I apologize for the snarky post in advance, but I’m in a goofy mood after a long week of conferencing, and this really has been a phenomenal but exhausting conference.  I’m looking forward to Aerosmith tonight and a bit of relaxation.

What we Got in PeopleTools (that I haven’t talked about yet)

• Peoplesoft Projects Community Development Platform.  Check it out!
  

• More debugging features:  Stack window that shows which functions we’ve been in, and tweak the values of anything in the component buffer.
• Reporting Console consolidates run controls, queries, process monitor and report manager.  I like it already.
• Connected Queries let you connect 1 or more queries together to preserve the parent/child relationships.  Then feed this to XML publisher for easier reporting than ever.
• Charting Capabilities – Everyone loves to show off the new Org Chart features, and yep it’s cool and I’ve seen it in so many demos I’m about sick of org charts.  There’s a good chance you can do different kinds of charts in app designer too.
• Rich Text Editor – Check the box on any long field on a page and suddenly you can change fonts, bold, italicize, color, resize, embed HTML and even pictures.  You can control which features you turn on to foil the hacker element that may be lurking in your enterprise.  Think how happy your recruiters will be now that they can make their job postings pretty!

 What We Want in PeopleTools (that we talked about this afternoon)

If you haven’t seen the wish list for PeopleTools 8.51, you can find it here:  http://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/2009/09/got_peopletools_enhancements_b.html.  PLEASE vote for your favorite feature, or post your own.  About 75 of my closest friends got together in a session this afternoon to tell Oracle what we really really want.  Here are the ones I remember discussing in some detail:

• An improved IDE.  Now that we have to deal with Application Packages and an order-of-magnitude more PCode than prior releases, would a little code completion, inline documentation and syntax checking kill you?
• Version Control.  We’ve only been waiting for 10+ years.  According to executive at the meeting, we almost got it in 8.5, but it reduced project migration performance 40-50% which was unacceptable.  So close, and yet so far… If you want it before the next decade, check out Version Control from Grey Sparling .  It's probably better than what Oracle will release anyway.
• How about letting us look at object properties without having to lock the object?  That’s GOT to be an easy change.
• User Status in security so we’ll know WHY a user is locked.  And while we’re at it, more user modification tracking (with comments) so we’ll know who made changes and why changes were made.  As much as I enjoy telling IT auditors we can’t meet their requirements in this version of PeopleTools, this is probably a good idea anyway.
• Running App Designer on Linux.  From what I could tell, this ain’t gonna happen so get over it, or get virtualization.

 What you need to know about Fusion Applications

As widely expected, Larry Ellison discussed Fusion applications in his keynote this year.  And we actually got to see a pretty cool demo without the standard save harbor slide about how features might be pulled if someone deems it necessary.  But overall there wasn’t any new information about features from what was communicated last year, and there was no definite timeline laid out.  So here’s what you need to know:

• Fusion will be released next year.  The oracle of Oracle has spoken.
• Fusion is "Code Complete", which means for the scope that was defined all of the code has been checked in.  The Fusion applications are now in testing.
• Speaking of scope, it has functionality for everything you might expect (GL, AP, HR, etc) except for manufacturing.  Sorry GM, you won’t be implementing Fusion anytime soon.
• Fusion applications were "architected around a service oriented architecture".  So it is really easy to plug modules in and out based on where they need to be in your business process flows.  Plug a Fusion module into PeopleSoft, or plug a PeopleSoft module into Fusion.  Build your own Frankenstein application to meet your business needs and have it your way.  (OK GM, if you really want you can implement Fusion and keep your current manufacturing software).
• The Fusion User Interface is driven by Business Intelligence, and Business Intelligence along with web 2.0 collaboration features are baked in at every level.  According to Ellison, "We tell you what you need to know. We tell you what you need to do.  We tell you how to do it.  And if you can’t do it by yourself we tell you who in your organization you need to collaborate with to get your job done."  Man, sounds like work just got a whole lot easier for a lot of us IT people, huh!
• Fusion is ready to run on site, or in the cloud. It’s SAAS ready.  And it can tell if your SAAS provider or your IT group is meeting the agreed upon service levels.  I'll bet DBA's just can’t WAIT until this is in all of their environments!

Other stuff Ellison said that you might want to know:

• Oracle VM runs on Windows, Linux and soon Solaris.  I’ve really got to do some research on Oracle VM especially since I know nothing about it and PeopleSoft VM’s are going to be delivered to run under it.
• Exadata 2 rocks.  It’s faster than anything for both data warehouse (where it really, really rocks) and OLTP.  That includes in-memory databases.  And it’s not all that expensive, for Oracle that is.
• If you want to give Oracle your configuration and usage information, they’ll load it to their servers and analyze it with other customers with similar configurations.  If a bug gets reported, they’ll let you know about the problem and recommend a patch that’ll fix the problem and work in your environment.  Auto-apply it with Enterprise Manager unless the problem is with PeopleSoft, then you’ll still have to use change assistant, sorry.
• You can map your key business metrics to the underlying infrastructure that’s supporting them, then if a business metric is falling behind and somebody wants to blame IT, they can drill down to the infrastructure component that’s causing the problem.  Think service level tracking meets Big Brother.  Make sure your SAAS provider gives you access to THIS tool!

One more thing:   I was able to confirm with Paco Aubrejuan when we chatted earlier that all of the great information coming out of the User Experience team is being shared with the Applications unlimited program, so you can expect the usability improvements to continue to flow into PeopleSoft going forward.  In fact, Oracle shares intellectual property like that with the various groups as part of their normal process.

Ok, I’m off to the party.  Later.