ERP Associates, Inc.

Everybody knows the basic security structure.  It goes like this:   User -> Role -> Permission List, and permission lists include Menu-Component-Pages.  Before PeopleTools 8.40 that was all you needed to know to give someone access.  But these days the Portal Registry provides the front-end navigation, and it maintains its own security table that has to be kept in sync.

The portal registry (basically the left-hand menu navigation) is made up of folders that can contain subfolders and/or content references.   Content references point to different types of content, but most of the time in your HCM, FSCM or CRM application they point to components.

The portal registry security table is called PSPRSMPERM.  This table defines which permission lists and roles are assigned to each folder and content reference.  

When you do edit permission lists on-line, PeopleCode keeps PSPRSMPERM in sync.  But not so when you migrate permission lists, or when you build or update them via SQL (a technique I’ve grown to depend on).

So if you migrate a new permission list into an environment, how do you get the portal registry synchronized?  Well, that’s the job of Portal Security Sync. 

Portal security sync can be a confusing process.  In this article I’ll try to make some sense of what it is, why it’s necessary, what kinds of issues you can expect, and some alternatives.

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Just yesterday one of my co-workers was using David Vandiver's Excel libraries for SQR to create a spreadsheet document from Excel, and he wanted to send the spreadsheet to the report repository.  I knew you had to write to the $PS_HOME/appserv/prcs/[DBNAME]/log_output/SQR_<sqrName>_<ProcessInstance> directory but I wasn't sure the best way to go about it.

Anyway I asked David, and he pointed me to this article that describes several options to get the directory programatically so the path name doesn't have to be changed as you migrate it from environment to environment.  The option I like is to select PRCSOUTPUTDIR from PSPRCSPARMS for your process instance, then prepend that directory to your filename before you open it.  David has written the code for this approach here .

Thanks, David! 

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PSAUTHITEM is one of PeopleSoft’s core security tables.  It’s primary purpose is to track which pages and authorized actions that each permission list is assigned, but it tracks web library (iScript) permissions as well.

In this article I’ll talk a little about the fields in PSAUTHITEM, how you can join to other PeopleTools tables to get more information (like Component), and how to decode the elusive AUTHORIZEDACTIONS field.

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According to a ZDNet article , Oracle is Suing SAP, alledging that they gained unauthorized access to Customer Connection and downloaded software and support articles.  SAP alledgedly used expired and soon to expire customer connection ID's to download 1,800 items per day for four days straight from their office in Bryan, TX.   All of the ID's belonged to TomorrowNow customers.

From the article:

Upon a review of the Customer Connection site, Oracle alleges that it found more than 10,000 illicit downloads in which customers with expired, or soon-to-expire, support and maintenance contracts had accessed the support and maintenance site. Oracle claims that one common thread among all of the customers with allegedly misappropriated customer IDs is that they were about to become, or had recently become, an SAP TomorrowNow customer.

I've always wondered how TomorrowNow was able to fix bugs and plug security holes in PeopleTools binaries with no access to the source code.  Maybe this explains it.

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The other day I really needed to load some Receivables data into PeopleSoft to test a workflow application.  I had a handy-dandy ExcelToCI spreadsheet made just for this purpose, so it should have been a non-event.  However, I’d just upgraded to Office 2007 (insert Darth-Vader musical score here).  After an initial panic attack when I realized there were no guarantees this would work at all, I decided to take it one step at a time.  And as it turned out, it wasn’t so bad.

Here’s what I did to make ExcelToCI work with Office 2007:

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One of my recent clients had a web-based document image repository where they stored images of invoices, sales contracts, and the like.  Since they were implementing a new PeopleSoft release, they wanted to be able to click an invoice from PeopleSoft and see the document image.

The nice thing was that the document image repository was web based and all of the documents could be accessed by a URL.  The difficult part was the URL had to include a document ID, a value that was internally generated by the digital image repository that PeopleSoft had no knowledge of.  The other challenge was that the document image repository assigned a separate document id to each page in the invoice so there wasn't a one-for-one match between a document in PS and a document in the repository.

Another challenge was that the digital image repository didn't provide any web services on the back-end.  Our program would have to access it through the same web interface that users did.

If a user were to view an image through the digital image repository they would have to log on, go to the search page, search by invoice ID, and click on an entry in the search results to bring up that page of the document.

After some discussion, we decided that the best way to handle this would be to provide a hyperlink from PeopleSoft that would open a new window, post the invoice number as part of the search criteria to the Document Image web server, and the digital image server would process the request as if a user entered the search and show the search results.  From there the user would just have to click on the page of the document they wanted to view.

In this article I'll show you what we did to make it work.  Hopefully it will give you ideas about how to customize PeopleSoft to get context-sensitive information from external systems.

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It's been a pretty busy news week for Ellison & Co.  Looks like Oracle is going to buy Hyperion for 3.3 billion.  According to the article:

Oracle's acquisition could trigger a scramble for other leading business intelligence software makers such as France-based Business Objects SA and Canada-based Cognos Inc., said AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson. He thinks Business Objects would be a logical takeover candidate for SAP and Cognos may elicit a bid from IBM Corp.

 I'm not sure where this will leave Oracle's existing BI initiatives, but it'lll be a nice addition to the future Fusion applications.

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I ran across a short but interesting post at the SystematicHR blog.  According to the article:

 

• Of main interest and something I didn’t really know until recently is that Oracle has actually integrated the Siebel product into PeopleSoft’s EPM product in the 9.0 release. This is a pretty major advancement in their data warehouse product.

• PeopleSoft 8.9 HCM should not hold any surprises any more. Really not having any new functionality, 8.9 was released with major updates to some of the core configuration and base tables. The most major of these changes is the “Person” model. The person model allows clients to track people outside of their employment relationships. While the upgrade doesn’t include much new end user functionality, this is a pretty major upgrade due to the person model.

• I can’t talk about PeopleSoft without having a quick note about Oracle’s eBusiness suite. I’ve long maligned Oracle’s HR capabilities, but they are really starting to build some great usability and functionality around their talent management processes. It’s interesting to watch the concurrent development of Oracle and PeopleSoft and guess as to what will survive once PeopleSoft development is ended. Oracle is clearly putting more resources on their won HR applications versus PeopleSoft’s in my opinion.

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I ran across this article on ZDNet today.  It looks like Oracle is cutting prices on its lower end servers by pegging database license costs to a server's processor socket count rather than the number of processor cores on a server. 

From the article:

The move could cut the costs of purchasing Oracle database software by as much as 87 percent in some cases.

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