Here is a recap from Oracle Open World '08 of the improvements Oracle are including in their next release.
1) Big Focus on User Experience.
Oracle has incorporated some of their
advances in Fusion, and it looks like PeopleSoft is moving forwards too.Some of the improvements will also be backwards compatible - so you
can have a v8.4 App running Tools 8.50 and get ~50% of the improvements.
Feature Available only with v9.1 App
are New Grids (sortable, Drag/Drop etc), Updated Stylesheet, Rich Text Editor, Mouse-over Popups, & IM Presence (eg. Beehive, Yahoo etc)
The new menu mentioned above can be seen below. The sidebar is goneanf they have drop-downs from a top menu (click for bigger).
The biggest winner may be the partial page refresh. Any prompt
- instead of triggering an entire page refresh - will pop up a modal
window and using AJAX will issue a partial page refresh. Much less
data going over the wire, and hopefully improved performance.
The auto-complete/type ahead also applies to lookup prompts. As you
type, PeopleSoft checks what you're typing against the available values.
The recent visits menu will save time by negating the need to trawl
through the menus for the components we all use the most often.
2) Lots of SOA and Web Services Improvements are able to expose App Engines and Queries as Web Services (in addition to
App Packages and CIs).
3) Reporting
In addition to the expected hype of XMLP/BIP and OBIEE there is
mention of 'BI in Context' and the ability to use Connected
Queries.
This is where a Query can call another 'child query', and
they can be nested down n-levels. Useful for XMLP ...
Also, Hyperion Essbase will allow clients to export data to Excel, manipulate it, and then load it back into PeopleSoft again.
4) Enterprise 2.0
Introduction of some Web 2.0 functionality. Lots of talk about
collaboration, integration, tagging and wikis. The screenshot below
shows some of this, including RSS, a discussion list, calendaring,
voting and a document repository.
5) Platforms
For OSes there are some 64-bit servers included (Windows and Linux),
and - amongst other things - 32bit Linux and Windows 2000 are dropped.
For Databases in comes Oracle 11g and SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2000 is dropped.
Tuxedo gets an upgrade to 10.1, and WebLogic up to 10.
6) Other items
- Improvements to Data Archive Manager
- Improvements in PeopleTools security (user access reporting, delivered LDAP integration, Web Service Security, SFTP)
7) So when is it out?
The answer to this is that no-one wants to say. It was originally
slated for 2008, but the latest I heard was the first half of '09.
