THE CAPTAIN'S CHAIR
John Hooper, Executive Director of Administrative Information Systems, CITC
What's Fusion anyway and do I have to go there already?
When UNTS purchased PeopleSoft's suite in June of 2002, we expected to have a long relationship with PeopleSoft which had been in business since 1987. PeopleSoft's enterprise application suite is the suite of purchased applications that are the core of the UNT System's Enterprise Information System or EIS. Needless to say, there was much consternation when Oracle Corporation began a hostile bid for PeopleSoft in June of 2003. At the time, Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle, announced that he intended to shut down PeopleSoft and move the PeopleSoft customers to Oracle's Enterprise Business Suite (EBS), a product that had not been selected by UNTS in a three way bakeoff between PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SCT. Since we were in the midst of an 18-month implementation of the suite of PeopleSoft products, this was discouraging news.
After a long and protracted battle including federal anti-trust rulings in Oracle's favor, the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger was completed in December of 2004.
After the merger, Oracle began talking of an aggressive time frame for moving the PeopleSoft and EBS customers to a new product suite called Fusion. This seemed to be the fulfillment of the prophecy to eliminate the PeopleSoft applications and move its customers onto a base built on Oracle technology. This was a great concern to most PeopleSoft customers because they all had a lot invested both in dollars and in human resources in the PeopleSoft products. Moving to Fusion would be another large investment in dollars and human resources. It would require disruption of institutional business processes to move to a new application paradigm. This was of even more concern to institutions like UNTS who had just come through an aggressive and taxing implementation.
Fortunately, Oracle realized that it would take longer to get to Fusion than they initially speculated and that there was a large part of the PeopleSoft purchased customer base that was not interested in moving to a new product line in the near or even intermediate future. In the spring of 2006, Oracle announced Applications Unlimited. According to the Oracle press release, "Applications Unlimited is Oracle's plan to continue providing ongoing enhancements to current Oracle Applications beyond the delivery of Oracle Fusion Applications. Applications Unlimited provides all Oracle Applications customers with more choice in their application and IT strategy, more visibility into product road maps, and more time to extract value from existing application investments. Applications Unlimited is driven by Oracle's ongoing commitment to protect and extend the application investments of its customers by providing them the choice to adopt value-creating applications and technology only when it meets their business needs."
Today, I am pleased to report that Oracle has delivered on this pledge. They have recently released 9.0 versions of their PeopleSoft suite and are working on their 9.1 versions for release in late 2008. Those 9.1 versions would be supported until 2013 or 2015 at an additional cost. We expect there will be versions beyond 9.1. Bottom line, UNTS can have many years before we might move to Fusion and we can make that decision when it makes sense based on the needs of the UNT System.
NEWS ROOM
Campus Solutions 8.9 Update!
Don Butler, Application Team Manager, UNT Student Contributor Services, CITC/EIS Upgrade Project Manager
 Did you happen to notice the unexplained "chill" in the air on Monday, April 2nd? Well I'm here to give you an explanation. That was the date UNTS implemented the "development freeze" on our current Learning Solutions 8.0 modules in EIS. From that date, until we go live with PeopleSoft's Campus Solutions 8.9 on Monday, November 26, 2007, only compliance and regulatory changes will be made to the existing system. And you were worried about global warming!
You may be asking yourself what progress has been made on the upgrade since the last issue of theEnterprise. If you thought we were all just waiting for the "freeze", you would be mistaken. We finalized contract negotiations with one of our upgrade service providers and a Human Capital Management Upgrade Professional has been working with our HR/Payroll/Benefits team as we analyze what impact the upgrade will have on that module. Our PeopleSoft Application Infrastructure Management team has been busy refreshing the data in the EIS upgrade environments and performing an upgrade cycle against production data taken on the 9th of January. They are also busy synchronizing the patch level of our upgrade environments with our production environment.
The timing of our upgrade plan allowed many of our functional and technical team members to attend this year's HEUG/Alliance conference sponsored by Oracle/PeopleSoft. At this conference they were able to attend sessions about the upgrade and network with other universities that have already been thru the upgrade.
As you can tell upgrade project members have been busy. Now that the "freeze" is here even more of us will be dedicating the majority of our time to ensure that this first major upgrade to EIS is a success.
Campus Solutions (CS) 8.9 Upgrade Kickoff Meeting
Cathy Gonzalez, EIS Training, Communications, and Administration Manager, CITC
More than 60 individuals from UNT and the Health Science Center (HSC) came together on February 6, 2007, to officially kickoff a significant upgrade to EIS. The University of North Texas System (UNTS) is upgrading from Oracle/PeopleSoft's Learning Solutions 8.0 to Campus Solutions 8.9. The project is a collaborative effort between UNT and HSC information technology and functional teams to plan and execute the version upgrade.
The meeting was lead by Don Butler, CITC Application Team Manager/8.9 Upgrade Project Manager. Don provided a project overview as well as status and timeline information. John Hooper, Executive Director for CITC's Administrative Information Systems division, presented a historical perspective about EIS.
The upgrade team structure is defined with the EIS Program Governance Structure Pyramid as a Global Project Team. Product Family Heads and project Module Management Group coordinators for each of the Campus Solutions modules presented status reports along with team building statements for meeting participants. Areas represented were Admissions, Contributor Relations, Human Resources, Payroll, Budgets, Student Financial Aid, Student Financials, Student Records, as well as Campus Community, Security, and Portal.
The meeting concluded with Cathy Gonzalez, EIS Training, Communications, and Administration Manager, discussing upgrade training and communication efforts. She also covered information for functional users who will be utilizing workspace at the Research Park during the upgrade to facilitate working relationships with outside consultants and CITC technical staff.
Information about the meeting can be viewed at http://eis.unt.edu/89upgrade/events. News, resources, and the current status of the CS 8.9 upgrade are available on the Web at http://eis.unt.edu/89upgrade.
Online Version of 1098T Available for Students
Dan Strange, Student Finance Team Lead, CITC
Since February of 2006, the EIS Tools & User Services group figured out how to build a dynamic PDF document and show it to a user on the PeopleSoft Application Server. UNT may be the only PeopleSoft installation in the country with this capability.
The Student Finance department made use of this new functionality for students. Using the student self-service portion of myUNT portal, students can see online and reprint an exact replica of the 1098T which was originally sent to them in the mail.
SUCCESS GALLERY
ePro Enhancement Provides Improved Vendor Search
Craig Thorp, Associate Director (Assets, Travel, Central Receiving, Surplus, Customer Service), UNT Purchasing and Payment Services
Purchasing and Payment Services (PPS), in cooperation with CITC's Fiscal Systems Development Team, recently developed an e-Pro enhancement to provide an improved vendor search in EIS. The enhancement provides a way for ePro coordinators, and eventually all basic security users of the Financials model in EIS, the capability to search vendors by the product and/or service they provide. Additionally, once the vendor is found, the ability to access the contact information kept current by PPS in the Vendor file will be available to users. Features such as direct URL links and contact numbers will be accessible from inside the module.
This enhancement is a huge improvement and time saver for ePro, P-Card, and Asset users. They can now access the 20,000 plus vendors in the Vendor file along with the most current contact information available.
The DST changes and EIS: What Happened?
Brian Richman, Programmer/Analyst, EIS Technical Services Team, CITC
The fateful day arrived. Technicians and programmers all over the country were up all night and for some at least it was a very stressful time. For some people, databases failed, applications crashed and transactions were rejected. Much sleep was lost and ulcers grew to monster proportions.
For the UNT EIS system, however, the "big event" appears to have been a bit of an anti-climax! Even the cnn.com web site had removed all mention of the DST change from the technology section of its web site by the middle of the change over day (Sunday 3/11/07) and most TV stations were more concerned about telling us all not to be late for work on Monday.
Of course, we can't recover the hours of missed sleep and we can't charge anyone for the weeks of work everyone put into making the change a non-event by patching and upgrading the server software (and in some cases even the firmware that runs the equipment itself), but the fact remains that we at least appear to have got past it all with remarkably little impact.
This is, however, not the case everywhere and for all computer users. Did you remember to download the updates to your handheld PDA? Did you notice that the set top boxes installed by some cable and TV service providers were not exactly certain just what the time was for a while on Sunday?
From an initial scan of the media, it looks like most of the problems with the change over to DST were confined to people who failed to keep their PC's updated with the latest software versions. Even here on campus, we still had a very small number of PC's that despite being (mostly) up to date still had old versions of some software installed on them that needed to be removed before everything functioned properly.
This raises the prospect of dealing with complex systems management. As the interrelated 'web' of software that is today's personal computing environment is nowhere as simple as it was, even as recently as five years ago. Today we see ever more software that relies on other software simply to load, let alone run properly! It's not just restricted to the operating system that runs your PC either. Simple programs can download java modules from the world wide web that are used to run yet other programs that make use of applications that store data in databases on yet more servers out there on the web and so it goes on.
Even as recently as five years ago, UNTS relied on a centralized, mainframe computer to handle its core business data processing requirements. Today's information technology scene could not be more different; our EIS setup reflects that change very well indeed. The UNTS EIS system is a very distributed network of computers. EIS is your PC (or Mac or Linux workstation or whatever you use to view it), it is the web front end processor, it is the application server, it is the database server, and although I am talking in the singular, there are duplicates and clusters of more than one particular machine for each of these features of the system.
We must also not overlook the network. If you are on campus, the network will be provided by UNT, but that is not always the case. In fact we at UNT are renowned for having one of the largest "non-traditional" student bodies (i.e. commuters and off-campus students) in the State of Texas.
So why is an understanding of this modern complex interaction important when it comes to something as apparently simple as Daylight Saving Time? The answer is that even if we get the EIS servers and UNTS networks working 100% correctly, and you have updated your PC 100% correctly, all this hard work can fall down in the end. The cause of the failure can be one small overlooked element that is not updated or left out of some maintenance schedule especially if that component is outside of the UNTS campus environments.
What this tells us is that no matter how carefully we look, we can nearly always find an interaction in the software that we didn't expect and that in this more complex multi-user, multi-server, multi-supplier world, the need for best practices in what we do is even more important than ever before.
Successful Upgrade to GAB Data Center
Cathy Gonzalez, EIS Training, Communications, and Administration Manager, CITC
An electrical shutdown of the General Academic Building (GAB) on the UNT Denton campus occurred the weekend of February 24-25, 2007. The primary reason for the electrical shutdown was the installation of a generator that will provide power to the computing data center in the GAB in the case of extended loss of city power. The GAB data center houses the largest number of computing resources that are critical to institutional administrative and academic functions.
The entire project was a huge effort by the UNT Computing and Information Technology Center (CITC) and UNT Facilities along with many other institutional groups working together to accomplish this one goal. The project took over a year of planning. Consulting groups had to bid on the project and submit detailed plans. More then 20 staff from Facilities and 60 CITC staff assisted in the planning and/or participated in the weekend project. The project was lead by Steve Vocelka, Computer Operations Manager, CITC. Tremendous support and assistance by UNT Facilities staff lead by Glen Haubold, Associate Director of Facilities Maintenance, was critical in the project's success.
Cooperative efforts between computing teams ensured an orderly shutdown and restart of critical systems housed in the GAB data center. These systems included EIS, WebCT services, and Research systems. Users of these systems were given timely notice of unavailability and contingency planning for needed services accommodated when possible, particularly for Academic departments dependent on the GAB for computing services.
The following is a recap of what was completed over the weekend of February 24-25:
- 300-watt generator installation
- new transfer switch installation
- UPS 400 amp breaker to a 600 amp service upgrade
- thousands of feet of electrical cable installed
- breaker sets for the Liebert for generator support and quad connections for large floor fans installed
- breaker panels rewired to correct phase issues
- additional circuit breaker panels added that provide 114 new circuit capabilities
- two A/C units rewired
The successful shutdown and powering up of the computing facilities also afforded CITC the opportunity to simulate a disaster recovery process. This project has helped CITC analyze certain issues that occur during a disaster in regards to staffing, equipment locations, and how UNT accesses various components of its computing infrastructure. The findings of the analysis are being used to update CITC's Disaster Recovery procedures regarding the dependencies that were learned from this exercise.
Work still continues on completion of this critical project. Although the generator is installed (sitting on the pad), the GAB still does not have emergency generator power. A whole myriad of tests must be completed to ensure all components are working correctly. Kohler (the manufacturer) will "commission" the generator and turn it over to UNT Facilities after those tests are completed. Load testing of the generator will be conducted during this phase. The testing was completed the week of April 9, 2007, and we now have a backup generator for emergency power in the GAB.
Pictures of the weekend efforts are available at the Facilities website:
http://www.facilities.unt.edu/GABgenerator.pdf
TECHNICAL CAFE
Implementation of New Backup Systems
Kevin Cox, Computer Systems Manager, Data Warehouse & Business Intelligence, CITC
In January, problems were noted with overnight refresh disruptions of budget summary data in the data warehouse. Several factors had contributed to this situation, factors that ranged from the level of activity generated by institutional registration to changes in the database area. The good news is projects have been completed that in the end provide a far more stable and efficient platform on which the data warehouse is built.
The first and most important project is a new and constantly running backup system to the production environments for the Learning Solutions and Finance modules in EIS. The backup system provides immediate access to production data by the jobs that build the data warehouse. This change cuts anywhere from 7-11 hours off the time it takes to do the overnight build and insulates us from the types of significant delays that occur during high activity periods, such as registration.
The new backup system is constantly running Oracle software named DataGuard. It has been in place and is being used by production jobs to create the data warehouse since February 14, 2007. The advantage to using DataGuard is that we no longer have to rely on the problematic and lengthy "cloning" process that was previously being used. By being able to push back the nightly backup start time from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., we capture more daily "end of business" data. Also, with the standby process instead of the clone process, jobs which take the EIS data and denormalize it for appropriate usage in the data warehouse (known as ETL jobs) are completing before 2:00 a.m. instead of after 9:00 a.m. The result of these improvements has effectively lengthened the overnight processing window and with more production data being captured every night in the data warehouse. Mike Murdock, Programmer/Analyst, on the Oracle Database Administration team, deserves special recognition for his great job implementing DataGuard.
A second significant project has been an upgrade of the Informatica software that provides analysis and reporting capabilities to the data warehouse. The upgrade provides new capabilities for our data warehousing team as they continue to add analysis and reporting data to the warehouse. Along with the software upgrade, Informatica was migrated to a new production application server running only the Informatica software. This change ensures resource allocation and utilization for the overnight data warehouse refreshes. The software upgrade keeps the data warehouse team up-to-date with new enhancements and features as well as new optimizations to previous workflows, sessions, and mappings.
The third and final project was the Oracle databases being some of the first at UNT to be upgraded to Oracle's latest 10g platform. The Oracle 10g migration for the data warehousing databases was completed for development databases in January 2007.
The upgrade projects were completed with the assistance of CITC's Oracle Database Administration team. Many thanks go to Eric Duchemin and his team for their noteworthy efforts working on these projects.
EIS FAST FACTS
Web-Based EIS Calendars
Need to keep up with what is happening for EIS? Web-based calendars are now available for change management (maintenance/planned outages), training, and meeting events relating to EIS. The calendars are linked to GroupWise using GWExtranet. GWExtranet is a simple, yet smart and powerful application that dynamically publishes on the web any GroupWise calendar and folder information from one or multiple GroupWise accounts or resources. Technical and functional staff associated with EIS post to the calendars from inside their UNT GroupWise accounts. GWExtranet provides the handy capability of viewing the calendars individually or as composite views.
The EIS calendars are available at: http://eis.unt.edu/calendar/
EIS Upgrade Quick Links
TRAINING LAB
Reporting Tool Training
Computer-based training is available for Crystal Reports 8.5 in Skillport. Crystal Reports is used to produce reports of queries run against EIS data. Information regarding how to log in to Skillport is available at http://www.unt.edu/cbt/.
Internet Explorer Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts in an Internet Explorer browser window can save time, wear and tear on your "mouse" hand, and enhance your EIS experience. The following are some of the more popular and easy ones to use:
[F11] |
Toggle full screen mode -- frees up space to display more of a page in EIS; press [F11] to toggle back |
[Ctrl]F |
Search for selected text on a page |
[Ctrl]N |
Open current page in a new window |
[Alt]D |
Select text in Address bar |
[Alt]Home |
Go to your home page |
[Alt]Left Arrow |
Go to previous page |
[Ctrl]B |
Open Organize Favorites dialog box |
[Ctrl]D |
Add current page to Favorites |
Training Calendar
WebCT Training
EIS WebCT training is available for faculty or staff new to EIS. Courses available are:
|
