The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

OOW11 Day 1 Round-up October 4, 2011

Our flight in on Sunday night was delayed so we missed Larry’s Sunday keynote, although as there was no mention of PeopleSoft (unsurprising) or Fusion (more surprising) this wasn’t as disappointing as it could have been.

We started today with a tour of the exhibition area.  There’s far too much to take in in one day, but special mention is deserved for the stand that let brave volunteers grapple an actual Sumo wrestler. There’s a large area of demo-pods, where you can walk up and ask specialists either for a quick demo or about an issue that you need help with. I’ve met some of the guys behind PeopleTools (who’ve previously only been names before) and had a great demo of Fusion HCM.  It’s really encouraging (for PeopleSoft, at least) to witness the crowds around the PeopleSoft booths compared to other products – it’s noticeably busier.

Of the sessions I’ve been to today I started with Shawn Haynes of Cardinal Point talking about Workcenter pages.  I’ve not done much 8.51 work – the client I’ve been working on is 8.50 – so a lot of it was new to me.  It seems a really powerful concept though, and Shawn is an engaging and knowledgeable speaker. He also gets bonus points for having the courage to go with a live demo – always good to see!  I cornered him afterwards for a couple of questions and he seems a thoroughly nice chap too.

Next up was William Varma on Performance Monitor.  This was a much lower level session, and contained a lot of info, not only on Performance Monitor but also some good intel on pre-loading cache too.

After lunch was Humair Ghauri and Daan van Egmond on Fusion HCM: Enterprise grade SaaS.  I really enjoyed this session for a number of reasons.  Both are excellent speakers, and I can recall Daan from many years ago when he presented on PeopleTools to the UKOUG.  What impressed me most was the strength of the Fusion SaaS offering, and the breadth – there is a complete set of options, whether you want on-premise, hybrid or cloud (both single or multi-tenant). You get the advantages of everyone on the same release, regular updates etc without the downside of being on a proprietary platform  It’s also very extensible, so you have the ability to tailor (not customise, but tailor!) the application to the client’s needs. I’m hoping to get a look at the tools behind this at a demo pod during the week.

Finally I went to Jeff Robbins PeopleTools Roadmap session.  Jeff also had a lot of live demos (which was bold considering the number in attendance) and shared a lot about 8.52, upcoming Portal functionality plus glimpses of what’s a little further out.  The one question he wasn’t asked, was “where is Tools 8.52?”.

I’ll try to add more during the rest of the week.