We Are Live in Spite of it All!

smiltenb — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:56:49 -0500

We technicaly began our Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Portal upgrades in May 2007 and, having made my way through countless upgrades/implementations over the past eight years, this project has been suprising uneventful. Just to shake things up a bit we threw in a few wrenches of our own -- deciding to implement the new versions on vmWare, deploying a new SSL switch/load balancer and using (the new for us) Oracle Application Server.

One of the attributes the really pride ourselves on here at MICA is the ability to be agile. When we have a change in plans or challenges that appear at the last minute, our team is not only great at adapting, they often use it as an opportunity to expand knowledge and learn from the experience.

After such an uneventful upgrade we finally got to put our agility to the test when Oracle told us they could not resolve the problems with Oracle Application Server to make it compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer -- one week prior to our go live. Fortunately MICAgility lept into action and, with assistance from vmWare, we rebuilt all of our 9.0 server environments using BEA Weblogic instead of the Oracle middleware.

While having a small staff and being agile can sometimes be a challenge, it really positioned us to deal with this last minute boulder in the road. And, in hindsight, I can't say that I'm too surprised -- Oracle let their early adopter school (Northeastern) go live without support for non-IE browsers and they have been working to fixing the problems with Firefox and Safari since July 2007. And it's been great to see technology (vmWare) and people (flexible and adaptable) coming together in a way that allows small colleges like us to manage bumps along the upgrade road.

EDUCAUSE | Software Upgrades

We Are Live in Spite of it All!