Tuesday here at Oracle OpenWorld wrapped up with Quest's fabulous networking party, held at the Thirsty Bear Brewery once again. The packed room was buzzing with great conversations among JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers. Notable guests included Paco Aubrejuan and John Webb of the PeopleSoft product team, and John Schiff and Denise Grills of the JD Edwards product team.

Wednesday brought more great sessions and information, including great tips, tricks and insight on upgrades for both the JD Edwards and PeopleSoft products. 

JD Edwards customers were treated to an in-depth demo of UpgradeJDE.com from Oracle's Barb Canham, along with lots of other great upgrades information and resources. This great website for World and EnterpriseOne includes searchable documentation, tips, tricks, and information on the 100-day upgrade workshops Oracle hosts on a regular basis. Oh, and they're free! Be sure to check out the site if you haven't already. Karen Brigiotta of Truck-Lite Co. addressed the audience as well with the company's upgrade experience. To have a successful upgrade, she said, make sure to present the product and all changes to the end users so that they know what to expect from the upgrade. Jeff Amerine of Oracle also took to the podium to talk about the new Customization Object Analyzer, a brand-new tool announced earlier this week in product lead Lyle Ekdahl's general session. This tool helps customers determine exactly what customizations have been made, so check it out if you're planning an upgrade.

Oracle's John Webb moderated a highly informative PeopleSoft upgrades panel featuring employees from Dell, FedEx, CBRE and Daimler. Not surprisingly, customizations (and how to reduce the need for them) featured prominently in the discussions. Audience questions included queries about team size and length of time needed for the project. Two panel members reported pulling employees from other jobs and putting them full time on the project, with Dell building a project team of more than 100 people. "You can't start early enough, and you can't overbudget for resources or head count," noted panelist Doug Reed, senior VP of HR operations at CBRE. Jennifer Galbraith, director of global HR for Dell, also emphasized the importance of the end user experience. "We didn't focus enough on usability," she said, which resulted in an onslaught of service desk tickets after the launch. "When we turned it on it wasn't intuitive," and encouraged audience members to keep that in mind. 

More to come!