Wow, what a week in San Francisco! With over 60,000 attendees and a massively broad set of topics, there was a lot to consume at OpenWorld this year. We know not everyone can fit OpenWorld into their schedule, so we will summarize the conference in three key points for you
Cloud
There wasn’t a single sign at OpenWorld that didn’t have the word “Cloud” on it! Literally, Cloud was everywhere. It was clear that Oracle is now giving every customer multiple options for moving some or all of their applications to the Cloud. And even your entire infrastructure, if that’s what you want.
Larry’s big keynote was all about how Oracle’s Cloud is faster and cheaper than Amazon AWS. Larry doesn’t even think it is close for that matter. Some of the performance statistics he presented were eye-opening for sure.
For PeopleSoft, they will now be delivering “Cloud Manager” in 8.56 which is due out “very soon”. Cloud Manager will make managing PeopleSoft in the Oracle Cloud incredibly easy. Need a training environment for a week? Click, click, deployed. Want to copy your development environment into Oracle Cloud? Click, click. You get the point. Cloud Manager will help spin up, tear down, copy and migrate PeopleSoft environments and there are no command lines. This is all via the Cloud Manager web page. And it will have special hooks into MyOracle Support and Oracle Cloud that other cloud providers will not have.
As for IntraSee, we announced a new collaboration with Oracle to make taking steps to the Cloud much easier. Starting in November we will be offering our world-class UX solutions to our clients who are looking to utilize the many Oracle PaaS (Platform as a Service) applications, such as the Content & Experience cloud and the Application Builder Cloud Services (ABCS). This new integration fits perfectly into our Usability First methodology. Rest assured, that as you adopt more and more Oracle Cloud services, that we will provide you with a seamless user experience every step of the way. Read more about the announcement here: https://gideontaylor.com/announcements/video-oracle-intrasee-usability-cloud-collaboration/
Elastic
Elastic Search is a new search engine that will be replacing SES (Secure Enterprise Search) in an upcoming PeopleTools 8.55 patch and officially in 8.56. We will be writing up a deep dive post on Elastic soon, so check back here for that. You know that Elastic is solid and scales because even Wikipedia is using it. Elastic is a welcome addition to our search user experience. At OpenWorld they announced that SES and Elastic will only co-exist on the 8.55.xx release. Once you move to 8.56, SES will be shut off. This is important to plan for. If you want to do a live swap without downtime from SES to Elastic, plan to do it on 8.55 and not during the 8.56 upgrade.
Oracle also announced that SES will be supported for 18 months from the availability of Elastic, so customers will have time. You will need to stay on 8.55 to enjoy that support, however. Finally, Wells Fargo, the beta customer for Elastic, said it was, “a walk in the park compared to SES”. We will certainly take that walk and have more to announce on IntraSee products and Elastic soon.
Update (November 3, 2016): See our Blog post on Elastic
Fluid
The final topic was Fluid. Some customers have implemented some Fluid features, but based on the show of hands vote in one session, a good 90% have not yet started with Fluid. The biggest news is that Oracle announced that they no longer plan to convert every component to Fluid. Complex components just don’t work well in Fluid, so they have come up with another plan. In 8.56, Oracle will be releasing “Classic+” (classic plus). This is simply a CSS stylesheet that makes classic pages look more like Fluid. This means your buttons, edit fields and labels will look the same and it addresses a major UX challenge with the mixed styles of Fluid and Classic.
This also means that customers who once planned to convert customizations to Fluid, may now opt not to. That Classic+ may be enough if mobile phone support is not important for that particular customization. This will create some other UX challenges on small devices, but we will talk more about that in a future blog post. But rest easy, at IntraSee we can provide mobile capability for all your classic components.
Customers who presented on their Fluid projects all had common things to say. First, you have to keep Fluid pages simple. Complexity, like too many edit fields, nested scroll levels and the like, do not work well in Fluid. Customers also shared feedback that their development teams were somewhat unprepared for the amount of web developer knowledge they needed to work with Fluid. If you find yourself in the same predicament, contact us below and we can help. We have mastered the art of combining both Fluid and Classic components in one seamless user experience.
In Conclusion
It was a great conference this week. It is clear that Oracle expects that most organizations will be mostly in the Cloud in the next 5-10 years. If you want to talk more about your options in getting to the Cloud and how IntraSee can help get you there at your pace, contact us below.
