PeopleSoft Inc. at the PeopleSoft Connect 2004 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday unveiled technology dubbed Total Ownership Initiative, which will be integrated into both Enterprise and EnterpriseOne suites and is intended to speed installation of applications and reduce support costs for IT.
In addition, the company introduced a solution for the demand-driven manufacturing model and Version 8.9 of its Enterprise Human Resources Management Solution (HRMS).
The Total Ownership Initiative will include a visual comparison tool called Accelerated Upgrade . With the comparison tool, IT application managers will be able 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 per cent the amount of time to bring the new system live,” said Rick Bergquist, PeopleSoft CTO.
Also new is Interactive Service Repository, a hosted customer support Web site that will contain greater 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 new demand-driven manufacturing tools unveiled Tuesday at the Connect conference focus on suggesting methodologies to help manufacturers create a demand-driven manufacturing strategy. Version 8.9 of the Human Resources solution will include 250 new features.
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