Life After the PeopleTools Upgrade
The recent upgrade to PeopleTools 858 felt a little like going to the dentist: you knew that it was necessary and that it probably was going to hurt a little.
The update, which was necessary for continued support from Oracle, was a huge undertaking that touched most of DEM. Thanks primarily to the efforts of Leslie Gardner, Sneha Reddy, Kurt Warner and the DEM smoke testing team, the upgrade was a big success and relatively pain-free.
As with any upgrade, a few issues came up that were addressed immediately and allowed the Student Information System to come back online several hours earlier than planned. Many worked through the fourth of July weekend in order to upgrade the system at a time when the fewest students would be impacted.
Now what? Because of COVID, Oracle release dates, and the major PeopleTools upgrade, we had to push our regular maintenance PUM to later in the year, which brought us to implementing PUM 20, 21 in the first week of October and PUM 22, 23, 24 in February/March. While daunting, this plan will allow us to get back on track with implementing two PUMs twice a year. Based on feedback from the DEM Directors, this would be a definite step-up from having to have functional teams review and test four times a year.
Again, a sincere thank you to all who made the PeopleTools upgrade a success. Just like our regular PUMs, the PeopleTools upgrade included bug fixes, security and new functionality that are necessary to keep SIS available, secure and stable for our users and students.