Blog entries

PeopleSoft Viewlets - Quick Training on Popular PTools Topics

Brent Martin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:52:42 +0100

Oracle just launched "PeopleTools Viewlets" at http://download.oracle.com/peopletools/viewlets.html. The viewlets are short training videos on PeopleTools topics like Web services & Integration Broker, reporting, security, enterprise 2.0 etc. They're great if you need a quick refresher or want to see a live example of something you need to do. Check it out.

Software Testing and Development Newsletter - March 2010

Tim Jones — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:12:33 +0100

Up to Newsletter Index

Quotable Quotes

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust. –Henry L. Stimson

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. –African Proverb

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. –Frances Willard

Every now and then go away—for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. –Leonardo DaVinci

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience. –R. Buckminster Fuller

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. –Henry Ford

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart. –Charles Dickens

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things. –Edmund Hillary

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of British Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. –Charles Babbage

Installing PeopleSoft Today

Brent Martin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:42:11 +0100

I'm going to do a PeopleSoft Install today. It'll be PeopleTools 8.48, Financials 8.9 on SQL Server 2005 and Windows 2003 to a server in the Amazon cloud. I know these are old versions but I need a machine that matches a client's current state config, and the installation basics haven't changed that much anyway.

I set up a Go To meeting that you can join if you'd like to "look over my shoulder" and ask questions. Feel free to drop in and out as you get time. I'll record it for posterity in case you miss it.

Connection info is:

1. Please join my meeting.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/532050768

2. Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) - a headset is recommended. Or, call in using your telephone.

Dial 312-878-0207
Access Code: 532-050-768
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting

Meeting ID: 532-050-768

GoToMeeting®
Online Meetings Made Easy™

Software Testing and Development Newsletter - February 2010

Tim Jones — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:23:55 +0100

Quotable Quotes

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. –Thomas Jefferson

Patience with others is love. Patience with self is hope. Patience with God is faith. –Adel Bestavros

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. –Margaret Young

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. –William James

Oracle Finalizes Sun Acquisition

Brent Martin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:58:32 +0100

Well, it's final -- I got the e-mail from Charles Phillips and Safra Catz this morning. Oracle has finally satisfied the regulators and now is the proud new owner of Sun Microsystems. What can we expect from Enterprise Software going forward? Well, according to the e-mail:

Performance levels will be unmatched. Oracle’s software already runs faster on Sun SPARC/Solaris than on any other server or operating system. With Sun as a part of Oracle, each layer of the stack will be engineered to further improve performance, reliability and manageability so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. Customers will benefit as their system performance goes up and their system integration and management costs go down.

In addition, our open standards-based technology will give customers choice. Customers can purchase our fully integrated systems, or easily integrate our best-of-breed technologies with their existing environments. Our open technology also enables customers to take full advantage of third party innovations. Oracle also plans to extend its partner specialization program to include Sun technologies to better enable partners to deliver differentiated and value-added solutions to customers.

Congrats guys. Feel free to cut out a couple of hours early. You've earned it.

Error when running PeopleTools 8.50 from a file server

Brent Martin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100

If you try to run PeopleTools 8.50 from a file server, or if you copied the directory to your home directory and tried to launch it, you may get the following error:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.

This happens because PeopleTools 8.50 is developed using the Microsoft Visual C++, and the C run time files must be installed on your workstation or the PeopleTools client programs will not run.

Here's how to fix it:

Go to PS_HOME/setup/vcredist
Run vcredist_x86.exe

Tracking PeopleSoft usage with Google Analytics

Brent Martin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100

I’ve been using Google Analytics to track how users use my web site for years now, but it just occurred to me that Google Analytics would be a powerful way to track usage in a PeopleSoft system as well.

Turns out it’s not all that hard to put the Google Analytics code on your Peoplesoft component pages. Here’s how to do it:

1) Launch App Designer

2) Pull up HTML Object PT_HNAV_TEMPLATE

3) Scroll to the bottom, and just after the closing tag but before the closing Body tag, add the Google Analytics code.

4) Save.

That’s all there is to it. Let this run for a day or two, and pretty soon you’ll see URL’s like this in your “Content Overview” section of Google Analytics:

Here are a few points to bear in mind:

Site Upgrade

Brent Martin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:07:12 +0100

I spent some time upgrading the web site over the weekend. I'm now running the latest versions of Joomla and all of the components and modules. The look and feel has changed considerably and I even took the time to make up a logo for my company, ERP Associates.

PeopleSoft Corner Blog and the forum are where they've always been. Hopefully all of your old shortcuts still work. Your old username/password combination should work if you're a registered user.

I do encourage you to register if you haven't already done so. Registration makes it easier to post messages on the forum or leave comments. You'll also get access to the members only area of the web site, and you'll be able to use the social networking features when they start rolling out in the near future.

If you do find a problem, have a suggestion about something that could be better or see something you like, please let me know. You can use the "Contact Us" on the main menu, or leave a comment on this post.

Oracle Hosted PeopleBooks

Brent Martin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:58:02 +0100

If you're looking for Oracle's hosted PeopleBooks, you can find them here. They start with version 9.0 and are full-text searchable.

OOW09 Thursday

Brent Martin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:02:22 +0100

If you didn’t see Thursday’s Fusion Applications Unconference session, you missed out on the best Fusion Applications informational session in the whole conference. Why was it so good? Because Oracle lifted the non-disclosure restrictions around Fusion Applications earlier that morning, and the people that have been the closest to the Fusion Applications can now speak freely about what they know.

And what do they know? They LOVE Fusion Applications and they can’t WAIT until they are running in their respective companies.

So what makes Fusion Apps so great? From what I’m hearing, Fusion isn’t really a "fusion" of the best parts of PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE, Siebel, etc. It was more of a ground-up redesign of everything based on how customers said they do business now. As a result, Fusion focuses on end-to-end business process instead of module silos. There is a lot of automation around those processes. And information appears on the pages when and where you need it with additional information never more than a click away.

OOW09 Wednesday

Brent Martin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:24:55 +0100

I apologize for the snarky post in advance, but I’m in a goofy mood after a long week of conferencing, and this really has been a phenomenal but exhausting conference. I’m looking forward to Aerosmith tonight and a bit of relaxation.

What we Got in PeopleTools (that I haven’t talked about yet)Peoplesoft Projects Community Development Platform. Check it out!
More debugging features: Stack window that shows which functions we’ve been in, and tweak the values of anything in the component buffer.Reporting Console consolidates run controls, queries, process monitor and report manager. I like it already.Connected Queries let you connect 1 or more queries together to preserve the parent/child relationships. Then feed this to XML publisher for easier reporting than ever.Charting Capabilities – Everyone loves to show off the new Org Chart features, and yep it’s cool and I’ve seen it in so many demos I’m about sick of org charts. There’s a good chance you can do different kinds of charts in app designer too.Rich Text Editor – Check the box on any long field on a page and suddenly you can change fonts, bold, italicize, color, resize, embed HTML and even pictures. You can control which features you turn on to foil the hacker element that may be lurking in your enterprise. Think how happy your recruiters will be now that they can make their job postings pretty! What We Want in PeopleTools (that we talked about this afternoon) Read More...

OOW09 Tuesday

Brent Martin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:13:00 +0100

It was a rainy Tuesday here at OOW, but it was definitely worth making it to the sessions. The sessions I attended today were more “what’s new in Tools 8.5” focused, and I spent a little more time with the Integration Broker component specifically.

Like a lot in PeopleTools components, Integration Broker started humbly as the service bus to integrate different PeopleSoft applications. It wasn’t entirely standards-based and proprietary components showed up there (like the PSCAMA tags). It was enhanced over the years to become more SOA focused and the last integration broker enhancement release was PeopleTools 8.48 released in 2006 (if memory serves). Going forward, Integration Broker remains THE integration tool for PeopleSoft. 99% of all integration with other Fusion Middleware components continues to go through Integration Broker, and that’s not expected to change.

If the 8.48 release was relatively deep with a few major redesigns, the 8.50 changes are broader, with lots of minor enhancements. Without going into too much detail, here’s what’s new for Integration Broker in 9.0:

OOW09 Monday

Brent Martin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:05:12 +0100

Today had a decidedly more PeopleSoft theme. It was quite different from last year when everything was still slideware – the demos today were of functionality that is now available or will be shortly. Paco Aubre jaun, VP and General Manager of PeopleSoft gave a fast paced walk through of the PeopleSoft 9.1 value proposition and managed to squeeze in an HRMS and Financials demo while he was at it. And John Webb, VP of PeopleSoft Product Management’s session went a little deeper in the new features and why PeopleSoft 9.1 is a superior product. I also attended the PS Enterprise Platform update and got some insight into which platforms are supported and why. It was good to be hearing about new features of a newly released PeopleSoft application again.

PeopleSoft 9.1 looks really good. It’s obvious a LOT of work went into the products and multiple groups must have made big contributions, including the User Experience team I heard from yesterday. In fact, user experience was the theme of this release as Oracle took the time to address their customer’s business challenges. Oracle worked with 150 customers throughout the process – from requirements gathering through testing. Let’s face it – every release we hear that processes are streamlined, but this time I think they mean it. For example, to add an item in inventory takes like a zillion pages in 9.0, in 9.1 it’s down to 2 screens and you don’t even have to license Business Analytics to pull it off.

OOW09 Sunday

Brent Martin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:46:45 +0100

I’ve been drinking from a fire hose all day today here at Oracle Open World but fortunately I’m getting questions answered and if this keeps up I’ll have met my goals for this week by tomorrow afternoon. This certainly wasn’t the slow day I was expecting – it seemed like I went from one good session to another and often I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with all of the information. I’m back at the hotel early so I thought I’d point the firehose your way and see how much I can regurgitate before crashing.

One of my primary goals was to start getting all of the Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFMW) technologies categorized so I would know when to use which technologies, and which technologies would make sense within a PeopleSoft context since there’s overlap between what PS provides and what OFMW provides. And the very first session, the PeopleTools Technology SIG, went a long way in helping me get that understanding. In a nutshell, I found that most Fusion MW adoption by PeopleSoft customers happens in integration technology, Enterprise 2.0, and Security.

Integration makes sense to me intuitively because PeopleSoft will never be the center of all of your enterprise integrations no matter how good Integration Broker is. But OFMW was designed for that and provides a nice integration stack to give you a central place to develop, design and manage integrations for your whole enterprise. Adapters provide connectivity to over 400 different applications, the Oracle Service Bus “owns” all of the web services and moves stuff from one app to another statelessly. BPEL orchestrates the integrations in a stateful way outside of any individual app so you can get a picture of where the integration is without having to drill into the individual apps. And Business Alerts monitoring (BAM) provides real time information on business processes. But if you’re doing PS to PS integration, it still makes the most sense to do it through good old integration broker.

Speaking of BPEL, not only is it a great tool to orchestrate integrations, it is also a great tool to manage workflow that crosses different applications. I hope you’re starting to see a theme about when to use PeopleSoft technologies and when to use OFMW technologies. Basically if a business process or integration happens within PeopleSoft applications, use the delivered PeopleSoft technology. But if the business process or integration needs to interact with applications beyond the PeopleSoft boundaries, consider OFMW.

Business Intelligence is an example of something that normally crosses application boundaries, and many of Oracle’s acquisitions over the last few years (like Hyperion) are bearing fruit especially in how they integrate with Oracle applications. PeopleTools 8.50 has been designed to give these BI products more access to PeopleSoft data than ever before using the new PS Query Access Services. Not only can queries be invoked by the BI tools in PT8.5 (using web services), the BI tool can actually build the PeopleSoft query itself.

That's not the only new trick PeopleTools 8.5 has learned. It also has some really good Enterprise 2.0 functionality – things like discussions, tags, RSS feeds and the like. OFMW has robust Enterprise 2.0 functionality as well in Oracle Web Center. So which one do you use? Once again, when the Enterprise 2.0 rollout moves beyond PeopleSoft to your other Enterprise applications it’s time to dive into Oracle Web Center.

Disable Jolt Session Pooling

Brent Martin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:37:48 +0100

Here’s a simple script many of you have implemented at one time or another: Call tmadmin from the command line, count the users, and send the result to the log file. Schedule it to run every 15 minutes or so and you’ll know how many concurrent users are accessing your system throughout the day.

In fact, here’s a ksh code fragment of how this might be accomplished:

#Get Usercounts from Tuxedo
rawdata=$(tmadmin << + > $HOME/perf/log/PS90HRPD.usercount
paginate off
pclt
quit
+)
users=`/usr/bin/cat $HOME/perf/log/PS90HRPD.usercount | /usr/bin/grep tdpfap | /usr/bin/awk '{print $2}' |/usr/bin/grep -v psoft | /usr/bin/grep -v JavaClient | wc -l`

This code worked well until PeopleTools 8.48 when "Jolt Session Pooling" was added to the web server to reduce the number of connections to the application server.

Jolt Session Pooling is turned on by default, but if you have a modest number of users you might actually get a performance benefit from turning Jolt Session Pooling off because each user wouldn't have to wait for a pooled connection.