XE w/coexistance support

I would like to hear from other XE shops running coexistence on what they are planning on doing once support for XE /Coexistence changes.

My place is in a precarious situation they are implementing XE with coexistence unfortunately the implementation plan stretches past February 2005 into July 2005.

The good news is they have only implemented two modules of XE so far with many more to go. I will take any suggestions which are out there.

1. Continue implementation, then end coexistance, then go to 8.9
or
2. End coexistance now continue XE implementation, then go to 8.9
or
3. End coexistance then go to 8.9

Open to any and all suggestions.

Here is my take on it. PeopleSoft has declared that support for the Xe version of Oneworld will end in Feb 2005. This means that they will continue answering questions and trying to help you solve problems, but they might not have an instance of Xe running in order to try to reproduce a problem so that they can solve it. I believe that there are probably enough coexistence customers around for them to keep an instance running. Also, although Xe is no longer supported on Feb 2005, how about version 8? I have heard of customers already upgrading to version 8.0 and retaining their coexistence.

However, if I was getting ready to upgrade, having not used OneWorldXe, I would go straight to 8.9 and not fool with coexistence. The upgrade from Xe to 8.9 is not an easy one. I would not look forward to a second upgrade immediately after I had just upgraded and neither would the users or the finance guys.

8.9 offers a whole new security model as well as a new database - UNICODE compliant. It will be the base of future upgrades.

Just to backup what Jean said, I would also go to 8.9, instead of the coexistence path. But, that would be to follow what I would consider an ideal path. There are many good arguements for coexistence. I think your going to have to determine that costs and risks of each method and present it to those who have a stake in this. Their the ones that will ultimately have to make the call.

The reason I would rather go conversion is it would probably be a shorter term project (No "back doors" or "back petalling". No followup conversion from Xe to 8.9. ). Although, if the stakeholders have a heavy demand for modifications, this may not be a quick cutover.

The reason some like coexistence is less cost and risk. If I went conversion, I would want a second Enterprise Server. I would also not have the opportunity to fall back on what I know works if things got real bad. But then, once you go live with Xe, you will then have to begin the 8.9 project.

I guess there really isn't one solution.