Setting Up Change Assistant

Change Assistant was first released in PeopleTools 8.44 as part of PeopleSoft’s Total Ownership Experience program. It was meant to automate many of the tasks around applying maintenance, such as figuring out what needs to be applied, downloading the new maintenance programs, determining what order to apply the maintenance, checking prerequisites, applying the maintenance, and deploying flat files (like SQR’s, COBOL’s, Crystals) to file servers and NT and UNIX batch servers. Later versions of Change Assistant run compare reports and migrate the maintenance and customizations to your development/test/production environments.

Unfortunately the setup isn't very intuitive, and since I've been spending some quality time configuring Change Assistant lately I thought I'd add my two cents worth on how everything fits together.