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Vote for my Session at Oracle Mix! |
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Written by Brent Martin
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Thursday, 12 June 2008 |
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I just suggested the session I'd like to present at Open World on Oracle Mix. If you're interested in the topic, I'd certainly appreciate it if you'd head over to Oracle Mix and vote for it.
It's called "Enterprise 2.0: Publishing Content from PeopleSoft using RSS", and it builds on a concept I came up with back in 2005/2006 but the market just wasn't ready (yes I'm a real visionary that way). According to Forrester , Enterprise 2.0 projects are starting to catch on, and delivering PeopleSoft content via secure RSS feeds seems like a natural fit to me. Anyway here's my write-up: According to Forrester, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share.” Much of the content to make Web 2.0 hum is locked away in your HCM, CRM, and FSCM applications. This session will demonstrate how to use existing PeopleTools technology to turn your PeopleSoft information into RSS feeds, how to leverage PeopleSoft’s robust security model control access, and how to combine the RSS feeds with other RSS content to enhance communication and collaboration across the enterprise. During the presentation I’ll demonstrate how to publish PeopleSoft Reports and Worklist entries via RSS by leveraging PeopleCode and iScripts. I'll show how to customize the content according to the user’s access and present a couple of options for bypassing the sign in page so that they’ll work with a feed reader. Finally I'll demonstrate how to use the feeds in commonly available feed readers and in collaborative applications like Sharepoint 2007.
I appreciate your vote, and thanks for your support!
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 June 2008 )
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Web Feeds in PeopleSoft - How it Works |
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Monday, 13 March 2006 |
Web feeds in PeopleSoft proof of concept is based on core PeopleTools technology and can be implemented today by most PeopleSoft customers who are running tools 8.4x.
Most of the work is done in an iScript. This is nothing fancy, just plain old PeopleCode that
1) Generates the RSS 2.0 headers,
2) Queries the database -- in this case for a user's reports,
3) Wraps the reports owned by the user in the appropriate RSS 2.0 tags
4) Responds with the XML message.
After the iScript is written, it's added to a permission list under the Web Libraries page. Once again, plain old PeopleTools security.
To allow the username and password credentials to be passed via a query string, I register the web library as a service in the XML Link function library. That way you can add userid=brent&pwd=brent to the URL and get the thing to respond with XML instead of a signon page.
Really, that's all you need to do to make it work as long as you can live with usernames and passwords on the URL. I didn't think most companies could live with that, so I took it one step further.
I created a Java servlet called XMLListeningConnector, and installed it under Integration Broker as another listening connector. The purpose of the servlet is to challenge the user for a username and password using standard HTTP Basic authentication, create the appropriate URL to the service you registered in the last step, call the URL with the credentials supplied by the user and pass the results back. I don't consider myself a Java guru so this would probably be easy stuff for most J2EE developers.
To make the RSS icon glow, I had to put the RSS Auto Discovery URL's in the main page header. This required modifying the PT_BRANDING Application Package and the PORTAL_UNI_HEADER_NS and PORTAL_UNI_HEADER_NS4X HTML objects. It was changed to get the RSS feeds you have security to and add them to the HTML document headers. I consider this the ugliest part of the modification since it touches PeopleTools objects and could have to be reapplied with every PeopleTools patch. If anyone has a better way to do this, let me know.
But in summary, I believe this can be deployed relatively quickly using your current PeopleSoft infrastructure and proven PeopleTools technology. There's really nothing new here, so don't be afraid to go for it.
Please contact me if you'd like some guidance. I currently have some availability toward the first of April. And if you would like to beta test the application demonstrated in the previous article, I'd be happy to arrange something special for early adopters. My e-mail is
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 14 March 2006 )
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Web Feeds in PeopleSoft - Proof of Concept |
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Thursday, 09 March 2006 |
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are some screen shots of my "Web Feeds from PeopleSoft" proof of concept.
First, this is Internet Explorer version 7 beta. Tabbed-browsing. Search engine on the toolbar. Web Feed enabled. Lots of security. And soon to be on the majority of corporate desktops in the United States and around the world.
Now we're logged on. Check out the RSS icon. It's glowing.
Let's click it and see what happens.
The Web Feed icon shows all of the web feeds that are available to be subscribed to. Let's click the Financials Reports web feed to subscribe to it.
Whoops, we need to log on again. This is by design. We won't be using the standard PeopleSoft signin page to access our web feeds after we subscribe to them, so we have to use an authentication method that Internet Explorer supports for web feeds.
I re-entered my PeopleSoft username and password. At least we didn't need to remember a different one. This would work even if you were using other authentication methods like LDAP.
This page shows all of the entries in the Financials Reports web feed. Notice these are our personal reports -- nobody else can see this same list. We'll click the "Subscribe to this web feed" link.
Now we get to say where we want the feed to show up. We'll put it in our favorites under the "Feeds" link. Of course, we could create a subfolder for just our PeopleSoft feeds, but I'm trying to keep it simple.
Now we're subscribed.
I signed out of PeopleSoft and went back to my browser's home page. If we want to access our web feed, we can do it by opening the Favorites window, clicking Feeds, and there's our feed.
If you click on the feed, it'll show you all of the reports we have. This is the same list that you would see if you went to Report Manager or Process Monitor.
Now let's click a report.
OK, we have to sign in again. Unfortunately web feed security and PeopleSoft security don't trust each other. I have some ideas to get around this which will be the subject of another post.
And here's your report.
Want to view another report? Just go back to the web feed link and click it. If you want to be advanced, right click it and select "Open in a new tab" so you can have both opened in the same browser window.
Here's a flash demo created in Wink on the fly that shows the process in real-time. This was my first time to use Wink, so I apologize for quality -- it's not the tool's fault!
Please let me know what you think.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 12 March 2006 )
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RSS/Web Feed Resources |
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Tuesday, 07 March 2006 |
Here are some resources on the topic of RSS and web feeds if my last post about web feeds from PeopleSoft totally confused you:
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 09 March 2006 )
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Web Feeds in the Enterprise |
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Monday, 06 March 2006 |
While listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast last August, it occurred to me that Web Feed technology has a huge potential inside the enterprise.
There a lot of information that you need to know but don't want to keep checking the system for. I'm sure if you're a PeopleSoft user you can think of several things that fit into this category. If you work in support, maybe it's new or escallated issues. If you're a manager, maybe it's the latest P&L report for your cost center. For many, you need the latest new-hire list. If you're a customer, maybe this would be new product information, order status, or timely invoice information. Vendors might want to get the latest change orders. You get the idea.
E-mail has been the traditional channel to push this information to your desk, but it has limitations. First, it's not anonymous. You must give your e-mail address which can then be used for other purposes. Second, it's not secure. Anyone can read your e-mail as it travels across the internet. Third, e-mail is an over-used channel. In addition to receiving e-mail messages from employees, managers, customers and vendors, we also receive e-mail messages from a variety of automated systems both inside and outside of the enterprise. It's difficult to keep up with, pritorize and respond to each one.
I think the solution to liberating e-mail and giving users the information they need is with Web Feeds. Web feeds allow all kinds of information to be published and subscribed to by users who have the correct access. The web feed model would provide a great anonymous, opt-in, spam free channel to get all kinds of enterprise information delivered to the users who need it.
Think about it. How much junk is clogging your e-mail inbox right now? Are you crazy about getting request to approve purchase orders, requisitions, etc., delivered there? How about new cases, leads, or opportunities that are assigned to you?
Wouldn't it be easier to subscribe to all of this via a web feed the same way you can subscribe to this blog or CNN's news feeds?
With Web Feeds, instead of checking their inbox for the latest worklist items, employees can check their Worklist web feed. Instead of e-mailing links to reports, employees can just subscribe to the reporting feed that are relevant to them. Instead of periodically emailing customers information about products, customers can now opt-in by subscribing to the product web feeds that interest them. No more spamming users, and users no longer need to send notes to the helpdesk asking to be removed from a mailing list because the consumer controls the subscription.
Currently there are some very good feed readers you can install so that you can subscribe to web feeds. NewsGator allows Outlook to subscribe to web feeds, the FireFox browser allows web feeds directly in your browser, and FeedDaemon is a nice stand-alone feed reader.
But in the near future you won't need to push a separate web feed reader to everyone's desktop. Internet Explorer 7 and the 2007 version of Microsoft Outlook will support web feeds when they are released later this year. The Firefox and other browsers have supported web feeds for some time.
Once your company rolls out IE7 or Office 2007, you'll for the first time have afeed reader on every employee's desktop. That opens up a whole new information delivery channel with little incremental cost.
It's not just about notifications. Documents and reports can be "attached" to web feeds via the Enclosures functionality so users don't have to make a trip back to the web server to get them. What a great way to deliver reports to the desktop without bogging down e-mail servers!
And web feeds already work great on mobile devices. I use PocketRSS on my iPAQ to keep my web feeds synchronized and download my podcasts. There's no reason emloyees couldn't do the same on their blackberry or Treo too. Combined with the Enclosures functionality, mobile users can now access corporate data like never before.
You might be thinking that web feeds don't send content that is specific to an individual's role and security settings. Well actually most feed readers support several different types of HTTP authentication. A web feed publishing servlet could authenticate each subscriber against PeopleSoft's security model and provide content specifically for that user's roles.
As with all good ideas, I wasn't the first to think of it. MediaThink has a great white paper which discusses the same concepts. Spanning Partners already provides web feeds out of SalesForce.com.
I've been working on a proof of concept for PeopleSoft to publish web feeds, and I'll share my findings in the near future. If you would like to know more, please send me an e-mail at
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Last Updated ( Monday, 06 March 2006 )
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