New products were unveiled at PeopleSoft's Connect 2004
conference: the Total Ownership Initiative which includes some
value-add tools; a manufacturing tool; and Version 8.9 of its human
resources managment tool.
TOI will be integrated into both Enterprise and Enterprise One
suites. It is intended to speed up the installation of applications
and reduce support costs for IT.
It will include a visual comparison tool called Accelerated
Upgrade, which will enable application managers to see the
difference in screens between the old version and the new. The
comparison tool also compares old and new PeopleCode, the company's
scripting language.
The other piece of the IT deployment puzzle PeopleSoft will
address is how to take an old production system down. The new
system will steal a page from PC application upgrades and back up
data incrementally, backing up only the data and files that have
changed.
"Traditionally, it is done over a long weekend. We've reduced by
66% the amount of time it takes to bring the new system live," said
Rick Bergquist, PeopleSoft chief technical officer.
Also new in TOI is Interactive Service Repository, a hosted
customer support website that will contain more than 1,500
application integration points or web services provided by
PeopleSoft for its applications.
"We provide an integration point that can be implemented as a
web service, a file, or a database interface. It will also tell a
user if it is a web service or a flash file," said Bergquist.
The key attribute the repository has is a business process
orientation, according to Bergquist. If a user pulls up an
order-to-cash business process, the repository would pull up all
the interfaces that are relevant to the appropriate process.
The manufacturing tools unveiled at the conference focus on
suggesting methodologies to help manufacturers to create a
demand-driven manufacturing strategy.
Version 8.9 of its Enterprise human resources management
solution was also introduced, PeopleSoft reporting that it will
include 250 new features.
Ephraim Schwartz writes for Infoworld