UKOUG PeopleSoft Roadshow 2013

Good day in London with a capacity crowd of PeopleSoft customers, partners and Oracle staff for the annual UKOUG EMEA PeopleSoft Roadshow.

Featuring Marc Weintraub (Director, PeopleSoft Applications Strategy) and Jeff Robbins (Senior Director, PeopleTools Strategy) along with customers and partners talking about the value of the latest PeopleSoft and PeopleTools releases.







Here's a few one liners, facts and other interesting things that caught my attention during the day.

• Oracle has 1,100 PeopleSoft staff in Applications and PeopleTools development team.
• PeopleSoft applications have 37,000 person years of development effort invested.
• Thomas Kurian (Oracle EVP Product Development) confirms that the PeopleSoft applications strategy is fully aligned with Oracles application strategy.
• User experience
• Capability
• Lower TCO
• Coexistance
• Big messages from Marc Weintraub
• Oracle offers choice
• PeopleSoft customers are "fiercely loyal". Huge take up of 9.1 apps
• PeopleSoft applications and tools are still receiving heavy investment
• Key PeopleTools 8.53 features highlighted by Jeff Robbins
• Search vs Menu Driven paradigm (object first then action)
• Guided navigation (Activity Guides and Train Stop processes)
• Embedded actionable analytics (Pivot Grids)
• User productivity (Dashboards, Work Centres)
• Mobile applications for mobile workforce (using iScripts, HTML5)
• PeopleSoft Upgdate Manager (using 8 week cycle fully patched and functioning VMs) Very nice!
• PeopleTools Future?
• Next Generation UI for mobile and desktop
• Extending functionality of Pivot Grid and Search
• Support for Endeca
• Make TCO of PeopleSoft on Private Cloud lower than SaaS.
• Time Ten access for nVision

UKOUG PeopleSoft Roadshow 2013

This promises to be another really useful day networking with oracle and PeopleSoft customers and partners. 

Featuring Marc Weintraub (Director, PeopleSoft Applications Strategy) and Jeff Robbins (Senior Director, PeopleTools Strategy) sharing hot off the press news on PeopleSoft 9.2 and PeopleTools 8.53.

Register early to avoid disappointment   http://www.ukoug.org/2013-events/emea-peoplesoft-roadshow-2013/

Hope to see you there.

Detecting CAPS Lock on PeopleSoft signon page

Many application warn you that CAPS Lock is on when entering case sensitive passwords.  A very useful feature.

We decided it would be nice to have this on our PIA signon page too.

This is done through some simple Javascript code on the signin.html page.

Inert this function (directly or via a linked .js file) into your WEB-INF\psftdocs\[sitename]\signin.html

<script>
function CheckCapsLock(event){
 //identify the ASCII code of which key was pressed
 keyCode = event.keyCode?event.keyCode:event.which;
 
 //Is this shift key on
 shiftKeyOn = event.shiftKey?event.shiftKey:((keyCode == 16)?true:false);

 //If the key pressed is A - Z and the shift key is NOT pressed then CAPS lock must be on.  
 //or If the key pressed is a - z and the shift key IS pressed then CAPS lock must also be on.  
 if(((keyCode >= 65 && keyCode <= 90) && !shiftKeyOn)||((keyCode >= 97 && keyCode <= 122) && shiftKeyOn))
  document.getElementById('oxf_warning').style.visibility = 'visible';
 else
  document.getElementById('oxf_warning').style.visibility = 'hidden';
}
</script>

Then add a call to CheckCapsLock into the INPUT tag for the password field.

Finally, place a "CAPS Lock is on" warning message somewhere on the signon.html page.

Warning - Caps Lock is on

This should work on any PeopleTools release and has been tested on Chrome, FireFox and IE.

Credit to Oxfam Developer Angela McKenna for these code snippets.

UKOUG Conference 2012

I recently attended the 2012 UKOUG PeopleSoft event at the Birmingham ICC in December and sat through some excellent presentations on subjects such as technical solutions for onboarding staff, implementing Work Centers, a fascinating insight in the PeopleSoft User Experience (UX) team from Oracle's Harris Kravatz,  making PeopleSoft work on mobile devices and securing PeopleSoft applications and data. In addition I had some great conversations with some old and new friends about new things they were trying and planning to do.  Networking is always great value.

I presented on Pivot Grids in PeopleTools at the end of the 2nd day which you can access here http://2012.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=9339&dlgact=shwprs&prs_prsid=7986&day_dayid=63 .

If you prefer... you can catch a more interactive Oracle version here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjeTC7dPeBs (Although this official Oracle video doesn't show how to build one).

OOW Day 4

There's normally 9.30 sessions but not this year. Maybe someone worked not that early morning sessions after the Oracle party were not a great idea.

So BIG thanks to everyone that turned up for my session with Russell Broom (Oracle HCM development) on Properly Enhancing PeopleSoft Applications. Over 100 people and a real responsive group. Thank you for listening.  All the slides will be up on my blog soon along with all the application designer project code.

OOW Day 3

Well it's the end of Day 3 (day 4 if you count Sunday) at oracle OpenWorld 2012 and the PeopleSoft sessions are buzzing with customers and partners, the demo pods are alive with discussions with the product experts and talk of upgrades, new implementations.  This is the value of these events - People!

PeopleSoft Update Manager

So, according to my interpretation of one of today's sessions the way in which PeopleSoft plan to deliver product updates is changing.  PeopleSoft Update Manage (PUM)  is a new tool for identifying, analysing, planning and deploying updates.  Part of this process involves Oracle releasing a fully updated application all set to run in a VirtualBox machine.  This will be main available for download every 8 weeks and will be a complete, fully updated and ready to run PeopleSoft system.  Nice!

This downloadable PeopleSoft Image (PI) will ony be available for Apps 9.2 but the new method of identifying, packaging and applying updates will be available for any release.

Read about it in the PeopleTools 8.53 RVP

and this My Oracle Support document says it all 1465172.1

Change Assistant will continue to be the software used to apply these packages and from 8.53 it will include features such as three way PeopleCode compare and merge, compare reports can be run as part of a CA job and support from the new PUM delivery model.

PeopleTools 8.53 Beta Panel

Oxfam is taking part in the PeopleTool 8.53 beta programme along with with other customers and partners - Boeing, Intrasee, GreyHeller and Succeed Consulting.  Jeff Robins (PeopleTools Strategy) hosted a panel session feature 4 of these.  The big message?  Well it's early days of the beta testing but

1) The infrastructure, install and setup is all very familiar and worked very well
2) The delivered VirtualBox appliance means you get a demo system up and running in under 20 mins.

PeopleTools Tips and Techniques

Then it was off to hear Oracle's Jim Marion with his ever popular session on PeopleTools Tips & Techniques.  From low level PeopleCode tips to high level sys admin helpers this is one slide deck to try and get hold of when they're published.  Much of what Jim's teaching here is in his book and he continues to demonstrate the power of the PeopleTools development framework.

Want to know the best way to clear out all the values in a PeopleCode aray?

&array.len = 0;

Of course.... simple really.  One of his big messages here was "know the language".

My day ended with this in the classic Mel's Diner.

OOW Day 2

Before word gets out about me I need say it here.... Yes.. I did go to a vegetarian restaurant last night.  Food was great and the company of friends I was with made the evening.   We did talk about work, of course.... specifically "how to secure your PeopleSoft web server on the public internet".   The company I work for has some interesting challenges in this respect which I may blog about in more detail sometime.  If you're interested in security and auditing then the ERP Firewall product from GreyHeller is well worth a look.  http://greyheller.com/Products/erp-firewall.html

Greg Kelly and Keith Collins (Oracle Security and IB)

Today (Tuesday) I've been in a great Integration Broker Security session with Greg Kelly and hardcore C++ programmer Keith Collins. Both of these legendary PeopleSoft blokes really know there stuff.  Lookout for more REST based support in 8.53 and security options.  The slides for this presentation has a great couple of diagrams describing the "waterfall" path when messages are negotiating authentication.  here's one of them....

Waterfall integration broker authentication

Discovered from Keith how to send integrations from one PS system to another without the need for the originating OPRID to exist in the target.  That's a new blog entry once I get home and try it out.






Everyone wants to know when PeopleTools 8.53 is out.  Well, of course, no one from Oracle is saying BUT it sounds like it won't be this year.  Last session of the day is a look at 8.53 in action by Russell Broom (HCM) and Christine Libby (FSCM) both Senior Apps Architects at Oracle.  Of all the many new features and enhancements in 8.53 to choose from this is what the focused on in this 50 min. session.

Russell Broom (Oracle Development)

Example for Activity Guide 1

Example for Activity Guide 2

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

• Related Actions and Content.  These are configurable in PI and have been extended from 8.52
• Activity Guides.  This is new for 8.53 and is PIA configurable means of implementing a guided procedure/process using bound components, iScripts and even external content.  Instances of a particular pass through the process can be saved and tracked.    On boarding a new employee with the need to reference many different components would be a great use case for this.  They utilise Work Centres and contain navigation buttons and instance state management.  (see Guide 1 & 2 pics above)
• Pivot Grids.  These arrived in 8.52 but have had some significant improvements made with smart filters, drilldown in grid and the ability to include Related Actions.  Nice!

Is that enough for today?  More tomorrow with news of Oracle SES in PeopleTools and hopefully more of a clue to the GA of 8.53.

PS Checkout these street musicians.  These guides played like this for about 20 mins.  As an ex drummer myself this level of drumming is pretty impressive.  Enjoy!