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.
