Lone Star College
Lone Star College deployed an Elasticsearch cluster across two data centers
Summary
Lone Star College is recognized for deploying an Elasticsearch cluster across two data centers with full Elastic replication that is load balanced and serves five PeopleSoft application areas: Interaction Hub, Financial Management, Enterprise Learning Management, Human Capital Management, and Campus Solutions. All areas saw dramatic improvements in search response times after implementation.
Lone Star College implemented Oracle Management Cloud’s Application Performance Monitoring solution, providing detailed insights into how individual PeopleSoft pages and components are performing and specifically how the system is used, so tuning efforts can be targeted to improve the end user experience.
Lone Star College deployed the PeopleSoft Fluid user interface with an emphasis on user personas to tailor the experience and a unique, custom side bar, allowing the design to scale effectively across PeopleSoft HCM, Financials, and Campus Solutions. This provides users with a native, mobile, self-service experience that resulted in an approximately 30% increase in mobile device usage.
Customer comments
User experience
At Lone Star College, we have successfully deployed an Elasticsearch cluster across two data centers with full Elasticsearch replication.
Implementing Elasticsearch for PeopleSoft applications has again placed Lone Star College as being an innovator and service excellence leader in higher education.
I believe we are the first Oracle customer to deploy an Elasticsearch cluster across two data centers. Five PeopleSoft applications currently use the cluster. They are FSM/HCM/ELM/IH/CS. They are load balanced by redundant F5 appliances. Lone Star’s data centers are located in two geographically different sites and have a response time of less than 1ms between them at a distance of approximately 38 miles. The data centers are connected by dual 20GB dark fiber, diverse links for a total network speed of 40GB network.
We saw a dramatic improvement in response time searches with Elasticsearch.
Campus Solutions uses Elasticsearch with PUM 6 for class search. When in production, this will offload those requests away from Oracle 12c RAC databases. We register over 100,000 students per semester. PeopleSoft Performance Monitor has registered over 40,000 concurrent users during peak usage on our Campus Solutions production environment.
Technology innovations
We implemented Oracle Management Cloud & Application Performance Monitoring.
The implementation of APM is providing insights into PeopleSoft and how each individual page, component, JavaScript, etc., is performing. Historically, most monitoring tools focus on infrastructure monitoring and present general server and data center health data. Prior to APM, the application performance itself was always a black box and felt unreachable.
With APM we can now have direct insight and tune our PeopleSoft applications (Campus Solutions, Human Resource Management, Financial Supply Chain Management, and Interaction Hub) to achieve the best possible customer/end user experience. We have insight into the end user experience and how they utilize the system, allowing us to focus our efforts where it matters most.
User experience
Lone Star College implemented PeopleSoft Fluid with an emphasis on user personas to best tailor the user experience. Because we support customers through the use of the Interaction Hub, Campus Solutions, Human Resource Management and Financials, we needed to create a design that could effectively streamline content for students, faculty and staff. We created a user persona splash page, which would serve as a springboard to self-service items.
Additionally, we created a side bar which could be used on homepages to allow more flexibility to add content, such as external links and third-party integrations. Our layout allowed for a more efficient use of web page real estate on both desktop and mobile. One of our main goals was not having to sacrifice features or functionality in moving from Classic to Fluid. Our customers were pleased to find all of their respective content in a clean, easy to find, responsive layout.
With each semester that passes, our web traffic analytics show us that mobile usage is definitely on the rise. Since the Fluid implementation has gone live, we have seen a spike in mobile device usage of about 30%. This increase in mobile traffic is correlated to the launch of the new user experience. We are finally able to offer our users a native, mobile, self-service experience.
