Here’s a bit of PeopleTools 8.4x trivia I wanted to pass along.  If “Allow Public Access” is checked in your web profile and the public access userid /password is invalid, you won’t be able to use any PeopleSoft hyperlinks from Microsoft Office documents.   You’ll consistently get the signon page and once you sign on you won’t go to where the link would have taken you.

This will mess up the nVision plugin DrillToPIA.xla that lets you drill down to detail, links in MS Word and Excel documents, and even links in Outlook e-mail messages when users use Word as their E-mail editor. 

I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but it seems that MS Office wants to make sure the URL is really a web address and not a file on your hard drive before it troubles your browser with it.  So when you click a link in MS Word (and other Office apps), instead of handing the URL directly to your default browser it makes a trip to the web site by itself.  If your MS Office app doesn’t have a PSToken to pass the web server (and it won’t), the web server will check the Public Access flag on the web profile.  If Public Access is NOT checked, MS Word will receive the signon page but the original URL will remain unchanged.  Satisfied that this is really a web page, MS Word will pass the URL to your default browser which will go through its own process and eventually you’ll end up on the page that the hyperlink pointed to.

But if your web profile has Allow Public Access checked with an invalid username/password,  the web server will redirect MS Word to the signon page and will replace your perfectly good URL with one that has ?cmd=login&errCode=105 as parameters to indicate an invalid User ID and/or Password.  Satisfied that this is really a web page, MS Word will pass the new, messed up URL to your default browser which will present you with a signon page and a signon error.  The browser won’t have the original URL you clicked on, so you won’t be able to get there from here. 

Has anyone else ran across this problem, or am I the only one who would unknowingly have public access turned on with an invalid QEDEMO user?

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