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The arrangement with Oracle was cancelled last week, and on September 20 UW officials signed an agreement with a competing company, PeopleSoft Inc., says Bob Blackburn of the information systems and technology department.
The change doesn't affect the use of Oracle products for UW's financial systems and the "administrative systems operating environment", Blackburn said. For those purposes, UW has bought well-established Oracle software.
For the "human resources management system", however, UW and Oracle were cooperating to develop a brand-new product. Oracle has an American HRMS product, but nothing that works in an environment of Canadian tax laws and other peculiarities on this side of the border.
Blackburn said that after "completion of the analysis phase" of the HRMS project this spring, Oracle reported that it was two years behind schedule. The delay would result in a postponement of the "go live" date at UW to January 1999, at the earliest, rather than January 1997. "During the summer," he said, "the university reviewed its options and determined that it could not delay or postpone addressing these critical areas for a minimum of another two years."
The PeopleSoft HRMS system is "much more mature" than the Oracle product -- it's already in use not only in Canada but in some universities -- and so "a more reasonable timeline" is likely, Blackburn said.
The new HRMS system will eventually replace the present UW payroll system, he said, "along with all other existing human resource related subsystems, and manual processes in human resources. However, our intent is that this replacement will be as 'invisible' as possible to most university employees when it occurs."
Much more successful was "St. Mark's Gospel", a one-man dramatic reading at St. Jerome's College last night. It was presented in the college's new Community Centre -- an expanded and spiffed-up cafeteria space, linking the men's residence and the women's residence (the former Notre Dame College), with evidence of the contractors still visible. For some reason I particularly like the big oval ceiling panel in the centre of the room. The Community Centre will have its dedication ceremonies a week from today at 2 p.m., the college has announced.
The "weekend of theology and the arts" at St. Jerome's continues with the 14th annual Devlin Lecture, tonight in Siegfried Hall: Robert VerEcke, with the support of the Boston Liturgical Dance Ensemble, speaks on "Dance in Worship: Reclaiming the Sacred Circle". Tomorrow at 5:00 the annual St. Jerome's Day Eucharistic Liturgy will be celebrated.
Our scheduled concert for Saturday, September 28, by "Trio X" has suddenly had to be cancelled -- but we were, by great good fortune, able to secure quite a fantastic replacement! The Gryphon Trio (Jamie Parker, piano; Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin; Roman Borys, cello) will perform instead, same time/place. This is Canada's top regularly performing piano trio. The Gryphon has performed all over Canada and beyond, has a fine CD to its credit, and is also to perform with the K-W Symphony at their next concert (Beethoven's Triple Concerto). Their program: Haydn, Trio #19 in g minor; Beethoven, early trio in Eb, WoO 38; John Knowles Paine (American, 1839-1906 -- he held the very first ever Professorship of Music in the U.S., at Harvard), Larghetto and Humoreske; and Dvorak, "Dumky" Trio.
The co-op department says more than 99 per cent of co-op students going out on work term this fall term have been placed in jobs: 2,695 of them, leaving just 23 unemployed. "These figures are very good," writes Bruce Lumsden, the director of co-op, "but I would remind you there are no year one students in the mix." He's expecting a bigger challenge for the winter term, when hundreds of first-year students have to be placed in their first co-op jobs.
People may be asking you for money today, as it's "pass the hat day" for the United Way, in support of a local radio station personality who's been living atop a billboard in downtown Kitchener for the past two weeks and hopes to raise $105,000.
CAR
| Editor of the Daily Bulletin:
Chris Redmond Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004 Comments to the editor | About the Bulletin | Yesterday's Bulletin Copyright 1996 University of Waterloo |