Issue #47 – 26th June 2013
Thanks from Mathew from Boise Inc who is our 500th subscriber
News and Latest Developments
Oracle Q4 Results
Oracle’s Q4 results disappointed in a few areas. Despite Oracle’s assertion that SaaS and engineered hardware sales were up, overall sales just missed the target. Commentary from Information Week can be found here.
Oracle Partners with Microsoft
Oracle Partners with Microsoft
Much of Oracle’s earnings update was taken up by Larry proclaiming that he was going to make a series of announcements this week that would reshape the cloud. The first of these is a deal which makes Oracle Linux, Database, Weblogic and Java available on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. For two companies that have competing database products to come to a deal like this is a real surprise – and a closer partnership than many had predicted.
PeopleSoft 9.2.001 Patched images released
The updated (patched) versions of the PeopleSoft images within VirtualBox (akaPeopleSoft Update Manager) have been released for HCM and Financials (Support login required).
Functional
Inside Enterprise Software Development
A guest post on ZDNet by Holger Mueller about the inner workings of Enterprise Development. How do they decide which updates to make, and whether a particular fix is within maintenance or not?
Innovations in PeopleSoft Project Costing WorkCenters
The Cardinal Point team look at some of the new WorkCenters that come with PeopleSoftv9.2, with particular focus on Project Costing.
The bumpy road from HR to the CEO chair
The bumpy road from HR to the CEO chair
Steve Boese charts the progress of Mary Barra. Mary is currently General Motors Chief Product Officer, and previously held the post of HR Director. She’s being tipped as a future CEO of the company. The path from HR to CEO isn’t a well trodden one, so what makes Mary different?
Technical
New PeopleTools 8.53 Branding Tools
The venerable Jim Marion returns with a post on the new component which allows you to upload Images, CSS, HTML and JavaScript via the PIA, plus a set of iScripts to enable you to make use of these new objects.
Cross-browser PeopleSoft Bookmarklets
This is a great blog that was pointed out by Succeeder Dave. It has a list of bookmarklets – you can save these to your browser like bookmarks/favourites – which take you to a particular component (regardless of which environment you’re in).
There’s an entry from the ‘PeopleSoft Blog’ for the second week running. This time the topic is the extra setup needed if you want to add mouse-over popups to customised pages.
Reading
Cloud, automation to alter offshore outsourcing equation
Larry Dignan (Editor in Chief of ZDNet) postulates that automation and cloud computing may just undo the outsourcing boom of the early 2000s. Can some of the tasks that have been offshored be accomplished via automation instead?
Eric Kimberling on the IT Toolbox blog talks about the effect of customisation. Although the title sounds pretty damning, the article treads the balance nicely between “customization can create problems during implementation” and “Vanilla ERP systems can create strategic disadvantages”.
Holger Mueller – Constellation Research’s newest recruit – talks about the newly released Oracle 12c database, and what it will do for the current state of multi-tenancy.
Bob Warfield on the Smoothspan blog discusses Google’s move to can its Reader product (which seems bizarre as many other companies are building RSS Reader products). Why is Google doing it, and will it be a strategic error?
Infographic
Data Proliferation
An amusing summary of the state of personal data in 2013, in pictorial form.
And Finally…
They don’t build them like they used to! 
They build them much, much better. In an interesting experiment in car safety, a modern Chevy was crashed into one from 50 years ago. The difference in occupant protection is astounding, spotted by Rands.
The PeopleSoft Weekly newsletter 