Oracle Continues to Develop PeopleSoft HCM

With a new feature pack for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management 9.1, Oracle brings a more consumer-like feel to its core software for human resources processes.
Six years after one of Oracle’s biggest acquisitions, users of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management software continue to receive updates to their core HR package, as they did again late last week with the release of a new feature pack for Oracle PeopleSoft HCM 9.1.

    Under its “Applications Unlimited” program, enterprise software purveyor Oracle has vowed to support a raft of applications it has acquired during a multi-billion-dollar spending spree that dates back to the middle of the last decade. Early in 2005, Oracle closed its vigorously contested, $10 billion takeover of leading human capital management software vendor PeopleSoft, a move that cemented the HCM component of Oracle’s E-Business Suite. Later that year, Oracle went on to swallow Siebel Systems, which substantiated the ERP vendor’s CRM credentials.

    Late last week, Oracle released Feature Pack 2 for the 9.1 version of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, an update that Oracle said delivers a “consumer-like self-service” experience to HR personnel and business users. Embracing the “consumerization of IT”—the trend of imbuing enterprise software with the fluid user experience found on smartphones and tablets—Oracle has added a search-based navigation function that allows users to perform quick lookups from any page to receive contextual results. A department manager might type a worker’s name into the search function, Oracle said in a statement, to pull up documents on that employee’s performance, salary, career planning, and related activities.

    In an effort to improve the user experience in the HCM software, Oracle also added pagelets into the latest version of PeopleSoft, a feature said to deliver a more personalized experience through fewer clicks. Meanwhile, managers can customize the new PeopleSoft Manager Dashboard to display key data on their reports, unit, and projects, and can use drag-and-drop technology to customize the page to their needs.

    Also new in the second 9.1 feature pack is PeopleSoft Talent Summary. “Administrators can select the content of pagelets that will appear on the Talent Summary based on the organization’s priorities,” Oracle said, “and managers personalize the page based on their preferences for presentation layout and areas of emphasis.”

    As Oracle continues to develop its core HCM software, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield, who left the company when Oracle took over in 2005, continues to grow SaaS HCM vendor Workday. The vendor has recently added adjacent cogs of functionality to create a more robust suite of enterprise software, bringing it into competition with Oracle and other ERP vendors.

Source: Chris Chiappinelli at http://www.managingautomation.com

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Oracle kills off one of the world's oldest domain names

Oracle will pull the plug on one of the oldest Internet domain names and shut the Sun.com site

Sun.com was the the page of Sun Microsystems and was one of the first dot-com domain names to be awarded.

According to one of Oracle's developer bogs, the site will disappear on June 1.

Most of the content that was on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of SDN of the site has been migrated to the System Admin and Developer Community of the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) already.

Oracle's engineering team is apparently working porting the much used Hardware Compatibility List which was also on the site.

The content in blogs.sun.com will remain available. A blogging platform similar to blogs.sun.com is in the works at Oracle so that blogging can continue as before.

However one thing that will be killed off is the huge database of papers. Oracle said it does not generally archive out-of-date and unbranded papers. It plans to rescue a limited number of classics, but most of the old blueprints will disappear.

Some of this can be found on mirrors such as http://www.filibeto.org/sun/lib/blueprints/sun-blueprints-archive.html.

Sun com was registered four years after Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Vinod Kosla founded the outfit and was one of the first 100 dot-com domains. It went live 24 years ago.

Oracle bought Sun last year and for the last year has been killing off the Sun's corporate operations and online presence. It has also been losing control of Sun's Open Sauce projects.

Read more: http://www.techeye.net/software/oracle-kills-off-one-of-the-worlds-oldest-domain-names#ixzz1Gqal4Icl

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Oracle unveils latest version of Oracle GlassFish Server

Business software and hardware systems company Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) said yesterday that it has released Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 and an update to the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 software development kit distribution through the latest release of the Java EE 6 Reference Implementation.

The latest release offers new high availability features in the areas of load balancing, failover, state management and centralised administration.

Oracle GlassFish Server complements Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, which is designed to run the broader portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and large-scale enterprise applications.

Source: http://it.tmcnet.com

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