The release date has not been "officially" set, nor announced, but I have an idea when it will be released. Unfortunately I'm unable to divulge that information...
I am actually in Denver and it goes GA tomorrow. The Business Service Development is very robust.
As a side note, the mandate from Oracle was that Business Services be a direct replacement for WSG. It will do what WSG does but they didn't extend it much past that.
The charting has been updated and is pretty dang cool.
8.97 is indeed available now from Change Assistant. I didn't see much out on Customer Connection as far as installation guides or server and system admin guides though.
Oracle has told us that 8.97 will be out in the month of November. We have a very distributed architechture and Oracle recommended an upgrade to 8.97 from our existing 8.96.I1. They say the web performace is a lot better in 8.97. Lets keep our fingers crossed !!!
If I were you, I would not immediately install 8.97, it's
quite risky to install such a fresh new release.
I'd wait for 8.97.1.3 or 8.97.1.4 before applying it to
my live servers.
My 0.02 CAD
please don't discourage people from installing brand new releases like this. Someone has to beat a path (and fall into the tiger pits). Just as long as its not me!