OOW2010 – day 2

Today Well, yesterday, was an interesting day. I attended few sessions and learned few things, especially on Peopletools 8.51 even though the sessions were not focused on these Peopletools 8.51.
The first session, “PeopleSoft PeopleTools Release 8.50 Upgrade: Details of a Well-Managed Project” presented by Graham Smith was interesting, not technical, but rather a success story of an upgrade to Peopletools 8.50 and the key points to pay attention on this version, especially the move from 32bit to 64bit. Graham could spent a couple of hours to speak about that experience, unfortunately the session was limited to one hour…
The second session was more formal, “Best Practices for Supporting and Upgrading PeopleSoft Enterprise”, how to integrate My Oracle Support (MOS) and Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) into your Peoplesoft environment. Well, we could again spent a lot of time to discuss this topic, MOS is not yet the most appreciate support website. Regarding the upgrade to the Peopletools 8.51, few new interesting features : improvement of compare report, usage monitor and Peoplesoft test framework (record application tasks).
Since I had time, I attended by curiosity an non-scheduled session (non-scheduled for me), “Deploy Peoplesoft on Oracle Exadata”. I think this session was the most technical session that I ever seen in OOW. It was simply amazing how the Oracle guys knows deeply what he was talking about and how passionate he is. The main topic here was to test a enormous payroll (on 500,000 employees) on Exadata and how was the behavior of this Exadata combined with a RAC system. The results were amazing ! Everything possible to tune has been done within Peoplesoft Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) : as a reminder the Full Table Scan are done onto the server and only the results are returned, high ratio of column compression, Smart Flash Cache, Fast Application Notification (from 8.50.09)…
I can only regret that I cannot pay play with an Exadata machine. Again, even if the focus was not about Peopletools 8.51, new features has been told and not the least : partition capabilities on Application level (after so many years !) and also Peoplesoft application on a Standby database (with local and remote synonyms).
My last session of the day was “PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips and Tricks” by Jim Marion. Jim showed a lot of tricks with Ajax and Mobile application features. I’m not a developer, but the session has been made for all public and was rather interesting. During a demo on a Peopletools 8.51 install, we saw that the click on the menu changed from the Peopletools 8.50, in 8.51 it opens the sub-menu, not the page.

All this makes promising the following days with few sessions Peopletools 8.51 dedicated.

Nicolas.