Two hot topics - PeopleSoft maintenance and the database split

By Tina Thorstenson posted 08-06-2010 10:46 PM

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The HEUG Board met with Oracle representatives last week to discuss PeopleSoft maintenance (bundles/fixes) and the upcoming 'split' for the 9.0/9.1 HCM and 9.0 Campus Solutions (CS) enterprise applications. This discussion pertains to institutions who run both PeopleSot HCM and CS in a combined database instance. As many of you know, in order to get to the HCM 9.1 release, it is required that institutions split their HCM and CS applications into separate databases.

Here's the brief update we received on the 'split'... Oracle indicated that their application integration enhancements to support the split are on-track for delivery. It appears that the delivery is targeted for the October time frame. The timing of this delivery brings up the question of the support window for 9.0 HCM/CS customers. The HEUG Board is engaged with Oracle to explore the possibility of deferring extended support fees. No matter how this works out, institutions should consider planning to start their upgrades in the beginning of 2011.

Following the 'split' discussion, we moved on to the subject of maintenance. Over the course of the past year, institutions have had some difficulty applying Oracle-delivered maintenance in the combined PeopleSoft HCM/CS environment. There were two instances where HCM bundles caused some problems in Campus Solutions functions. These difficulties have resulted in costly, resource-intensive research and analysis at inopportune times. Oracle acknowledged that the recent PeopleSoft maintenance was unacceptable. They have assured us that they have tightened the development coordination by improving cross-application engineering coordination and testing. As a community, we should expect to see improvements in this area. The HEUG Board will continue to monitor the situation and advocate on behalf of our community.

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Tina Thorstenson

08-25-2010 04:55 PM

Split Solutions Follow-up - Batch Processing

I checked in with our friends at Oracle on the batch processing topic and received a helpful response from Campus Solutions (CS) Development. Here is what I received.

"For Oracle-delivered SQR and COBOL processes in CS 9.0 today, updates happen directly at the table level, but an additional insert is made to an auxiliary table that is used to trigger a person_basic_synch message (by an app engine process).

There is also a variant of this for some higher volume loads that leverage something called CS_PERSON_SERVICE, but it in turns fires person basic synch.

The result is that all delivered batch updates will have information flow through Person_basic_synch and thus keep separate instances informed (depending upon the type of instance separation)."

So, the delivered updates, from the CS perspective, seem to be covered, but any customizations or additional processes created by individual customers would have to be reviewed. The TAG has suggested that Oracle update documentation to provide more guidance along these lines. For now, this gives us a little more information to think about...

Julie Parmenter

08-17-2010 02:36 PM

Splitting up is hard to do

I agree. There was a time in our initial implementation when we had difficulty coordinating our HCM and CS systems but we have long ago determined how to live happily together. The split has no benefit to us and just forces into another long project with no value to our users. However if the split is inevitable and if Oracle is going to extend support for HCM 9.0, will they please go ahead and do it? That way we can more appropriately plan the year ahead.

Larry Roux

08-11-2010 10:20 AM

Split Solutions

From everything I have seen Oracle intends to deliver Web Service based solutions for integrating between HCM and CS, largely intended to be used with their HECH (Hub) product.

While having a Web Service solution available will be nice, it will not cover the majority of person adds/updates which happen via SQRs (ie TS189). The HEUG Board needs to push Oracle to recognize this and provide solutions that will work outside of the Web Service arena.

Also, being forced to purchase a third product (HECH) or develop our own solution is going to be a huge incentive for our administration to begin looking harder at other products.

The fact that we spend so much time, money and resources on infrastructure changes that have no positive impact on the end users is making PeopleSoft less and less a Value Added proposition. The Feature Pack idea has failed largely due to a lack of any useful functionality or time to implement the few items that could be useful.

Perhaps the discussion should revolve around NOT splitting and going back to an upgrade path.

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