Almost all of the technical PeopleSoft sessions at OpenWorld were using PeopleTools 8.52 which in not GA yet. I was pleasantly surprised that Oracle showed commitment to PeopleSoft platform and desire to develop not only the PeopleTools but also enhance the product offering by providing more integrations and run-times of the other products that Oracle owns, for example Oracle SES Search will replace Verity in the next version PeopleTools and will also provide enhanced search capability throughout the application. Here is a sneak peek of the new stuff:

• Pivot Grids – interactive analytics based on the query
• Related Content/Actions – additional action in the context of current transaction without leaving the current page
• Application Search / Component Search (SES) – navigate to transactions, items in the catalog and whatever else you have indexed
• Pagelet Improvements – Enhanced ability to drill, edit fields in the pagelets
• Modal Windows – removed limitations intorduced in 8.51, more widely used in Applications 9.2
• InterWindows communications are intorduced
• Application Designer–  (finally) drilling into Application Classes/Packages, Find Definition references for Application Classes

It seems that there are more good news across the Oracle products – in order to gain competetive advantage we should be seen more and more products being better integrated and even some of them being offered for free within a product you already own. Fusion Apps for example utilize Hyperion Analytics for grids. Of course those “free” components will have just a run-time license.

For full overview of the new features coming out in 8.52  you can download the PeopleTools Highlights session presentation from the OpenWorld Site

Wednesday keynote was for the major part about Oracle applications direction. Steve Miranda talked about Oracle having entire stack – hardware and software, and the fact that Oracle software will run better and will be optimized for Oracle / Sun hardware.

The biggest news was introduction of Oracle Public Cloud by CEO Larry Ellison. Although not similar to traditional cloud software platforms like Salesforce.com or Workday, Ellison emphasized that the differences are the key advantages of the Oracle Cloud platform:

1. Oracle Cloud consists on Oracle Fusion Applications  that utilize  industry standard technologies :  SOA, Architecture, security built into middleware, Database , OS
2. Modern user interface with actionable news,  Analytics,  BI
3. Ability to run Fusion Apps – on premise, hosted or in the cloud

Larry Ellison spoke about the lengthy 6 year journey to Fusion apps and the reasons behind

1. Approximately 100 Fusion modules are in GA (Generally Available) now
2. Oracle Fusion Applications utilize industry standards on all application layers – Java, Oracle Database and Weblogic. This allows Fusion applications to be easily migrated from On-premise to Hosted or Cloud solutions.
3. The vision has changed from what it was 6 years ago – Facebook, Twitter have inflluenced the way people work. Hence, Oracle has added Oracle Social Network for Enterprise, which is also integrate into Fusion apps.

Last years heavyweights continued  the sparring match about “Clouds”.  This time around Larry Ellison first cancelled Marc Benioff’s scheduled keynote, that generate quite a media frenzy and he also added a slide about the “false clouds”.

A picture is worth a 1000 words so here are some of  the slides that I found notable:

This was so far the shortest keynote by Oracle.

Mike Hurd took another couple of jabs at IBM hardware and P-series, those were actually called “IBM Mainfraimes”,  and showed a couple of clips with Larry Ellison, but there were not much change from Larry Ellison’s presentation yesterday with the exception of:

• Oracle license sales has increased 20%  this year
• Exadata and SPARC machines are optimized to run Java, and according to Larry run java faster than IBM 7 series

But overall I get a feeling that Oracle tries to model their enterprise hardware/software strategy after Apple’s. As we all know Apple follows this model to a tee – software is optimized to run perfectly on it hardware. Larry Ellison is on the path of creating the Apple in the enterprise hardware market, the motto is -  Oracle software is optimized to run on Oracle hardware.

Oracle will continue to support other platforms, but the repeating message is – applications, middleware , databases will have more features on Oracle hardware.

And as we all know Mac Pro of Oracle is called Exadata and all of the middleware is called … surprise – ExaBusinesslogic and ExaAnalytics

The main highlights of the EMC offering are:

• Optimize workload execution
• Fully automated storage tiering
• Use of High performance commodity servers for cloud
• Ligttning enabled products – flashcards and software that uses it. Increase of IOPS.
• Big data -> driving business , enterprise data will grow 50x times

With Amazon EC2 and Database.com being out there already, we should see a lot more vendor partnerships and consolidation on the hardware market.

And here is this time of the year again – Oracle OpenWorld 2011. I will attending the conference as a blogger – thanks to folks at Oracle. I hope to learn new things, meet new people – my readers, fellow bloggers and Oracle professionals. Let me know if you are attending:

I figured I would write a quick post to remind my developers and others out there some of the features that have been implemented since version 8.49. For those experts readers who have been using these and other technics for awhile I would appreciate if you share your own technics.

 Running Compares

So without further due, below you can see a sample PeopleSoft’s visual merge compare for Project Peoplecode. In order to save you from long and boring explanations – I will leave it to PeopleBooks – Using Merge Interface. However I would like to add just a few comments – sometimes I find myself pasting compare code into good old Notepad++ and running a compare in there. I guess I do like the power of the full fledged editor and syntax highlighting does not hurt as well.

As much fun as App Designer reports are I always like to look at the reports in the HTML view  – better , faster and cleaner experience. And all it take is specifying Generate HTML report in the Compare Options in App Designer:

Secondary Pages

If you are creating a complex page that contains some sort of look-up pages – always a good idea to split the interface and not create page that would overwhelm the user.  In earlier versions of tools going to secondary pages required user to transfer to a separate page, however since Tools 8.50 – secondary and modal pages can open in a modal JavaScript Popup that still allows you to stay on the same page:

In order to enable this behavior for existing and new pages you just need to enable one little checkbox and voila:

Change Control

When working in a team and making multiple changes to the environment you don’t want to be stepping on each others toes. Although still quite limited and inferior to Tools like Quest Stat – PeopleTools built in change control does provide you the ability to lock objects while you change them and leave comments as to what was done (always a good idea). This also helps with documentation – once you are done with the changes you can run a quick SQL and get a report of all the changes that were done for more please go to here.

I hope you enjoy this and let me know if you have any suggestions.

We guessed that problem was related to the MIME types not being recognized and after doing a quick search on Oracle Metalink we discovered this document

Problem : E-PC: Unable to view a Files of Office 2007 including DOCX file after upload

Part of this solution is updating the PIA web.xml with new MIME types supplied by Microsoft . But after doing so and restarting our WebSphere we still had a problem …

We tried and again in different environments and after awhile …

… still nothing.

After doing more online searching, elsewhere I encountered a post referencing having to add MIME types directly through WebSphere Admin console. And here are the rest of the instructions:

1. Login to WAS Admin Console – http://your_server:9060/ibm/console/login.do
2. Go to Environment > Virtual Hosts > MIME Types

1. Enter all your mime types there and restart the server

Hope this helps – let me know of you have any questions

1. Business Objects or Crystal reports CDs will not be shipped or supported starting July of 2011 – not surprising since the introduction of XMLP and SAP purchase of Business Objects
2. Additional COBOL compiler from IBM will be offered on AIX and Windows – can be purchased separately, see My Oracle Support Doc ID 1212164.1
3. IBM WebSphere Application Server – “will need to be separately licenses from IBM, September 1, 2010, NEW customers will not receive a license to use IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) when they purchase PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.  Prior to upgrading to PeopleTools 8.52 existing customers will need to obtain support from IBM or migrate to Oracle WebLogic” .
4. PeopleTools will have additional Database Tuning features available only for Oracle Database

On the same note I would like to add that the theme of the conference was – Oracle Investment in Oracle Products on Oracle OS running on Oracle Hardware.

As long as you buy Oracle branded suite – you are all set, but be careful if you decide to buy just a jacket – you may need to go to the tailor to make it fit better. Not to be too negative though, Larry needed to make a decision and spend wisely, based on the recent acquisition of Sun and MySQL  – Oracle has become a one stop shop that makes everything from the jackets, pants, shoes and soon will be making eye-wear and handbags to match.

Oracle will try to release once a year Tools updates called – “Feature Packs”. I would like to talk in more detail about this because it affects upgrade strategy and resource planning.

• Each PeopleTools version will be patched until 12 months after the NEXT version is released
• Critical Updates (CPU’s) will be produced for 12 months beyond that

Oracle recommends upgrading Tools on an annual basis to keep in sync with releases. Some people who usually upgrade to get significant features or to resolve problems, would find this annoying and resource consuming. For those folks there is  Alternate Strategy – Skip One:

• Upgrade prior to end of patch support (every 2 years)

Oracle will make major application releases approximately every 3 years.

For better of for worse – the above allows to do better planning of the resources on IT and business side. I just hope Oracle will actually keep this schedule.

Please see the screenshots from the relevant Oracle presentation slides below:

PeopleSoft Patch Support

Peopletools Alternate Upgrade Strategy - Skip One