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.