Now, I know I said that I would update you on Day 2 of the Summit the next day, but there was sooooo much, and then the Alliance straight after it that its taken me some time to come down from the heady days of Vegas. But I did promise and so here's what the eBS PAG did on the second day of Summit 2014.
Well, we started off as we always do with reviewing our goals for 2013/2014 and how we did against them, and then looked forward to what we plan for the future. I'll do a separate item on our goals later as I think its best we update you on where we came from, where we're going and you can assist us in acheiving those goals.
After this, we had a discussion about our forthcoming meeting with Cliff Godwin from Oracle. For those of you who don't know, Cliff is the Senior Vice President for e-Business Suite Development and during this meeting (which we had on the Monday) the PAG have an opportunity to discuss with Cliff the progress that has been made in the development of the e-Business Suite in the last year, the developments that we would like to see from e-Business in the coming year and more importantly how best we, as the PAG, can work with Cliff and his team to strategically and tactically develop the system for the benefit of you, our members.
After this, we had a great session on the future of Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence, covering where Oracle are taking the products. There was also some exciting news about Hyperion Cloud and how Oracle have structured licensing for this towards the HE sector. For more information, speak to your Oracle Account Manager.
Straight after this, we had another excellent session from Oracle on the new 12c database. More forward thinking from Oracle on this and how it can potentially help in the utilisation of your infrastructure and decrease the time it will take to clone new instances. e-Business Suite R12 is certified with 12c database (https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/12_1_0_1_db).
Over lunch, we met with Mark Armstrong who discussed with us the announcement that was to be made on the Monday, which was extremely interesting. If somehow you have missed the announcement, the more details can be found at http://www.heug.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=1731
The afternoon involved a long awaited session by the eBS PAG. Many of the PAG have over the last couple of years been working closely with Michael Webb from Oracle who is overseeing the development of Procurement in Fusion and we have been involved in many discussion with him on Encumbrance Accounting and Budgetary Control (EABC) and we finally managed to get him to Alliance to show us the fruits of our labour ... and its looking good. Keep a look out for announcements on when this is available.
After this, we have a cross PAG session with the PeopleSoft Grants PAG on the new Grants module being developed in Fusion ... and again its starting to take shape. The eBS PAG are ensuring that the development of this crucial module to HE sector is being developed between the PS Grants and the eBS PAGs to ensure that all members gain the most from this development, obtaining the best functions from both products to create a module we can all be proud of.
Lastly we had a fantastic session with Joe Burkhard on how Oracle is using technology and data to track students progress in the hope that this can be used to provide additional support to students BEFORE they know they need it by looking at trends, but to also look at how the experiences of over performing students can be used to create a better student experience.
A fantastic two days for the eBS PAG with great sessions from Oracle, some real positivity from the PAG in going forward - 2014 is going to be a great year me'thinks!!