I have been reading up on PeopleSoft’s new Update Delivery model. It sounds very interesting, but one of the things that I caught was the fact that they will be delivering a Virtual Machine on Virtual Box where you can extract the updates that you need. You can watch a nice video on the topic from Oracle’s YouTube channel:
While this delivery model sounds interesting and promising, the side benefit is that it provides a great way to experiment with the new products. If you want to test drive PeopleSoft 9.2 but don’t want to go through a full install, you should be able to download a virtual machine.
So, where do we get the images?
In the Update Manager Home Page, there is a place holder for future image links. As best I can tell, this is going to be the easiest place to find them. Unfortunately, it says that links are yet to come:
Thinking it Through
I am curious about how this will work. I would love to know your thoughts, so please comment below. The two biggest things are:
- These are surely some hefty downloads … When tax updates come out and everyone is trying to get up to date, are the download speeds going to suffer?
- Do we need to test installing into a demo? The video indicated that there’s no need for installing a Demo instance of PeopleSoft. It makes sense from the standpoint that you can test the vanilla functionality in the virtual image, but what about testing the installation process? Is there value to installing into vanilla code and vanilla data to make sure that the install works fine? How important is that?
My initial feeling was that this would be a really great way to get new updates, and we would have the ability to pick-and-choose the updates that we wanted to make more easily.
But by the end of the video, my impression was that instead of having Oracle build our Change Packages, we would now be building our own Change Packages, including flat files such as SQR, COBOL, DM scripts.
You also touched on a good point. Tax Updates are extremely frequent. But what about quick patches? We just applied two patches into our Campus Test environment that were post-patches to the INAS 2.5 Critical Patch. In essence, to get from Campus Bundle #2 to Bundle #3, we’ve had to patch our Campus systems 4 times. I can’t imagine downloading a full environment 4 times to progress to essentially the next Bundle.
I also agree with the idea of having our own DMO environment. It’s a chance for us to get an idea of what the Patch progress will be like without the concern of over-writing potential customizations, or generally stepping on the toes of Developers.
Either way, I’m looking forward to getting to experiment with this patch process.
Garrett,
Thanks for the thoughts. I am with you — looking forward to getting to experiment with it.