It’s hard to believe it’s been four-and-a-half years since PeopleSoft Financials (Compass) went live. During this time, no upgrades have been performed other than swapping out physical servers for VMs. We are still on the same Oracle 10g database and have the same PeopleTools release as when we went live. We are way overdue for upgrading.

Early last Fall, a $2.8 million project was approved to first upgrade PeopleTools and all supporting infrastructure and then perform a fit-gap assessment for a full application upgrade to go from PeopleSoft Financials 9.0 to version 9.2. The current PeopleTools upgrade effort involves upgrading our PeopleTools release from 8.49.07 to 8.53.09, upgrading all of our web, application, batch and database servers as well as upgrading our 1.5 terabyte database from Oracle 10g to Oracle 11g. This is not the normal simple tools upgrade that PeopleSoft systems typically go through.  However, we need to do this to prepare for the application upgrade to follow.

Tom Vincent, technical lead for the Compass Tools Upgrade.

Emory brought Dave Miller back as a consultant to lead Emory through much of this effort.  In October 2013, Dave asked me to step in and lead the technical effort for the PeopleTools upgrade while he focused more on the assessment for the subsequent application upgrade.  Also supporting this effort are Eric Wagner (DBA), Dean Schuh and Michael Davidson (PeopleSoft Admins), Kevin Kirwan (System Admin), George Thompson (Interim Manager for Compass functional support), and Graydon Kirk (PMO) as our Project Manager.

The PeopleTools upgrade is scheduled for mid-April.  The subsequent application upgrade assessment upgrade will utilize fit-gap sessions to determine the scope of the project. Our business partners and campus community will participate in an in-depth review of the new application and will either accept delivered functionality as a “fit” or develop a solution for the “gap”. A lot of the decisions made 4 or 5 years ago will be re-evaluated.

Overall, we are excited about the progress we have made thus far and anticipate continued success as we go through these significant pair of upgrades.