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.