release. Talk about asymptotically approaching 9 :-)

Take Three

I'm not sure which customer managed to finally convince PeopleSoft senior management that doing some releases that were focused on making current stuff work instead of The Next Big Thing, but I remember being in several corporate visits where (due to scheduling issues) I ended up sitting through Craig Conway or Ram Gupta's sessions and get to hear the same earful that they were getting.

It's wasn't unusual to hear from people in charge of actually running PeopleSoft at a customer site about things that we could do to improve operational efficiencies. That's one of the main reasons people used to come to Pleasanton for a corporate visit - to get a chance to talk with product strategy and development about their needs. Historically though you wouldn't see the "C-level" discussions get into this sort of thing though.

So that's what led to Total Ownership Experience (TOE). PeopleTools 8.44 was the big TOE release for PeopleTools. Performance Monitor, Change Assistant, etc were all big features, but not really "sexy". Of course, they took a fair amount of development effort, which meant that there wasn't really enough folks left to work on PeopleTools 9.

This was the go-around where there were actual PeopleTools 9 baseball hats created. I'll have to talk Larry into posting a picture of his. I gave mine to a friend at a PeopleSoft customer in Germany awhile ago.

Take Four

The last stab at doing PeopleTools 9 was in the middle of the Oracle acquisition, so it was a little strange to be doing long term project planning. SAP was scoring sex and sizzle points with their NetWeaver story, which shaped some of the internal scoping debates.

This time around, PeopleTools 9 was not being called 9, but rather "X". No one was ready to venture a guess as to what version number it would finally ship as. Which turned out to be rather smart since it didn't ship :-)

Postscript

As it turns out a lot of the ideas for PeopleTools 9 are things that Oracle had already been working on (or would soon acquire).

One was the whole idea of radically extending/re-writing the component processor to make things that are common customizations today into personalizations. Imagine the tab order personalization feature from PeopleTools 8.44 being extended to moving and hiding fields (while still honoring the business logic of course). Check out some of the ADF Faces work for some ideas on what Fusion applications will be capable of.

Another big feature was the idea of re-usable data objects. Oracle got that with the acquisition of Siebel, who in turn had acquired a company called nQuire. This now has the awkward name of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, but it is some really slick stuff. As Larry mentioned in a previous posting, we had brought nQuire in before Siebel bought them, but we didn't move quick enough (historically PeopleSoft didn't do acquisitions that well).

Applications Unlimited

One of the things that we did right after the acquisition was to survey some PeopleSoft customers about what they wanted to see from Oracle in relationship to PeopleTools. To a customer, every single one said in no uncertain terms that they didn't want to see any major new things from PeopleTools - just focus on quality, performance, operational excellence, integration, etc.

This was prior to the announcement of Applications Unlimited, but the sentiment remains.

As it turns out, folks that are looking for something radically new are starting to adopt Fusion Middleware. Oracle seems to be having a decent uptake of that within PeopleSoft customers.


(1) Funnily enough, the comedian that PeopleSoft hired for the PeopleSoft 8 launch party, Greg Proops, actually did some research before the event and made a comment to the effect of "All of this for going from 7.5 to 8? .5? ". Of course, he actually made it sound funny.

On a sad note, that launch party was held in the summer in 2000 at the Windows on the World restaurant, which was destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Labels: 2007, Fusion, History

Wow. I knew that there were plans to adopt some of the PeopleSoft user interface for Oracle 12 (in advance of Fusion), but these screenshots that Steven Chan has posted are quite impressive.

I was almost expecting to see VP1 as the login ID :-)

For current PeopleSoft customers worried about teaching their users a new user interface in Fusion, this is a great indicator that the transition won't be too difficult.

Hopefully keyboard navigation is handled properly as well.

Labels: Fusion, PeopleSoft

In my previous blog entry on nVision and Siebel Analytics, I shamelessly embedded a couple of screenshots from Mark's Blog.

This morning, he posted an in-depth explanation of the platform and how it works. For those who want a look into the crystal ball showing the foundation of application reporting in Fusion applications, this posting is a must-read.

Labels: Fusion

This week, when I was picking up my kids at school, I ran into one of the nVision developers who used to work for me (who's still working at Oracle). She's working on taking nVision to Fusion, which will use the Siebel Analytics platform.

When I first remembered that Oracle's acquisition of Siebel included Siebel Analytics, I told my co-workers that if Oracle was smart, they'd use that as the replacement for nVision (and metric calculations in EPM).

So, Why is it a good thing?
Believe it or not, we at PeopleSoft evaluated Siebel Analytics (although under a different name) to be the infrastructure for the next generation of nVision. At the time, it was a small company called nQuire. We put together a bunch of things we wanted them to prove they could do within a week against multiple PeopleSoft systems. At the time, Chris Heller and myself had a lot of discussions about the product's claimed capabilities... his quote was "Either they're crazy or they're geniuses". We found out that they were geniuses.

Unfortunately for PeopleSoft, Siebel beat us to the punch and acquired nQuire and re-branded the product. Now that Oracle has acquired both Siebel and PeopleSoft, it looks like that original vision may be realized for PeopleSoft customers.

So, what is Siebel Analytics?
Siebel Analytics is most of the functionality we planned to provide in reporting in PeopleTools 9.

• A data abstraction layer that allows users to work with meaningful objects for building reports
• A browser-based way of building both tabular and crosstab reports by business users
• A server-based quering engine that runs the reports and delivers results

In the published PeopleTools 9 plans, we had different names for the same functionality

• Data Objects (Data Abstraction Layer)
• nVision Studio (Browser-based way of building tabular and crosstab reports)
• nVision Engine (server-based querying and reporting engine)

Mark Rittman has some good images on his weblog (which is a must-read for anybody wanting to understand what's going on with Oracle and BI) that shows screenshots for building and managing the data abstraction layer and for building queries or reports.

Data Abstraction Layer

The data abstraction layer looks exactly as it did when we reviewed the product.

The far right pane contains the list physical objects that are the sources of data and metadata. These can be tables or files (and I'm assuming XML sources now). You can think of these as record definitions in PeopleSoft.

The middle pane allows you to map the physical objects to objects that have a more meaningful business names and structures. They abstract away joins and unions and other physical attributes you don't want to present. (a good example we had them prove in the PeopleSoft evaluation was that you could have a single representation for sales, where under the covers you were getting historical sales from a data warehouse and current sales from the CRM system). These are related to Data Objects in the PeopleTools 9 feature list.

The left pane contains the presentation layer for how you would want to present these objects to business analysts. For example, you might want to have different versions of an order, depending on the vertical you're using (where fields specific to a vertical are displayed and not others, and where the terminology presented to the user is targeted to that user type). In other words, you might have a different presentation object for Universities and Commercial in CRM, where in a university a customer is displayed as a contributor and in commercial, they're displayed as customer. These are related to Data Views in the PeopleTools 9 feature list.

Reporting

Siebel analytics provides a drag-and-drop interface for building reports in the browser using these objects. Although I believe that there is some opportunity for making the user interface more targeted to business analysts, they've done the big, hairy effort to pull together crosstab and tabular reporting into a single reporting tool. Here's another screenshot from Mark Rittman's weblog that shows some of the user interface.

As you can see, you have the objects from the presentation layer in the left pane, and you have the ability to lay them out in a report.

So, What's left to be done?

Good question. Here are the major tasks I see that need to be done to get nVision using this platform:

1. Map ledgers to the Siebel Analytics metadata. This should be relatively straightforward, but it is dependent on the fusion business unit/setid project as well as how chart of accounts configuration gets done in fusion.
2. Teach the Siebel Analytics platform how to read trees. Again, this is dependent on the fusion tree project. Fortunately, there are a lot of designs in place for how an engine would utilize different approaches for modeling trees. Another good thing is that the Oracle database has sql extensions for trees/hierarchies that make this much, much simpler than what is currently being done in nVision.
3. Build a robust excel user interface that leverages the calculation engine in Siebel Analytics. From what I know about WebADI, this infrastructure may do the trick, because it is build to allow web services to be used interactively to embed application functionality into to provide a user experience targeted to a business user.
4. Extend Siebel Analytics with output management functionality (this will probably involve work with concurrent manager, which is being managed by the person who used to own PeopleSoft's process scheduler and report manager).

Conclusion

Hopefully this makes most PeopleSoft customers more comfortable with the future of things. I've already known or suspected much of this information earlier, but was waiting for Oracle to provide enough information publicly for me to safely write this entry.

Labels: Fusion, nVision, Performance

Over the past week, I've had many conversations with customers who've approached me with concerns about the future of nVision. Because I used to be responsible for nVision, and have strong relationships with the people responsible for GL, Reporting and Analytics, and XML Publsher, I wanted to take the time to discuss what is, and isn't going to happen.

Is nVision going away?
The answer is a definitive "NO". The financial reporting functionality available to you with nVision is not going away in Fusion. I recognize that many customers are receiving conflicting messages from Oracle with respect ot the future of nVision, so I wanted to make it succinct and clear up front. Read on to understand what's going and not going to happen (and why the messaging from Oracle has been confusing on this).

nVision in your current PeopleSoft releases
First of all, Oracle is going to continue to release and support nVision in your PeopleTools-based applications as it currently exists. As new maintenance releases come out, nVision will continue to be shipped, supported, and maintained.

Yeah, but isn't XML Publisher coming out in these Tools 8.48?
Although XML publisher will be added to PeopleTools 8.48, it is not intended to be a replacement for nVision (or other PeopleSoft delivered reporting tools , such as Crystal or SQR for that matter). The goal is to put some of the Fusion middleware in PeopleSoft customer hands prior to releasing applications on Fusion, and to solve some of the production reporting issues that are hard to solve with Crystal and SQR (such as automatically adjusting reports to chartfield configuration changes).

Although the application development teams will be delivering some reports in XML publisher in the (applications) release 9 timeframe, they will continue to deliver and support the versions of those reports that you currently receive in Crystal or SQR. There are no plans to develop delivered nVision reports in XML publisher for release 9.

Okay, then what about Fusion?
Although it will probably have a different name and different technical underpinnings, Oracle is currently working on financial reporting capabilities in Fusion that they consider to be a descendent of nVision.

Fusion represents a major technology shift for all PeopleSoft products, and the development teams are designing and scoping the release from a feature-by-feature perspective instead of a product name by product name perspective. Will there be a tool named "nVision" in Fusion? probably not, just as you probaby won't see a scripting language called "PeopleCode". That doesn't mean that the features those products represent won't be present in Fusion.

I've talked with the GL development team about their design approach for building the next generation of Financial Reporting. The GL team is using nVision as the standard by which financial reporting in Fusion is measured, and they are in the process of conducting working sessions with PeopleSoft customers to ensure that they clearly understand customer requirements. These requirements will be used to collaborate with the Server Tech group to scope and design the features you need.

Although the low-level design details still have to be flushed out, you should expect Oracle to deliver a financial reporting tool in Fusion with the following capabilities:

• It utilizes Excel in much the same way that nVision does.
• It is integrated with the Fusion applications in much the same way that nVision is (i.e. it understands ledgers, trees, calendars, and Setid Indirection).
• It supports drilldown and automatic inclusion of supporting details (nPlosion) in much the same way that nVision does.
• It empowers business users to configure and run their own reports in much the same way they can in nVision.
• It runs on a server better than nVision does.
• It is easier to deploy in an organization than nVision is.

Labels: Fusion, nVision