With the release of PeopleTools 8.48, Oracle added several new enhancements and has delivered and certified the integration of the Fusion Middleware Product Suite with Tools 8.48. This gives you additional technology options and enhancements that basically provide a bridge to Oracle's future application architecture. Oracle's future architecture is of course, based on the Service Oriented Architecture of its Fusion technology. Additionally, PeopleTools 8.48 is now capable of supporting 64-bit processing. This gives PeopleSoft customers the ability to address larger datasets and memory.

However, the biggest changes are with respect to the architecture. For example, you can use Oracle Application Server 10g as your web server. Additionally, you can utilize the OracleAS Web Cache as a reverse proxy server (RPS) to the Oracle Application Server.

You will find a number of changes and enhancements to BEA Tuxedo, especially in the area of failover and load balancing. For example you can now use weighted load balancing, which allows you to set the "weight" of the load, or amount of requests, being directed to a particular server. You can also now boot your app servers in parallel so that you can have each server process within your domain start at the same time, rather than one after the other (serial).

While these enhancements to the architecture are very welcome, I have found the addition and integration of Oracle's XML Publisher to be a smash hit!

XML Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that separates the data extraction process from the report layout and allows the reuse of extracted application data into multiple report layouts. And, let me tell you that many of us have been waiting a long time to get this robust, and flexible reporting and analytic tool.

The XML Publisher renders XML data and allows you to use Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat templates. Moreover, it allows you to generate PDF, RTF, Excel, HTML, output formats in many languages, by the use of just one template. This reporting technology is actually a standalone java-based reporting technology.

What does that mean to you? Well it means that if you are not yet using PeopleTools 8.48, you can still download XMLP from Oracle's website and begin using it today. However, it is seamlessly integrated and natively accessible from PeopleSoft Query as well as any PeopleTools 8.48-based applications that provide XML data.

Now, functional power-users and developers will have a new design tool called Oracle XML Publisher Desktop which includes Template Builder. And they are available on the Oracle Technical Network as a free download.

All in all, Oracle is making huge strides in its quest towards a Service Oriented Architecture and the addition of many useful tools to assist its customers to lower their total cost of ownership.