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Software Review
A Look at Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0
4/30/2007
Many of us at Boise State have been actively involved with HEUG, through its conferences and product advisory groups (PAGs), and I am a member of the HEUG Board of Directors. In addition to facilitating the sharing of ideas, best practices, and even code among its members, the HEUG has also worked very closely with first PeopleSoft and now Oracle to ensure that the applications continue to improve in quality and evolve in functionality to meet the needs of the higher education community.A Giant Leap Forward -- Campus Solutions 9.0
The latest release of Campus Solutions--version 9.0, released in December, 2006--provides particularly compelling evidence of the effectiveness of the HEUG’s advocacy for its constituents and collaboration with Oracle. Many of the features delivered in this release are the direct result of HEUG members and PAGs identifying and prioritizing issues, and Oracle responding by developing the requested enhancements. Several Boise State representatives were directly involved in the discussions that led to many of those enhancements, and in providing Oracle feedback during the development cycle.
Boise State was fortunate to be chosen as one of three institutions to participate in the Hosted Beta program for Campus Solutions 9.0, which provided the opportunity to "test drive" the new version preceding its official release. This gave us the chance to get our hands on the features we had helped to advocate for, and see if Oracle had really done things right. We were delighted to find that they had, and many of the new features will allow us to retire customizations that we created and have maintained for years.
The list of significant new features is too long to describe completely here, but several merit special mention--starting with transcripts. The transcript is arguably the most important document produced by any college or university. The exact content, organization and format desired in a transcript vary greatly from one institution to another. Hence, implementing a general mechanism powerful and flexible enough to meet every institution's needs is a nontrivial task. Unfortunately, it is one that the Campus Solutions product did not accomplish very well--until version 9.0.
Responding to numerous concerns and suggestions from the HEUG constituency, Oracle developed a completely new transcript mechanism, involving a set of better designed tables, a much better processing engine, and a powerful new reporting tool called Oracle XML Publisher that allows the institution to design its transcript template using familiar tools such as Microsoft Word. This new Campus Solutions 9.0 approach is incomparably superior to the old one. It should allow us to retire all of our modifications to the old transcript, which were among the most extensive and difficult to maintain of all of our customizations.
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