ERP Associates, Inc.

I’ve been drinking from a fire hose all day today here at Oracle Open World but fortunately I’m getting questions answered and if this keeps up I’ll have met my goals for this week by tomorrow afternoon.  This certainly wasn’t the slow day I was expecting – it seemed like I went from one good session to another and often I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with all of the information.  I’m back at the hotel early so I thought I’d point the firehose your way and see how much I can regurgitate before crashing.

One of my primary goals was to start getting all of the Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFMW) technologies categorized so I would know when to use which technologies, and which technologies would make sense within a PeopleSoft context since there’s overlap between what PS provides and what OFMW provides.  And the very first session, the PeopleTools Technology SIG, went a long way in helping me get that understanding.  In a nutshell, I found that most Fusion MW adoption by PeopleSoft customers happens in integration technology, Enterprise 2.0, and Security.

Integration makes sense to me intuitively because PeopleSoft will never be the center of all of your enterprise integrations no matter how good Integration Broker is.  But OFMW was designed for that and provides a nice integration stack to give you a central place to develop, design and manage integrations for your whole enterprise.  Adapters provide connectivity to over 400 different applications, the Oracle Service Bus “owns” all of the web services and moves stuff from one app to another statelessly.  BPEL orchestrates the integrations in a stateful way outside of any individual app so you can get a picture of where the integration is without having to drill into the individual apps.  And Business Alerts monitoring (BAM) provides real time information on business processes.  But if you’re doing PS to PS integration, it still makes the most sense to do it through good old integration broker.

Speaking of BPEL, not only is it a great tool to orchestrate integrations, it is also a great tool to manage workflow that crosses different applications.  I hope you’re starting to see a theme about when to use PeopleSoft technologies and when to use OFMW technologies.  Basically if a business process or integration happens within PeopleSoft applications, use the delivered PeopleSoft technology.  But if the business process or integration needs to interact with applications beyond the PeopleSoft boundaries, consider OFMW.

Business Intelligence is an example of something that normally crosses application boundaries, and many of Oracle’s acquisitions over the last few years (like Hyperion) are bearing fruit especially in how they integrate with Oracle applications.  PeopleTools 8.50 has been designed to give these BI products more access to PeopleSoft data than ever before using the new PS Query Access Services.  Not only can queries be invoked by the BI tools in PT8.5 (using web services), the BI tool can actually build the PeopleSoft query itself.

That's not the only new trick PeopleTools 8.5 has learned.  It also has some really good Enterprise 2.0 functionality – things like discussions, tags, RSS feeds and the like.  OFMW has robust Enterprise 2.0 functionality as well in Oracle Web Center.  So which one do you use?  Once again, when the Enterprise 2.0 rollout moves beyond PeopleSoft to your other Enterprise applications it’s time to dive into Oracle Web Center.

Okay, that’s integration.  Security is another common place where PeopleSoft customers use Oracle Fusion Middleware.  And there is a lot of robust security management functionality in OFMW, especially within the Oracle Identity Management product.  But there wasn’t a lot of discussion or any notable specifics that I remember, so I’ll leave you with that.

I attended a couple of sessions about how to build applications with JDeveloper and OFMW.  My impression of JDeveloper is that it’s an incredibly robust but to use it you need to know something about the different technologies, frameworks, adapters, components, etc., you can control with it.  And that’s a very big topic.  But to build a basic online web app that accesses a database a developer would mainly need to know something about ADF .  ADF is a meta framework – a framework of frameworks if you will – that lets you access multiple frameworks the same way.  It’s used in a very visual way with lots of dragging and dropping, and properties can be set in property windows.  There are three core ADF technologies you’ll have to be aware of to create OFMW apps.

• ADF Business Components – this provides the data access layer.  It connects to the database, generates SQL, handles persistence, does the relational database to Java Object mapping, etc.
• ADF Faces Rich Client – Built on top of JSF, ADF RC provides the UI Rendering.  It supports pop-ups and diaglogs.  It also provides data visualization tools like all kinds of charts, maps, and hierarchies.
• ADF Controller & Model – The controller component takes over when a user clicks a button or does some other action on a page.  The Model provides bindings between the fields on the page and in the database.
• ADF Model – this binds the data to fields on a page.

In addition, to be successful in the Fusion world you’ll also need to know something about:

• Java – You don’t need to be an expert at the java language to be a successful JDeveloper developer, but some knowledge is essential.  It’s a good idea to have a Java guru on the team.
• HTML & XML – knowledge of XML is important because JDeveloper generates a lot of XML. HTML probably isn’t as important because it’s a better practice to let JDev generate the HTML and tweak it as little as possible to insure your app is as portable as possible.
• Javascript and CSS – once again you don’t have to be an expert but you need to know something about these.
• Groovy – I didn’t get to see this in operation but apparently you can add groovy expressions to change object properties at run time.

 I did get to attend a hands-on session with JDeveloper on how to build one of these simple apps, and it wasn’t all that difficult to build the app by following the instructions.  But I definitely need some more practice before I feel comfortable with JDeveloper as a true development tool. 

But as Floyd Teter said in the “Next Generation User Experience” session, the technology doesn’t matter anyway.  It’s all about how the applications fit with the business process.  And according to the presenters, Oracle is pioneering a new way to build user experiences through over 1,500 hours of field studies observing how customers do their work, listening to customers, over 4,000 hours of testing with customers, and enhancing the technology stack to make the apps work the way customers need them to. 

They found that the main end-user opportunities are:

• Streamline navigation between applications
• Close business process gaps
• Share context across boundaries
• Make apps easy to use like the internet is
• Provide a desktop-like user experience

I won’t go into the specifics of how Oracle is implementing all of these but I liked this antidote: When Oracle started watching their clients work they discovered the most popular application on the desktop was Notepad.  Why?  Because users had to take data from one application and enter it into another application. Obviously when you have to switch applications you lose time and your thought process is derailed.  Not to mention when you can’t find something (like the promotion guidelines during performance review time) and have to call someone for help. Just think how much productivity could be gained just by having this information easily accessible in one place!

And the user experience efforts are paying off.  According to Jeremy Ashley, Vice President Applications User Experience, Oracle is seeing productivity enhancements of over 50%, and the average productivity enhancement is 26%.  Impressive numbers indeed.

OK, that’s my brain dump for tonight.  Tomorrow is another (long) day.