OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

Lately at work I've been having to remind myself lately not to pave the cow path -- not to bring existing business processes and technology forward just because that's how we've always done it.  Here's the poem that the expression comes from.

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Oracle announced today at the Alliance '13 conference that the PeopleSoft 9.2 will be generally available on March 22.

Here's the link to the press release:  http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1920557

So far I've written about how you might approach the plan, design, build and test phases of a PeopleSoft replatforming project.  This time around I'd like to spend some time on the Cutover.

You’ll probably want to do at least 4 mock cutovers. One to build the initial development environment on the new hardware.  One to start System Test. One to start User Acceptance Testing, and a “dress rehearsal” to prove out your cutover plan/strategy. 

Start the cutover plan when you do your first migration. Capture tasks and timing. And continue to refine it with each additional (more...)

So far I've written about how you might approach the plan, design, and build phases of a PeopleSoft replatforming project.  This time around I'd like to spend some time on the Test phase.

Just because you’re only changing some SQL around doesn’t mean that you can take shortcuts with testing.  You’ll want to run an entire stem-to-stern test of your PeopleSoft system to insure that everything works as expected.

 One thing to keep in mind:  99% of your defects will be with custom and customized code.   The delivered code won’t generate nearly as many problems, so if (more...)

In last two postings I wrote about how you might plan a project where you migrate your PeopleSoft application from one database platform to another, and how you might approach the Design phase.  I wanted to share my thoughts about the Build phase in this article.  I'll share my thoughts about the Test and Cutover phases in my next posting(s).

The Build Phase

The Build Phase is always my favorite part of any PeopleSoft project, probably because I come from a Development background.  The Build phase of a replatforming project is in some ways very straightforward, and (more...)

In my previous article I described how you might approach planning and requirements gathering for a PeopleSoft database replatforming project.  You would exit that phase with solid RICE object inventories and an idea of any new PeopleTools functionality you will deploy.

I’d like to take you through some thoughts and considerations for the remaining phases (Design, Build, Test, Deploy).  This article will just focus on the Design phase and i'll publish the other articles in the near future.  For this discussion, I’m going to assume we’re doing a PeopleTools upgrade along with the replatforming effort, and we’re (more...)

There are several reasons why you might decide to migrate PeopleSoft to a new database platform.  It could be that you need to move to a more scalable platform.  Or you may be looking to reduce your annual license costs and want to switch to a more cost-effective platform.  Whatever the reason, you can certainly take advantage of PeopleSoft's multiple-database support and change your database platform.  This article will give you some ideas about how to plan the effort.

One of the first things to consider is whether or not you want to upgrade to the (more...)

Amazon has been steadily moving toward making their web service offering ready for the enterprise. Over the last year or so they've received certification for Oracle database, they've broken down the barriers that would prevent PCI certification, and they've improved their pricing structure to make it more corporation-friendly.

Today they may have finally broken the final barriers down to large scale enterprise adoption with the following announcements:

Virtual Private Cloud is now out of Beta and allows you to "provision a private section of the AWS cloud where you can create avirtual network that you control, including selection of an (more...)

If you’re implementing Hyperion applications to complement your PeopleSoft Financials application, one decision you’ll have to make relatively early is which tool to use to manage your core dimensions and their associated hierarchies.  Here are the options:

So which one is the right choice?  Based on my research and discussions with Christopher Dwight, a member of Oracle’s Master Data Management practice, here’s what I have learned:

The native functionality basically means you’ll maintain your dimensions in each application separately.  So if you want to add a department, you’ll have (more...)

I was talking to an Oracle sales rep this week about OBIEE.  Since this is a PeopleSoft blog I guess I’d better explain.  OBIEE is Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering.  It’s solidly in Forrester’s leader’s quadrant and it has all of BI features you would expect (reporting, ad-hoc analysis, dashboards, alerts, etc). The question at hand was why we should implement it when we already have some perfectly good BI tools with committed users who truly believe in them.

We didn’t get into a deep discussion about BI features.  Everybody knows what a BI solution should do (more...)

I’m going to Oracle OpenWorld again this year, and I just finished building my schedule.  Wow.  This year there are so many sessions I want to attend in the same time slots that I won’t be able to see a fraction of what I want to.  Guess I’ll have to skip the session on how to author blue-ray disks using Java in favor of a product roadmap session I need to attend.  You see, I’ve started a new project and I have a whole laundry list of stuff I need to come up to speed on. (more...)

Servers are becoming more powerful as manufacturers are finding new ways to get more cores into a CPU.  Today it’s not uncommon to see hexa and octa-core processors shipping at the same price points the dual- and hexa-cores shipped yesterday.  Where manufacturers once got their performance improvements through raw CPU speed, they are now getting their getting the majority of performance improvement through more cores in their processor chips.

Unfortunately the economics of additional cores for performance aren’t the same as improvements through improved clock cycles because software manufactures have largely tied their technology licensing to the number (more...)

Remember the old days (circa 2006) when doing disaster recovery involved shipping tapes to an off-site storage facility and provisioning emergency hardware at a disaster recovery facility?  Well, fast forward to 2010 when virtually unlimited hardware and disk storage are cheap and plentiful.  Making real-time backups to the cloud (with the right software) is not only doable but almost a no-brainer.  But once your backup is in the cloud, the next logical step would be to launch a virtual instance of the server that you backed up.  But that’s like, Star Trek futuristic stuff, right?

Well (more...)

Suppose you have a spreadsheet full of invoices that you want to load to PeopleSoft.  If you’re running PeopleSoft 8.9 or later, that’s easy. You use the voucher load spreadsheet to get them into the system and then run Voucher Build to turn them into vouchers.  But what if you want to load Single Pay vouchers?    That’s something that the spreadsheet voucher load won’t handle.

Okay, so maybe use the ExcelToCI spreadsheet to populate the VCHR_EXPRESS component.  Good luck with that.  If you’ve ever tried then you’ll know all about the "First operand of . (more...)

Sure, Amazon Web Services is great for geeks and small companies with nothing to lose, but what if your company is in the Fortune 1000? Can you really trust Amazon (or any cloud provider for that matter) with your employees, vendors, customers, and all of the associated confidential data like credit card numbers and tax ID’s?

That’s something I’ve been struggling with lately. We have successfully used AWS to spin up demo environments of PeopleSoft Enterprise, Hyperion, GoldenGate. We used demo data as opposed to any customer-specific data which has been fine so far. And I must say that AWS (more...)