mbarsic’s blog

The opening session was interesting.  The new CEO definitely wants to shake things up.  On the good side, he wants SGHE to start acting like one company, which make a lot of sense.  On the scary side, he seems to want to release more things, faster – that can be taxing for us unless they do things very well.  Maya Angelou was very good too.  I’m glad I got to hear her speak.

Next, I went to the UDC Technical Opening session.  This was an interesting session.  They appear to be moving to a Java mid-tier with an RIA client (Flex or AJAX) for many things.  With the Java-tier they mentioned the Spring library and Hibernate for object-relational mapping.  This is very flexible architecture, but they are signalling a shift from Oracle – I think- if you use an ORM you should be able to choose your own database.  For ID management, they’re using SPML and mentioned extending CAS.  The Luminis 5 preview mentioned some good improvements, plus a shift away from uPortal.  We should start looking at true Portlet/JSR-168 development for channels.   Here are some othe keywords that came up – Apache CXF, TerraCotta (for caching) and JackRabbit as a simple CMS.  Also, Luminis 5 is sticking with Tomcat which is fine for me.  For UI development, they basically said start ramping up your Flex skills as well as straight HTML/CSS.   They also said to get familiar with Eclipse as well as Flex Builder (which is built on Eclipse or can be installed as a plugin) and possibly Aptana – which is also available as standalone or an Eclipse plugin.

To cap off the day, Anita, Erin, Joanne and I met with Mark Zimmerman, LInda Jessup and Melissa King to discuss EM.  I also told Melissa that we’d love to start helping with a dev kit – either beta or pre-release.  Erin and I spoke with some people from Univeristy of San Diego and Sherri Z. from Lehigh.

Here’s a quick and dirty example of adding a Virtual host to OAS 10.1.3x, since you need to so this with files.

You’ll need to edit the $ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/httpd.conf file. I looked for the existing VirtualHosts section, which may be commented out. Then added the following:


Listen 7890
<VirtualHost *:7890>
ServerName em-tst.scad.edu
DocumentRoot "/u00/websites/em-tst/htdocs"
LogLevel error
DirectoryIndex index.html
CustomLog "|/u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/bin/rotatelogs /u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/logs/access_rar_log 43200" combined
ErrorLog "|/u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/bin/rotatelogs /u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/logs/error_rar_log 43200"
ServerAdmin somone@scad.edu
</VirtualHost>


After that, you can check your config with

$ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin/apachectl configtest

If you did it right, you should get “Syntax OK” and you’ll probably see a warning about direct use of apachectl is deprecated, but we’re just checking the syntax.

Finally restart Apache with opmnctl or via the Enterprise Manager.

How to fix SQLDeveloper when the editor stops accepting backspace or delete keys….

http://decoding.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/oracle-sql-developer-problem-backspace-delete-button-not-working-quick-fix/

In case that’s not working, here’s his solution..,

To resolve the problem you have to go to:
Tools -> Preferences -> Accelerators -> Load Preset -> Default -> OK

Today started with Luminis with External E-mail. I did not get alot out of this one. I did get a tip about customizing the e-mail channel. One, that we should be able to get the channel working and two, to do so we’ll need to extract the car file and make some modifications. For more info, search lumdev.net.

Then I went to the Luminis Platform 5 Architecture, which was very informative.
They are attempting to move away from being “infrastructure” and more toward an application. For example, they would switch from being a provider of SSO servics to a consumer, e.g., a user would sign-on to enterprise ID management system and then access the portal.

They plan to support more than one portal technology, such as uPortal, Oracle Portal and/or Liferay – but they were careful to add that list is not official. They are also trying to look at the standards and code to that or use infrastructure that is standard-based. JSR-168 is the Java Portlet (channel) spec and WSRP is a Web Services-based portlet spec, so they would only use JSR-168 and WSRP compliant portals.

They are also following the SOA style. The presenter mentioned using the Oracle and JBoss ESB applications to assist with that.

Also, they want to leverage RIA technologies. It should make the portal more tolerant to slow performing channels, becuase each channel would/could be running from different applications.

They expect Luminis 5 to out in late 2009 or early 2010.

Erin and I went to Drexel’s presentation on Creating a Prospective Student Portal. They are not using the SGHE EM product, but coded their own PSP using Banner and a secondary Luminis portal. They implemented a second portal for performance reasons. This was a very technical presentation on how it worked, from a Banner-to-Luminis view. I picked up a couple of things, such as the how they capture prospect login/logout data and a technical bit about L4′s PersonDirectory.xml file for using custom user attributes.

Now for the afternoon sessions, I started with Inside Banner EM Performance Solutions. This was not a great session for me. In a nutshell, it will be another component to be run through ODS into the EDW, and it comes with a bunch of pre-defined reports, dashboards, etc… I did takeaway that this is driven off of the Banner application (as in applying for school), so we’ll probably need to look at that in greater detail. We’ll probably need to use the Banner application for admission in some fashion.

The next session, Inside Banner EM Relationships Solution, was much better. I took away several things from this one. There will be several components that someone in IT should manage or at very least, review before putting into production. First are the Business Rules, which can be written in SQL, PL/SQL or the scripting language Groovy, and we may need someone for my team for Groovy. The Expression Builder and Campaign Modeler will also need a great deal of assistance. We’ll need to be very involved with and very responsive to admission for these items.

We can map EM users to Banner INB users and take advantage of Banner’s FGAC.

The basic architecture of the new app is a Flex client-side, a Java (Spring-Hibernate-Flex Data Services) server side application, and regular Banner, along with a new schema, relate, as the database. The presenter mentioned a WebServices-first design, but that they were not exposed as of yet.

And we will need a new OAS server for this. They require the 10.1.3 release.

A few other bits, Lehigh is thinking of setting up a separate e-mail server for EM, and we may want to do that too. Some admission staff may need to become more familiar with Banner, as not all Banner data is accessible through the new UI. They may need to use Banner forms for some pieces of data. And finally, Erin, mentioned that we may need to consider more Cognos licenses for the reporting piece.

My last session was UDC Web Service Tour. It wasn’t that useful for me either. I did learn that currently you need to put in a support request to SGHE in order to use the Web Services. They’d like to know which vendor you’re working with and a little bit about the project. A general release for the Web Services are planned for Banner 8.1.

The first session today was Luminis IV Lessons Learned. It was a by a SGHE employee that support a college’s Luminis platform. The upgraded last summer. Basically, he validated a few of our upgrade decisions. That school decided not to migrate data from III to IV. The wrote scripts to manually migrate calendars and group data for those that wanted it – I did ask for the scripts, that should really help with the upgrade.

He had a few warnings. One was to attention to targeted announcements. They experienced performance issues and now schedule them to go out during off peak hours. He currently restarts Tomcat twice a week – we restart SunOne once a week. We should probably keep an out for memory issues. He also identified a custom icon problem and pointed out the resolution — http://www.lumdev.net/node/1159#comment-2763 – and he said to look for SGHE FAQs dealing with the UP_FILTER_GROUP_MEMBERSHIP. Overall, it was a worthwhile session.

Next was Web Portals for Prospective Students. It was informative, but I was underimpressed. Lehigh does not have a prospect portal and don’t plan to have one soon. They plan to allow applicants access to their portal and I thought I wrote down a go-live of Fall 2008. They have been transitioning students from accepted to incoming to firstyear within the portal framework already. This is something we should probably be doing too. I expect that we’ll be live with a prospective stuednt portal prior to them, thought we should build in transitional states as well.

On the technical side, I spoke with Sean Cody? from SGHE. We need to address the way in which we’ll allow accounts to be created. The invited account would be ideal in my mind – they’ll need to be in Banner in order to get an invite. There are two reasons: one we’d like to use the Banner ID and the L4 immutable ID because of the SSB login; two it would prevent the number of junk accounts.

After lunch I went to the Identity Management Technical Session. This went into more detail than the first session. SGHE developed their own XML export file that get gets transformed into SPML v2 with some extensions. It’s included in the Banner General 7.5.1 release, but to really use it you’ll need to download and deploy some other components which would run on an existing INB/SSB OAS server.

Also, they’re not using database triggers, which I found very interesting. They are using Oracle Streams which work off of the redo logs and run in a seperate process. In theory, it will not affect the speed of transactions as much as trigger. It sounds neat.

They’ve added a new package, GP_STREAMS_UTIL, and new form, GUASADM, to configure the ID management work. The rules are setup using GORRSQL – just like the roles that come over to Luminis.

I think we should spend some time evaluating this. It could be a more robust and supportable solution than the numerous scripts that run now in order to sync Banner information with the Network Services resources. They have tested with Novell’s Identity Mgmt solution and are working with Oracle and Sun. I spoke with a person from Seton Hall and they are actively working with Sungard using Oracle’s Enterprise Identity Mgmt solution.

Another component of this is an SSO capability between Banner, Luminis and Workflow as well as the other systems. And SGHE has or will soon release an SDK for this.
—————–
The next session I attended was Java, RIA and other New Technologies. In a nutshell, look at Flex for the UI; look at Spring and Hibernate for the server-side component; and use Flex Data Integration to transfer data between the server and client-side Flex application. This is what they used for EM and for a couple of Banner 8.1 options.

I think we, my staff and I, should start reading up on these and possibly working it into some of our projects.
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The last session I went to was EM Recruiting Campaign and Communication. Erin, Ginger, Shub and Joanne went along too. It looks like a very slick product. A couple of notes: tech assistance will be needed for creating business rules which are composed of SQL, PL/SQL or Groovy (a Java-based scripting language). Also, the campaign modeler looks to be a Java applet very similar to the Workflow modeler.

After that session, we all stopped into the EM lounge. Ginger asked a couple questions that were troublesome, because they don’t exist yet. One had to do with tracking travel. The next question was about campaigns and how to use High School teachers and guidance counselors. The SGHE people said those features were coming later, but I think we’ll need to identify potential solutions to those problems earlier than later. It’s possibly doable using Banner in some fashion – perhaps just extended reporting.

Also, I asked Melissa King, who is the SGHE product or project manager for EM, about influencing the feature list – she said sure we could get on it as an early adopter. They’re using Scrum and so work with clients to define feature sets on a monthly or weekly basis. She said they play a type of poker for features to be worked on. I’m not the one to be on that team, as it should probably be more of an admission’s person or someone with a lot of end-user input.

Talk about information overload, my head hurts.

The first session of the day was Banner Enterprise Identity Services. Basically, SGHE has added support for Banner to populate an identity management system from Banner. In a nutshell, they have components to interact with id system via SPML v2. And – hahaha – they’ve another unique id for this. It should allow for mapping between systems.

Next, I presented Managing Banner Security with Anita. It went very well, I think. We probably had around 200 people and already have a slew of people asking for the source code. I guess Anita and I will have a little cleanup and documentation session when we get back.

And that was the morning.  Of course my head hurts from the three sessions in the afternoon.  More on those later.

The keynote was very good. The speaker, Erik Weihnemayer, is blind mountain-climber – that’s right, blind and climbing mountains, including Mt. Everest.

After that I went to the Banner UDC Today, Tomorrow and Beyond session. This was much better than the last couple years. Here’s my notes:

EM developed using the Agile Scrum methodology; 4-6 month implementation for client; Lehigh beta tested the product and will truely go-live in May;Miss State beta-tested also and will go live in June.

Banner 8 – id mgmt; 5 areas of expense/savings, compliance, easier to use, i18n, capacity; new feature Supplemental Data Engine – add fields to tables and forms with support to move forward, which sounds really cool; they announced some new features for faculty load and wait-lists too.

They did announce flex forms for Banner 9. Actually, they announced more RIA for 9.

Next, I went to the UDC Technical Forum. The big topics were SOA and EM with the new UI framework. For SOA, we may need to license the Oracle SOA Suite (Enterprise Service Bus) for Banner 9 in the 2009-10 timeframe. They did mention they were looking at other SOA-ESB options, but could not discuss it at the time. Lots of benefits from SOA, which should involve a looser coupling of product – I hope that’s true.

For the UI, they were reluctant to say they were using Flex, though they did eventually say they used it for EM.  They wouldn’t say that they’ll use it for Banner 9 and beyond because tech changes so quickly now.  But I think they’ll use it for Banner eventually too – good tools, and wide support for developers and end-users (Windows, Mac and Linux).  Of course they could switch to Silverlight

I stayed after the session and spoke with the tech lead for the EM UI.  I asked if they were working on a dev kit for EM.  They are and I asked for early-access or to beta-test if possible and gave him my business.  For now, we need to boost our Flex and Web Services skills (SOA).