I took a video of the HCM portion of the Oracle Fusion demo Steve Miranda and Chris Leone presented on September 24.  I apologize for the poor quality, but it does show some of the cool stuff that Fusion HCM has.  The Org Chart functionality is nice.

You can find the video here.

With a session called "Caching and Timeouts" late in the day in the middle of the week, my expectations of paying attention were pretty low.  But Graham Smith from Oxfam gave the most practical and complete presentation of the topic that I’ve heard.

Oxfam is one of those rare companies that runs PeopleSoft all over the world.  Not just in nice urban centers with reliable fiber-optic networks, but in places like Afghanistan where the only power comes from a diesel generator and the network is a small satellite dish on the roof.  In such situations, it’s absolutely critical to get caching and timeouts optimized, or the user experience will be non-existent.

I had a client in Switzerland once with the challenge to operate in similar environments, and although it’s been over 10 years I’m still interested in how companies do computing in hostile environments.

It’s not that the subject matter was difficult, or that I didn’t know most of it already, but the completeness of the presentation and the additional insights to the process made the session worthwhile.  Here are the points I came away with:

Steve Miranda, SVP of Fusion Application Development along with Chris Leone, Group Vice President, ERP Application Product Strategy walked through the Fusion Application features that will be in place for version 1, and gave a live demo of functionality within Financials, HCM and CRM.

As much as I liked the PeopleTools 8.5 and the PeopleSoft 9.1 preview I saw, they can’t quite match the elegance and efficiency of the Fusion UI.  Relevant business intelligence is pervasive at every level.  Dashboards are used not only to present an intuitive view of your data, they also serve a functional role to drive navigation throughout the application.  Collaboration functionality is so integrated and intuitive that you quickly take it for granted.  Graphics slide across the screen as intuitively as a power-point slide.  The work Oracle did in their usability studies has paid off substantially.

But the UI is just the surface.  Fusion is packed with new features to drive productivity.  The navigation model is still there, but it’s de-emphasized as the dashboards present users a role-based view of what needs attention, and navigation from the dashboards is easy and intuitive.  A single, role-based universal worklist is accessible from the app, and it is accessible from outside of the application via RSS.  Configurable “activity guides” walk you through the steps to complete semi-structured processes like on-boarding or period closes.

Since the Oracle acquisition, the most noticeable change in PeopleTools – to business users anyway – has been the sign-in page.  But that’s changing with the coming release of PeopleTools 8.5 in 2009.  According to Paco Aubrejuan, power is shifting to end users who want to do their jobs their own way.  Business owners want application functionality to be complete, not just for the business process but for how their industry implements that business process.  And IT managers want help addressing internal stakeholders’ needs more quickly and at a lower cost.

To meet the End User’s Web 2.0 needs, PeopleTools 8.5 is delivering an Ajax-enabled experience that is backward compatible to Applications as old as 8.4.  The look and feel is much different, but still very intuitive.  The most striking difference is that the menu navigation on the left is gone, transformed to more of a “windows task bar” style of a menu across the top of the page.  It was removed to free up screen space that Tools 8.5 and the 9.1 apps are hungry for.  But navigating the menu has never been easier.  Ajax-enabled in this case means menus expand quickly, allowing you to navigate the various folders intuitively.  And actually navigating through multiple folders to a page doesn’t have to be done so much now that the Favorites folder includes a “Recently Used” feature.