Director's Message, by Jennifer Gehrt

The LASER team is working on the finishing touches for end-user process design, reports, and execution strategy for the Financial Information System. In addition, they are hard at work designing, developing, and testing the processes, system interfaces, conversion of data from legacy systems, and reports for the central users. We are well underway on conducting the overview training sessions and gearing up for hands-on end user training later this spring. The team is under much pressure to make our implementation date and your patience will be appreciated. Thanks to the many people involved to help make this financial system work for K-State.

The production hardware for LASER has arrived and is in the process of being set-up and readied for production. The new LASER system will use products from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and F5 to provide cutting edge high availability architecture. Having multiple servers at each level in the architecture means if we should lose a database server or web server the Oracle E-Business Suite will continue to function. Since no server will be a single point of failure, this will provide an extremely high level of reliability. This type of administrative application system, with redundant servers at every tier, is the first of its kind at K-State.

The Oracle takeover of PeopleSoft, announced in mid-December, has taken up much of my time as well as others within the administration. There was concern about how this merger might affect our LASER project both short-term and long-term. We have had numerous conversations with Oracle executives since that time and we met with Oracle representatives last week. Oracle plans to support the PeopleSoft applications (including our Human Resource Information System) through 2013. The next version of the Oracle Student Solution will be released later this year and will be the last supported release under the current format. The last Oracle E-Business Suite will be released in 2006.

A combined Oracle/PeopleSoft development team has started to work on a new combined Oracle/PeopleSoft product line in a project called “Fusion”. This new suite of applications will be released in 2008. The idea behind Fusion is that it will be a new Java-based product architecture utilizing the best features of the current Oracle and PeopleSoft applications. The bottom line is that the merger should not have major short-term impact on our LASER project but will affect K-State in the long-term as an anticipated “new and improved” version of the Oracle applications would be available to us in a few years. When we receive the next major release of the student system as well as the financial system, this is what we will utilize at K-State for several years, until we can migrate to this Fusion suite of applications.

The LASER team will continue to monitor developments in the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger and assess impact on our project.

“The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.” John C. Calhoun, American Senator