Summit - Day Four

This will be my last full day in Anaheim and I have to say that it has been an enjoyable stay.  The conference (Summit!) was excellent, with more good content than one could ask for.

I began the day listening to a keynote by Dr. Carl Hammerschlag.  He gave an excellent presentation on the alignment of priorities in life and how we think of them.  That's my take on it anyway.  I am sure that others would view it in different ways.

It was my intention to attend a session on changing hardware for Banner, but decided instead to support my pal Bill Moore and attend his session on integrating external email systems in Luminis.  Bill did a great job and the attendees were enthusiastic about the subject area.

Following Bill's session, I attended a sort of "Birds of a Feather" presentation on Enterprise Components, Integration and SOA.  We were provided a general picture of what our infrastructure will include in a Banner 8 world.  

Lastly, I poked my head in the door for the "Peek a Portal" session.  I missed the Luminis Idol presentation, so this was kind of a replacement for that.  It didn't really satisfy my needs, but there was nothing else on the agenda that inspired me.

A lot of the things I was looking at this week were longer term projects in relation to Banner and Luminis (and Workflow).  The Identity changes, for example, really only come into play for Banner 8, which we will not likely implement until late 2008 or early 2009.  Our IdM project needs what they are doing with Banner 8, so we will need to look closely at how we bring these two initiatives together.

Some of the general "tools" discussions may not really be all that relevant for 2, 3, maybe 4 years, during which time the thinking will most certainly have changed from what is being offered up today.  Oracle Forms, for example, is going away at some point, but how soon and what will it be replaced with.  The current thinking is that there will be a move toward tools like Adobe Flex for UI development with some Java-based architecture underneath the covers, including lots of Spring and Hibernate.  The Sungard representatives admitted today though that they are really still working on this direction and weren't ready to commit to any particular set of tools.

They are really serious about SOA and the role of Identity Management.  I have a whole new suite of acronyms to bring back to the office after this week.

As a general note, this was one of the better technical events I have attended, ranking right up there with Novell's Brainshare.

Summit - Day Three -Part Deux

Just as a side note relating to the new development techniques being used at Sungard, I stopped by the Sungard booth to take a look at the new Enrollment Management application.  This app was created with Flex and looked very, very nice. 

Summit - Day Three

It was another interesting day at Summit 2008.  Yes, long and interesting.

My first session of the day was entitled "General Person Synchronization".   In it, the presenter covered the intricacies of merging "matched" General Person records in Banner and discussed the common matching rules (API).

We were reminded of the core tables: SPRIDEN, SPBPERS, SPRADDR, SPRTELE, and GOREMAL.

The presenter included an outline of the 8 character "merge string" and the two character representations for Finance, HR, Student, and Advancement.

It was an interesting review in light of all the other identity related sessions that I have been attending.

I modified my schedule slightly so that I could take in the Luminis Platform 5 Architecture presentation in the Luminis Developers Lounge.  Gary had asked me some questions about directions for the SOA initiative at SunGard, so I wanted to hear what they had to say in relation to Luminis architecture.

What they are trying to do on most fronts is leverage the application stack of their clients, which in most cases means more Oracle.  And we've seen the impact of their efforts to date.  I think most would agree that the infrastructure supporting Banner is in a much better state than it was in the bad old days of Banner 5/6.

Yesterday's notes mentioned the move to Adobe Flex and I honestly thought that I might hear essentially the same message, or at least a similar one, in the Luminis arena.  They seem to me however to be much less certain of the direction.   Or perhaps they are just a little more realistic than the Banner crowd.

The directions for Luminis included: JSP, JSF, AJAX, Web 2.0, Restful Web Services, and Struts compatible technologies.

Luminis itself is being advertised more as a suite of value-added features, than a full portal offering.  

The presenters were high on Liferay for the portal piece of the puzzle, and were interested as well in making their offering work within an Oracle portal and within the uPortal offering from JA-SIG.  They expressed some concern about the future of the WSRP implementation in uPortal.

When asked about the Java containers (servlet and portlet) being used, they indicated that development was being done with JBoss with additional testing against Oracle.

As had been done in the Banner presentations, there was a lot of talk of the Enterprise Service Bus.  They spoke of the JBoss ESB and the Oracle ESB.  JBoss used JUDDI for the repository and Oracle uses their own (which they say is the most performant).

The presentation was an interesting one, and mostly confirmed what I had heard in relation to Banner.  Very useful.  The message could be a little more cohesive, but they definitely have a general direction and it was nice to hear it.

After lunch, I attended a session called "I Want My UDC Identity".  It covered issues related to governance and was a bit less substantial than the other identity presentations that I have taken in.  It was great though, because I did manage to spend some one-on-one time with one of the Sungard technical leads on identity, during which he was able to review with me some of the requirements related to infrastructure.

Following that session, I took in an Identity Management "Birds of a Feather" session, during which a number of people shared their Identity Management challenges and successes.  Interestingly, from my perspective, the users of the Novell offerings were generally happy with what they were able to accomplish, while those using the Sun products were less satisfied.  I gathered some information in relation to that.

I finished my day by attending a session on Banner/Luminis integration.  It was a so-called "for Dummies" session, which was about the right speed for me at the end of a long day.  It was well worth the time spent though.

These notes were culled from my rough scribblings from each session and may or may not make much sense when read in isolation. 

Half day tomorrow, and then we're on our way back to Winnipeg.

Summit - Day Two

So, yesterday was the Conference Kick-off, but today was the real content kick-off.  I attended 4 sessions today, all of which were interesting, but of varying quality.

The first session of the day was entitled "Banner Enterprise Identity Services".  The content spoke to SunGard's efforts to provide an interface to some form of Enterprise Identity Management services.  At the very least, these efforts serve to bring Banner, Luminis, and Workflow under a common user identity regime.

The underpinning of their strategy is compliance with SPML 2.0, an OASIS standard XML markup language for provisioning.  Using SPML, they define identity using standard HR schema compatible or extendable to include the Eduperson attributes.  Their "key" is something called the "UDCIdentifier".

They provided two identity scenarios:  the first, in which no Enterprise IdM exists, and the second in which there does exist a Vendor Enterprise IdM.

SunGard has done work with Sun, Novell, Oracle, and CAS.  In private discussions, one representative spoke very highly of the Novell offerings in the space.

They suggested that further studies in this area should include openspml.org.

SunGard Professional Services could be employed to assist with the implementation of identity strategies.

The second seminar was entitled "In Search of SOA".  This session was a higher level discussion of SOA.

The presenter (Jaime Chambron) discussed the reasons for SOA - mainly, enterprise agility and reduction of redundancy.

Their efforts with SOA have been in the area of Campus Card and Housing.

She spoke of the need for an SOA Governance Council to direct the move to this new design principle.

The "success factors" for an SOA project were:

1. Start small - with perhaps one project

2. Should be a high priority business need

3. Need a champion and Executive sponsorship

4. Long-term visualization

Projects must identify potential roadblocks.

As I mentioned, it was a higher level look at the SOA Design Principle.  Not as many people stuck around to ask questions and a few people walked out during the presentation.  It was a good presentation, but I would imagine that some people were expecting something a little more concrete than the high level presentation being offered.

My third presentation of the day was entitled "Identity Management Technical Session" and was an extension of the first session with more technical detail surrounding exactly what they were trying to do.

The key study areas (for me) include Oracle Streams, GORRSQL, GUASADM, and Intcomp.  It was suggested that a lot of good material could be found in the Banner Identity Handbook for Banner 8.0.

This was a great session with a lot of good technical detail.  The presenters seemed very knowledgeable.  And the crowd seemed very interested and engaged with the topic.

My final session of the day was entitled "Java, RMI, and Other New Technologies".  This proved to be a very interesting topic both for the content and the controversy.

The presenter discussed SunGard's new approach to providing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) through the use of Adobe Flex and Java technologies.

Flex applications run in Adobe Flash Player inside a browser.  Current SunGard software includes systems relating to eProposals, Travel and Expense and Enrollment Management.  They were referred to as 8 dot 1 projects (meaning Banner 8.1).

Technology areas to study include Java, the Spring Framework, Persistence (JPA), Hibernate (for object relational mapping), and annotations.  Flex development is enabled with Eclipse via a plugin.  It is also minimally available with IntelliJ.

The controversy came when the presenter was being asked about the future of Oracle Forms ( ... it doesn't really have one) and how institutions were supposed to migrate to the new methodologies in an orderly manner.  Worries about developer training were presented along with concerns about inconsistent UIs during the migration (i.e. some Oracle Forms and some Flex and some old-style SSB).  

The salient point was that no new development would be taking place in Oracle Forms and that it would all be migrating to Flex.  The end goal of all this would be to provide a consistent UI for INB and SSB.  Implementation of the new technologies would be measured "in years rather than months".

This was mostly news to me, but I probably have not had my ear to the ground on this topic.

More fun to come tomorrow.

Summit - Day One

Registration for SunGard Summit 2008.   Got down to the Convention Centre shortly after 8, and was amazed at the enormity of the whole operation.  Wow!   Got registered though, and rummaged through my newfound "stuff".

After registering for Summit, I took in the First-Timers Orientation Session.  I'm not sure it was really worth the time spent, but it didn't hurt, and I did get to meet some people.

The Keynote followed shortly after brunch, with guest speaker, Erik Weihenmayer.   It was really quite enjoyable, and his stories were truly inspirational.  And he was funny, too.

We have a great program ahead of us, and I am really looking forward to meeting some people and learning a thing or two.