Graham's PeopleSoft Blog

PeopleTools 852 Upgrade Scripts Now Available

2011-11-21T09:03:00.001-08:00

For those that are waiting on the edge of their seats for the 8.52 upgrade scripts THEY'RE OUT.

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=REFERENCE&id=1362049.1

Patch 03 is also out https://psft-updates.oracle.com/ice/Resolutions/873541/PT85203UserDoc.htm

PeopleTools 8.52 Form Posting

2011-11-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

When a user clicks a link in PIA, that causes a roundtrip, the entire form along with all fields on the page get sent in the resulting form POST back to the web server.

With PeopleTools 8.51 a feature was introduced which detects the fields changed by the user and ONLY sends these. The upload savings in payload size of this are very significant. I found this didn't work all the time in 8.51 and sometimes, for no apparent reason, would revert back to old behaviour. Of course on a high speed office network users wouldn't notice but on slow networks this new form post feature was massively beneficial.

This feature looks like it's had some improvements in 8.52 and seems to more consistently do the smart post back of only changed fields.

If you haven't got a clue what I'm talking about then watch this video.... it may help understand this simple but effective new 8.52 feature.

Nice one PeopleSoft developers!

PeopleTools Tables Reference Library

2011-10-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

My good friend, Dave Kurtz, from Go-Faster Consultancy Ltd produced this handy PeopleTools reference a little while ago and I thought the PeopleSoft community might like a reminder that this very useful resource exists.

It's a reference for all PeopleTools tables. Not sure what tools release it's based on and there are a few gaps. But, if you know how to fill them then you can contact Dave and make this resource more complete.

http://www.go-faster.co.uk/peopletools/

OOW Wrap Up

2011-10-10T02:06:00.000-07:00

So here are my top 11 take-aways from OpenWorld 2011

1) Continued massive investment by Oracle development of new features in PeopleTools and PeopleSoft applications (see below for highlights).
2) Most of the development effort going into improving the User Experience (as distinct from user interface). This is a combined focus on improving process, UI and software behaviour.
3) Pivot Grids are very nice. See screenshot here. (8.52)
4) Embedded Oracle (SES) Secure Enterprise Search in PeopleTools for cross application and component keyword search really is going to "change the world". (8.52)
5) Inter Pagelet communication framework significantly opens up the power of Work Centers (8.52).
6) Related Actions are a very powerful concept (8.52).
7) PeopleTools 8.52 is coming soon.
8) Oracle are launching big time into the public Cloud market with back-end Exadata and Exalogic. Look out Amazon?
9) A little bit more noise at conference around Oracle Fusion Applications but they didn't appear to be the big noise. I think some customers are now live.
10) Oracle heading unashamedly down the "engineered" solutions road. In some books this might be called proprietary. I think proprietary solutions can be good and I certainly think Oracle have some very smart engineers to produce some of the best hardware and operating system software combinations on the planet. (see Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics).
11) A long conversation with Greg Kelly and Tom Lenz (both Oracle security experts) was incredibly useful. I'm afraid I can't tell you here as "The first rule of security? - - - - Don't talk about security".

Nice to be back home!

OOW2011 Thursday Day FOUR

2011-10-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

Last day of conference... loads to try and squeeze in. Here are the highlights.

Spent a brilliant hour with the PeopleSoft platforms team (Mark Johnston & Friends) in the hand-on-labs building a virtual machine using on the Oracle VM templates. Very easy to if you know a bit about Linux (I know nothing) and if you have access to an Oracle Virtual Server platform to host your new VM (not many people do). Some discussion about the value of providing an ISO disk image that would work with local PC based VM clients such as Virtual Box or VMWare. It really can be done in minutes.

One of the last sessions of the day was a useful panel discussion with PeopleTools product management. From left to right there was Jeff Robbins (PT Strategy), Binu (PT Development), Willie Suh(PT Strategy), Ravi Shankar (PT platforms development), Virad Gupta (PT Dev) and on the end is Mike (PT tools development).

Discussed were topics such as

release date of 8.52 - A: very soon.
more auto setup in Apps Portal
8.52 to split out PS_APPS_HOME
IB Integration Network in 8.52. Aims to simplify setup, monitoring through auto-discovery.
Support for FireFox and Google Chrome. When a tools version is released Oracle will support minimum versions at time of release. Aim to certify each new version of browser being relseased.
8.53/4 plans to allow LDAP authentication for 2-tier tools connections.

Very usesful session on PeopleSofyt Reporting. Jody (PT development) covered subjects such as

rename of XMLP to BIP (Businesss Intelligence Publisher).
BIP now with Rich Text and Image support
BIP Query data sources can now be transformed before rendering using XSLT
Connected Query performance significantly improved.
Drilling URLs in Query now have free form URL structure

And so, finally, to my companion Smurf to tell us of this conference MAIN MESSAGE.

Hadware and Software - Engineered to Work Together.

OOW2011 Wednesday Day THREE

2011-10-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

Today was even busier than yesterday. I spent more time at the PeopleSoft demo booths talking with Keith Collins (developer of all things integration broker) - he showed me all the new tools for building RESTful services in 8.52 - Very nice! I love meeting with Keith.... he knows his stuff and he's a great programmer.

Met Tom Lenz from Global Support and Greg kelly (both PeopleSoft Security gurus) and found out how to integrate PeopleSoft signon with Windows. I'll blog on this once I've got it working. Thanks guys. "The number one rule of Security....? - Don't talk about security!" (hat tip Mr Kelly).

Tom Lenz

Keith Collins

The Meet The PeopleTools Experts session at the end of the day was just great. Thanks to all the Oracle staff for showing up and in engaging so well with the customers that showed up.

I sat through a great session by Christine Libby from FSCM Applications Architecture who showed how some of the new PeopleTools 8.52 features can be used to extend applications. She covered Pivot Grids, Related Actions, Inter Pagelet Communications and the simply awesome Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) embedded into PeopleSoft. Her presentation slides are well worth getting hold of as they cover in quite a bit of detail how some of these things are put together. Loved the Lego bricks Christine!

Smurf with Larry Grey's iPad app

On Monday night I got a chance to see the new soon to be released PeopleSoft Mobile solution from GreySparling. They've got a very neat thing their doing to get PeopleSoft pages rendering and behaving like a native iPad or iPhone application. I'm going to leave them to talk about technically what they're doing because I don't want to get it wrong. Just to say here - it's impressive and well worth a look if mobile enabling PeopleSoft in your thing. I took a picture of Larry with the iPad app but for some reason it didn't come out. (this is odd as my photo of Chris also didn't come out either - must be something about GreySparling staff - are they real?)

It was great to meet and present alongside Mark Johnston from Oracle WebLogic and JOLT development today. We we're cover the benefits of virtualising PeopleSoft. Some really good news is that in 8.52 a new feature has been added to allow new application servers to be introduced into the configuration.properties server string without needing to bounce PIA. Very nice... thanks Mark.

More great content expected on Day 4 tomorrow.

OOW2011 Tuesday Day TWO

2011-10-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to see a big theme for PeopleSoft at this conference...... Paco's session on PeopleSoft Apps strategy, Jeff's session on PeopleTools roadmap, Jim, Mathew and Robert's session on building a good UI and even Jim's "legendary" tips & tricks session are all following a strong theme this year - USER EXPERIENCE.

It appears that a significant investment is being but into the look & feel, navigation experience and application behaviour of PeopleSoft apps. What I'm seeing is VERY nice. Having had a tour of Oracle User Experience Labs at Redwood Shores last week and having sat through an hour of usability testing and feedback with the PeopleSoft eProcurement team today I'm not surprised that such high class software is being tuned out. - - BTW Thanks for the nice chocolates UX Team and really nice to have met you all :-)

Got a picture of the new pivot grid feature being released with 8.52 ("due soon"). Thanks Michael from Oracle Dev team for a great walk through of this on the PeopleSoft demo pods today. You guys all work really hard down there on the demo pods - thanks!

Mathew Haavisto and Jim Marion and Robert (sorry didn't get surname) both gave great demos of how to themse and re-skin the Applications Portal (see above sample from their presentation). Jim's posted a blog entry on the really neat concertina menus which are based around navigation collections.

I had a very useful time today with some members of the Oracle CABIO (Customer Advisory Board for International Organisations) many of whom share similar harsh comms challenges like Oxfam. (low bandwidth, high latency, high packet loss). World Bank, BIS, US State Dept, UNDP and others. I think there could be a lot synergy within this group with a common set requirements for disconnected mobile working - something Oracle/PeopleSoft are not really focussing on much.

OOW2011 Monday Day ONE

2011-10-04T00:52:00.000-07:00

So it's the first day of OpenWorld conference and the downtown San Francisco area is packed with conference attendees as usual. I've been here for 4 days already attending meetings with Oracle development at Redwood Shores and the weather has been blue sky and a scorching 35C. Today it's cold, wet and windy. Of course only the sensible ones brought umbrellas - so not many then.

Paco Aubrejuan gave a break-kneck speed insight into what PeopleSoft developers are doing in 9.1 Feature packs and 9.2 Applications with the new 8.50, 8.51 (and soon to be released 8.52) toolset. Lots of prebuilt Work Centers, integrated search-centric interface (search then act rather than navigate, search, act) which more closely matches the consumer internet experience (such as Amazon, Google, etc) and strong emphasis on improved usuability. Paco gave some examples of features to keep cost down such as dynamically building your own product update package (need to find out more on this as it sounds fascinating - sounds like you pick and choose what patches, features you want and an upgrade package gets built for you online) and new feaure called Data Sets which allow you to compare and migrate confiuration data from one system to another.

Spent another high speed, concentrated "run" through building and consuming web services in PeopleTools. Highlighted some new features in 8.52 including REST, new configuration Work Center and improved cross PopleSoft transaction monitoring and test and diagnostics tools. The presenter brilliantly demonstrated how easy it was to create and consume web services and how the new 8.51 Document feature was the way forward in working with XML. Excellent hour.

The last session of the day was the PeopleTools Roadmap. Jeff Robins (Oracle PeopleTools Strategy) gave a great insight into what applications look like when the new PeopleTools were used. Rather than a blow by blow list of new features Jeff took the approach of demonstrating applications built using the tools. Nice! Here's the main themes

1) A change from the traditional "Navigate - Search - Action" to a new search centric paradigm of "Search - Action". The inclusion of Oracle SES (secure enterprise search) as part of core PeopleTools is most impressive feature. A search experience similar to Amazon, Google or eBay is now available across the entire application or within a specfic component.

2) Context sensitive action menus are springing up in search results and elsewhere in the application.

3) Heavy investment in improving how pagelets behave in portal, work Centers and Content Dashboards.

4) Pivot tables/graphs are new programming objects replacing the traditional analytic grid. Vey visual way of viewing and dynamically changing the view of data on a page.

More tomorrow.

Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2011

2011-08-08T07:00:00.001-07:00

Honoured to be attending OOW this year to share some of Oxfam's success stories around running PeopleSoft applications on virtual platforms.

PeopleSoft Success: Using Virtualization to Manage TCO Session 14006 Wed 1pm Moscone West 2024

In this session I'll be sharing some of the problems we encountered in running PeopleSoft applications on virtual servers and how we resolved or worked around them and are now reaping significant benefit over equivalent physical servers.

Graham

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference 2011 - Update

2011-07-06T07:46:00.001-07:00

Well here's my report on the UKOUG PeopleSoft 2011 conference. I hope you'll get a flavour of this significant 2 day event in the PeopleSoft world.

Great venue at Heathrow airport with good food and plenty of space. Loved the Fizzy Cola Bottles - I think I ate over 40 !

Oracle PeopleSoft People
I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who spent the 2 days in the Technology Stream but I heard really good reports from the other HR, Financials and Payroll streams. But, before I get into details I must say first how wonderful it was to have such high profile Oracle staff speaking and networking at the conference - Marc Weintraub (Product Strategy Director), Amira Morcos (Director Financials Strategy) and Jeff Robbins (Snr. Director PeopleTools Strategy, Oracle). Having these people at the conference gave us first hand insight into product strategy, impact of Fusion Applications, PeopleTools next release and a chance to network with frontline product specialists. It was also great to have Colin Kilpatrick and Neville Varnham join us from Oracle UK both really good friends and supporters of the Technology SIG.

Keynote Message from Marc Weintraub
I'm not a writer and Marc packed so much into his opening keynote that to make it easier for me to write and you to read I'm going to bullet the key messages.

Out of 120,000 staff at Oracle 1,250 work exclusively on PeopleSoft products. This does not include the middleware, dbms, o/s staff that work occasionally with the PeopleSoft teams.
SUPPORT - marc gave a good overview of the premier support package
APPLICATIONS UNLIMITED - Continued to reinforce the message of ongoing support and comitment to product development.
COEXISTANCE - This message positioned PeopleSoft alongside other Oracle apps (Seibel, EBS, JDE and now Fusion (still not sites live yet)). Fusion Middleware meant that apps could coexist and Oracle would be doing a lot work around making these apps work together.
ONDEMAND DEPLOYMENT. This message positioned Oracle has supplier of Cloud bsaed SAAS as well as simply products and services. Fusion Apps are currently only available through Oralcle OnDemand.
PeopleSoft 9.1 Apps had seen huge take up compare to previous releases. Over 20% (1,250) of all customers were either on, upgrading to or planning an upgrade. From this I was able work out that Oracle has over 5,000 PeopleSoft customers.
INVESTMENT STRATEGY. Oracle's investment strategy in PeopleSoft applications were along 3 main themes Simplicity (making it easier to use), Productivity (bringing information together/reducing the number of clicks) and Total Cost of Ownership (lower the cost of patching, doing upgrades)
RELEASE STRATEGY. PeopleTools will have an annual release (usually just before OOW), Applications will have a major release every 3 years, Annual Feature Packs will roll up fixes plus deliver incremental new features.
FUSION APPLICATIONS. A few customers going live but not live yet. Only hosted by Oracle OnDemand. Customers will not be forced to upgrade. If customers see a need for these apps then they will be available. Oracle is "getting ready" so that when customers need standards based, web2.0 apps they will be there.

PeopleTools Keynote from Jeff Robbins
Always great to see Jeff at conference. He's got a passion for making technology work for users and for using technology to spark innovation and ideas. Great to have the opportunity to network with a key player in the PeopleTools strategy team.

Key messages from Jeff include

PeopleTools 8.52 out before OOW conference in October.
Release Value Proposition out here
New features include a fantastic new application search based on an embedded Oracle Secure Enterprise Search which looks like it will deliver configurable indexing of actual application data and a search interface that includes powerful filters like that found on Google, Amazon and eBay, WorCenters and Related Content have all had significant improvements along with continuing to extend the navigation paradigm seen in 8.51 with recent search results.

Very Useful Technical Content

Duncan Davies from Succeed Consultancy gave a very useful insight into opensource product Jenkins for controlling and automating admin tasks against PeopleSoft infrastructure. He demonstrated the automation of a database refresh. Very impressive.

Succed also demonstrated a very nice tool under development which can compare and copy configuration data from one PeopleSoft database to another. PeopleTools 8.52 will have a feature called Data Sets which is similar but Succeed have a powerful compare tool which it looks like 8.52 won't. These guys are well worth watching closely.

Like I said earlier it was great to have Neville Varnham from Oracle UK support the PeopleSoft technology community. Nev demonstrated the electronic forms and approval system. Nice feature and it sparked a lot of exctirement and discussion. Read more here http://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/entry/finally_a_paperless_office_with1

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference 2011 - Query Features in 8.50 & 8.51

2011-06-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

The annual 2 day UKOUG PeopleSoft conference was a great success. I'm going to post up a summary soon but for now here's my slides from the session I presented on "New PS/Query Features in 8.5x". Download PowerPoint Slides.

Hope you find them useful.

Graham

Portal Index Fail

2011-06-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

From PeopleTools 8.50 the PS_HOME and PS_CFG_HOME can be in different directories. Not going to discuss why you'd do this here but I'm finding many customers are choosing to separate their configuration from their PS programs.

Well we discovered a problem with running the Portal Index process PORTAL_INDEX with the separated design. The process runs to success but does not create any indexes.

One of our senior developers here at Oxfam, Scott Horman, found the solution and with his permission I'm posting it here.

When you run the process it creates the indexes in the PS_CFG_HOME\SEARCH\EMPLOYEE folder on the batch server. If you don't use PS_CFG_HOME to split config and programs then the indexes get created in PS_HOME\SEARCH\EMPLOYEE. However, the PORTAL_INDEX process looks for the STYLES folder in PS_HOME\DATA\EMPLOYEE and needs this in order to properly create the indexes. If this folder does not exist then the process runs to success without any warnings but fails to create the indexes.

We had made the mistake of assuming that because of this new configuration no longer writes indexes to PS_HOME\DATA we were safe to delete all the contents of the DATA directory on our batch server. Doing this will cause the create index to fail. You must leave the STYLES folder and all it's contents in PS_HOME\DATA

CA and backdoor index warning

2011-05-05T03:16:00.000-07:00

Encountered an interesting gotcha during a recent PeopleTools upgrade using Change Assistant.

One of the CA SQL jobs failed trying to drop an index that did not exist. The index really didn't exist either in the database or in meta data against the PSINDEXDEFN table and so I couldn't understand why the CA job was scripting the delete.

After much head scratching here's what we found.

The table in question was the PSPMTRANSARCH (Performance Monitor archiving table) and the index (which didn't exist) that CA was trying to delete was PSPMTRANSARCH.PSSMTRANSARCH.

The PSPMTRANSARCH table did however have one additional index which was not defined in Application Designer. It was an experimental index added directly in the database that had not made it's way into the Record definition in App Designer. The name of this index was GRS_TEST_INDEX and therefore did not conform to the standard index naming convention used when the index is created in App Designer. The standard is that the name of the index is the same name as the RECORD object name with the PS_ prefix The 3rd character _ is then reserved for the KEYS index and custom indexes replace the 3rd character _ with a single alpha character (sequencing multiple indexes starting with A).

When App Designer was asked to script the table alter (which includes index alters) it sees there is an index in the database that does not exist in App Designer, it assumes the index must have been created legitimately by App Designer and therefore must be in the standard naming convention. It therefore scripts the DROP INDEX assuming the index name is the same as the record name and leaves the 3rd character alone - in this example the 3rd character of the rogue index GRS_TEST_INDEX is S so App Designer scripts DROP INDEX PSPMTRANSARCH.PSSPMTRANSARCH. This index does not exist and so returns and error which is trapped by CA.

Lesson to be learned here? Always build indexes in App Designer. if you can't (and there are some instances where you have to work outside App Designer) then be aware of this gotacha!

Queries with Hyperlinks

2011-03-08T08:45:00.000-08:00

From PeopleTools 8.50 the PS Query tool allows the user to create a hyperlink to another Query, PeopleSoft component or an external link. You can also bind into the url string fields from the query. Very powerful. However, there are two BIG issues that I've discovered

1) if you schedule a Query to Excel then the Query parameters are displayed horizontally in the first rows of the worksheet. The code that inserts in the hyperlinks is not expecting the parameters to be there and so starts adding the links at row 2. This means that the hyperlinks are out of step with the rows of data and the last n rows have no hyperlink at all. Reported this to Oracle support and have a POC to fix this for 8.50.11.

2) The other issue is that hyperlinks seem to increase the size of the Excel file massively. So when a Query is run to window there is a size in bytes shown to the right of the links to download to Excel, CSV and XML. Not sure quite what this size is but it never matches any of the download sizes (could well refer to the JOLT data message in bytes). Anyway, the screenshot below shows the result of adding a single drilling link to an existing field. The Excel file without the link is 8,721KB and the same Query with the link added increases the size of the Excel file to a massive 36,516KB. Note the CSV and XML output types are similar sizes.

Logging this with Oracle.

Oracle ACE Program

2011-02-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

I'd like to thank my peers in the Oracle community who have nominated me for membership of the Oracle ACE Program . Well, I can now say I'm officially and Oracle ACE.

"Oracle ACEs are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates, with candidates nominated by anyone in the Oracle Technology and Applications communities."

There are 334 Oracle ACE members across the entire Oracle applcations and technology products. From the Oracle PeopleSoft world I know a few including Dave Kurtz, Duncan Davies and Nicolas Gasperatto.

How to extend Recently Used in 8.50

2010-10-01T03:53:00.001-07:00

At OOW conference in the Monday morning session I mentioned that we had increased the Recently Used list in the 8.50 header. This was done by Neil Yetman (one our developers here at Oxfam) and so here's his writeup on how to do this http://getlevel0.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-recently-used.html

Wednesday - Day 3 OpenWorld

2010-09-22T23:59:00.001-07:00

Another packed day of PeopleTools sessions. Just a few highlights.

Full session today demonstrating the new 8.51 testing framework. Record a script, play it back, copy the script to target system, replay script, compare test results, build AD project of tested objects, run compare. After the demo there were several questions from the audience.... and then Chris Heller from Grey Sparling raised his hand... no question.... but a great accolade "it's awesome" says he. And .... it is !

David Bain, (Oracle, Senior Manager, Product Strategy) and Jim Marion gave a brilliant demonstration of how to create a PeopleSoft CI based web service and then, using JDeveloper and ADF, build an application for a mobile device. Great demo. We should see this appear soon as a viewlet and details can be found in Jim's new PeopleTools book. He told me today that the Oracle book store had sold out and that his was the best selling book at conference. Not bad for a PeopleSoft book when you think how many Oracle tech and apps people are at this event. Well done Jim! UPDATE: So Jim tells me that he was bumped into 2nd place. One other Oracle book sold more - by only "one" copy. Doh! I knew I should have bought my wife and kids a copy!

Larry Ellison's keynote today. Here is a summary of what I think he said.

"We [Oracle] are number 1. We have the best software in the world and the fastest, cheapest, most energy efficient hardware in the world, they've been designed to work together, Fusion Apps will be released soon and will leapfrog the competition, Java and Linux is the platform of choice and PeopleSoft application was not built on industry standard technology" (what? er... WebLogic, Java, W3C standards compliant Integration framework, open standards portal, database agnostic, ... shall I go on? ).

In the evening helped some heroic Salvation Army guys handout 1,000 sandwiches to homeless and hungry people on the streets of downtown San Francisco. The contrast of extreme wealth and poverty and misery here is massive.

One more day to go.

Tuesday - Day 2 OpenWorld

2010-09-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

One big breakfast at Mel's Diner at 7:00am with friends this morning. Need to lie down!

Today has been PeopleTools 8.51 overload. If you want to know what's new in 8.51 read the release notes but here are some of my faves.

Related Content has been enhanced to access Level 1 and 2 fields from the buffer and not just level 0. You can also bind a related content item to a specific field. Right click on the field and a context menu opens with related links - - - COOL!

Smart Navigation feature brings data results into the top menu bar and allows you to drill hierarchical data structures. Very nice.

Work Center (centre for us Brits) provides a way through configuration to link pagelets to any CREF (component) and render these whenever that component is opened. Even in this "basic implementation" in 8.51 this is a powerful framework for building composite applications and mashups without doing any development. This is planned to be made more sopisticated in 8.52 whereby acrtions in the content frame can be directed to the pagelets frame. Really like this!

Document object is a new IB feature whereby a logical model of your XML can be created (or generated automatically from a schema (nice...)) and then bound to a physical implementation (CI, XML file, etc). You then code to the logical model thus protecting your application from changes to the underlying physical implementation. This is powerful and I wish I had recorded the hour long conversation with Keith the PeopleTools developer who's been the brains behind this.

There's so much more.... test framework, persistent searches, embedded help framework ( I think PeopleSoft copied this from Oxfam's project system :-) ), action drop down on org chart nodes, and .....

On my way now to learn more about PeopleSoft Portal.

Real buzz amongst the PeopleSoft customers here and loads of Oracle strategy and development team around to chat to. Well done Oracle!

Monday - Day 1 at OpenWorld

2010-09-20T08:41:00.001-07:00

Arrived here in San Francisco ok as you can do after 10 1/2 hour flight.

Spent Sunday at the Salvation Army Harbor Light centre - a drug and alcohol detox and rehab unit. What an awesome place ... making a genuine difference in the lives of men and women who for one reason or another find themselves struggling with addictions. A 12oz rib eye with the centre director, his wife and a guy who went through the rehab programme and is now the assistant manager there! Then a trip into the SF Mission district to a Spanish speaking Salvation Army church for evening worship.... mexican food afterwards cooked by the pastors wife. I feel like I've already eaten enough for the whole week.

Well, it's Monday morning and I just walked the 7 blocks into Moscone Centre where the Oracle and now Java One conferences have been combined. This was already a big conference.... now it's even bigger. The enthusisastic young American girl at the Oracle registration desk just gave me her best, well rehearsed ,happy smiley patter at nose-bleed pace as I collected my pass, mandatory Oracle bag and ticket for the Wednesday party... my head is spinning.. (wonder if she'll be as enthusiastic after processing several more thousand attendees today?)

Will do my best to post highlights from each day.

Oracle OpenWorld 2010

2010-09-15T06:56:00.000-07:00

So much to do and so little time before I head off to Oracle OpenWorld 2010. Looking forward to meeting all my PeopleSoft friends from around the world again and learning more about Oracle's plans for PeopleSoft applications and PeopleTools.

I'm honoured to have been asked to co-present with the legendery Jim Marion in his equally "iconic" PeopleTools Tips and Techniques session S317016 (Monday 5pm - Marriott Marquis, Golden Gate A). Not to be missed... even if you're not into PeopleTools and your more a functional expert then this session will give you some great ideas to take back home to your developers.

I'm also presenting with Jeff Robbins on Oxfam's PeopleTools 8.50 upgrade project in session S317421 (Monday 11:00 - Moscone West L2, Rm 2014) and also part of the PeopleTools 8.50 Upgrade Customer Panel in session S317446 (Wednesday 11:30 - Moscone West L2, Rm 2014)

Will try and post summaries from each day as it happens.

English Language browser and PeopleTools 8.50

2010-08-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

If you have browser configured with a language other then English US (en-US) then you get an error signing into PeopleSoft unless you have that language installed in PeopleSoft.

Logon failed as the language you have selected is not enabled for this database.

The solutions to this are discussed here https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=PROBLEM&id=988042.1 but this does not tell the full picture.

The table PSLANGUAGES hold a mapping between PeopleSoft language code and iso language code.

select LANGUAGE_CD, ISO_LOCALE from PSLANGUAGES

When you login to PeopleSoft the browser iso locale is detected and an attempt to login using the associated PeopleSoft language code. So if I have a UK English browser then my iso locale is en-GB which maps to PeopleSoft language UKE which in most (if not all) installations does not exist.

If, on login, there is a Web Profile language override mapping set then this is used to derive the PeopleSoft language code.

So if en_GB=ENG (note the underscore not hyphen) is set in the Language Support field of the web profile then ENG would be used not UKE.

So, here's the gotcha. There are dozens of possible iso language variants (just open IE > InternetOptions > Languages > Add to see most of them) but only 254 characters in the web profile Langauge Support field. One solution that works is to use JUST the first part of the iso code. So this now becomes en=ENG. Now any browser with an en stem would map to ENG.

But there's another gotcha. This works fine for Spanish.... es=ENG. But it does not work for en=ENG. This drove me quite insane trying to figure out what was going on here until a very helpful analyst at Oracle Support came back with the solution.

If the ISO_LOCALE in PSLANGUAGES contains only an entry for the first part of the iso code (such as en) and other entries using the sane stem also exist (such as en_GB) then ALL iso codes must be mapped in the web profile (en and en_GB). So to get en=ENG mapping to work you need to add both en=ENG and en_GB=ENG. Hey presto.

Incidentally, multiple entries in the language support field should be separated by carriage returns.

IE7 Very Slow with PeopleTools 8.50

2010-07-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

This is my experience with Internet Explorer and PeopleTools 8.50.

We found that IE7 on PeopleTools 8.50 was VERY SLOW. Pages would take between 3 to 8 seconds to render in the browser making the user experience unacceptable. IE 6, FireFox and Google Chrome performed very fast in comparison. You can watch an example of this here.

I observed that while the browser was rendering the page my PCs cpu went very high and MCSHIELD.EXE process seemed to be the culprit. MCSHIELD is McAfee Anti Virus process which scans (amongst other things) web pages for viruses.

So, we logged a P2 with My Oracle Support. We're not live on 8.50 yet but this was a show stopper to go live so this is still a P2. The Support analyst came back immediatley saying that this was a known problem with IE7, 8,50 and McAfee and that other users had reported similar problems and had disabled "Script Scanning" and this had worked around the problem. See ICE 1513373000.

Well, I completely uninstalled McAfee from my workstation and I still had the performance problem. It's possible that under some circumstances McAfee was causing a problem but this was not what I was seeing.

Turns out this problem is caused by an IE 7 addon. The IE Developer Toolbar . If I disable this then IE7 works fast.

The odd thing is that IE7 with the Developer Toolbar is absolutely fine with PeopleTools 8.49!!! Got this still logged with Oracle as a) they should be aware of the cause and b) need a heads up that there may be other addons that exhibit similar problems.

Please vote for my OOW presentation suggestion

2010-06-17T09:00:00.001-07:00

I've submitted what I hope will be a useful PeopleSoft presentation for OOW this year. If you think it's of interest to the PeopleSoft community then you can vote for it here https://mix.oracle.com/oow10/proposals/10765-the-anatomy-of-a-peoplesoft-query

The session explores what actually happens on your PeopleSoft stack when you run a Query and a ton of tips and tricks on how to manage the Query load, redirect Queries if necessary and some new 8.50 implications that every infrastructure analyst should be aware of.

Thanks

Graham

8.50 App Engines stuck in queued status

2010-05-19T01:33:00.000-07:00

Just applied PeopleTools 8.50.08 patch and found a problem with App Engines getting stuck at queued. At first I thought it was the patch but it appears to be a bug with using %CURRDATE% in the PSPRCS.CFG file Output Directory Optional Extension= directive.

The error you get in the SCHDLR_mmdd.LOG file is

PSPAL::UnhandledExceptionFilter::UnrecoverableExceptionFilter

I've retested this on the recently released patch 09 and it's not fixed so have raised an SR with Oracle

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference 2010

2010-04-26T08:16:00.001-07:00

Registration is now open! http://peoplesoft.ukoug.org/

I've been involved in selecting content and speakers for the agenda for this event and I can honestly say this is planned to be one of the best ever.

Some of the highlights of this 2 days conference include

Jeff Robbins (VP PeopleTools Strategy, Oracle)
Marc Weintraub (Product Strategy Director, Oracle)
Jim Marion of Jim's PeopleSoft Journal fame and author of PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips & Techniques
Customer and Partner presentations from some of the based PeopleSoft techies in the UK.
A chance to meet with all the presenters throughout the event.

If you're company is a member of UKOUG then depending on your membership type you will have between 2 and 5 day places. http://www.ukoug.org/membership/

Becoming a member just to get to conference is well worth the money. Contact the UKUOG Membership team here for help with any aspect of membership. info@ukoug.org

Hope to see you there.

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference 2010

2010-03-05T02:51:00.000-08:00

We are still interested in hearing from potential speakers for this great annual PeopleSoft event. If you're a customer or partner that has an interesting story to tell, a technology tip or new way of using PeopleTools then get in touch. Drop me an email (gsmith (at) oxfam.org.uk) or register as a speaker.

This 2 day event is a great way meeting Oracle and other users of PeopleSoft. There good value events for networking and hearing about new products and services. If you or your company are a member of UKOUG then the event is free..... so no excuses. Hope to see you there!

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference - 25 Nov 2009

2009-11-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

The next UKOUG PeopleSoft Combined FSCM, HR and Technology SIG takes place on Tuesday 24 November 2009 at Baylis House in Slough.

These are great events for networking with other PeopleSoft customers and to learn about new PeopleSoft software including PeopleTools 8.50.

You can find the agenda here.

Hope to see everyone there.

Graham

Wednesday at OOW

2009-10-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

OK... so I'm home now and just about over the jetlag. From my earlier post I might have led you to believe that all the happened on Wednesday was this awesome party! Well, that has 4 hours in the evening and the rest of the day was back to back sessions the highlights from which I'm going to try and share here.

PeopleSoft Tips and Tricks - Jim Marion (Oracle)

I've never listened to Jim and been disapointed - this hour was no exception. He's like a "customer of PeopleSoft working in Oracle" with a deep insight into PeopleTools from a developers perspective. Jim's Blog and New Book is a must.

His focus today was on customising PeopleSoft UI and on the more esoteric subject of Domain Specific Languages. He argued that as you wouldn't use PeopleCode to write the next wordprocessing package and that it is a language good for working with PeopleTools meta data that PeopleCode was a DSL. No surprise there for me - just great to hear an expert from Oracle saying this.

He discussed some methods for injecting JavaScript dynamically and contextually into PeopleSoft pages and wow'd the audience with some Web 2.0 enabled pages and he wasn't using the new 8.50 toolset! His blog and the powerpoint related to this session is the best place to get the detail. I'm not going to attempt to convey that here.

Got Enhancements for PeopleSoft PeopleTools?? - Jeff Robins (PeopleTools Strategy)

This session was an open discussion around several enhancements to PeopleTools suggested by customers on Oracle Mix. Again, I'm not going to try and convey the content here. The best thing to do is get into Mix and read the discussions there.

Some interesting debate around the reasons and value behind making App Designer more "modern" and around implementing version control for all objects.

Basically, have your say on Oracle Mix as the PeopleTools strategy team can't do everything for everyone. A very strong message came through that ongoing serious investment in developing PeopleTools and App Designer was planned and that this would be in areas that added nost value to most customers.

My final session of the day was my own that I was presenting. Given that Larry Ellison's keynote ran over by over 40 minutes and was still going when my 5pm session started I had a good number of enthusiastic PeopleSoft developers interested in what I had to say about safge and sound customisations. or... maybe it was the Fair Trade coffee and chocolate I was giving away :-) Any way my eariler blog entry will take you to all the slides if you're interested.

More on Thursdays final day when I get time later this week.

OOW Wednesday - The EPIC OpenWorld Party

2009-10-15T01:12:00.000-07:00

Man alive! What a party!!! Never been to a party with 40,000 people before. I only went because Roger Daltrey from The Who was on one of the stages and he was not a disappointment. Even at 65 years old he was totally awesome.... played every major Who song and brought the house down with his classic rock voice and stage presence. See videos below.
Today’s OOW was jammed full of great PeopleTools stuff. Ellison gave the Keynote announcing the new Exadata 2 server based (this year) on Sun hardware, gave IBM a hard time, offered $10M to anyone who can get IBM kit to run faster than Oracles and Governor Schwarzenegger made an appearance. I have tons of notes from today to type up.... it's 2:00am in the morning and having just got back from the OOW party I'll probably leave it until tomorrow.

Just a few more photos from Wednesday at conference and the party.

Graham

How to Customise PeopleSoft Applications Safely

2009-10-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'm giving a presentation at 5pm today and I'm up against a very interesting showcase session on some of the new PeopleTools 8.50 features. Ah well.... never mind.... I'm used to talking to a small crowd. Maybe I'll go to that instead of my own!

Anyway, you can find the slides, SQL and the full published article that this presentation is based on below.

How to Customise PeopleSoft presentation

Full Article published in UKOUG Oracle Scene Magazine - 2008

SQL to report customisations

http://openworld.vportal.net/?auid=10430 for the live recording. You'll need an OracleDemand signon or conference signon to access this.

Tuesday at OOW

2009-10-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Wooah! Information overload !!!! and it's raining. I thought it never rained in California?

Interesting and very entertaining keynote this morning from Thomas Kurian (Executive VP of Product Development). Main themes were how Oracle can make your applications work together to present a single view of data from multiple systems using Oracle's AIA (Application Integration Architecture). Some slick demos of various Oracle Apps working together. The coolest demo was a an Oracle eCommerce site where the shopper not only has a very rich browser experiece in the online shop but when they click through to talk to a sales person the shopper's order is automatically opened on the sales centre staffs browser session. The sales taff can then discuss product configuration and push new or revised order line items back in realtime to the shoppers basket. Very impressive. Watch it in full or highlights here http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/018079.htm#tuesday

Oracle Database Machine
Last year at OOW Larry Elison launched the Oracle Database Machine in partnership with HP. Only 12 months later the Oracle Database Machine Version 2 is launched this time with hardware from Sun (now there's a surprise). This is quite awesome hardware and if this is your "thing" then you can read more here . Oracle marketing is all over the place at conference claiming Sun hardware beats IBM with OLTP load and the HP based Oracle DB machine Version 1 seems to be no more.

PeopleTools Road Map
Jeff Robbins (Oracle PeopleSoft Snr. Director PeopleTools Strategy)
Jeff had an impossible job this year to pack all 550 new PeopleTools 8.50 features into 1 hour.

http://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/2009/09/general_availability_ga_of_peopletools_850.html

Just a few highlights from Jeffs session (if you want a feature overview check link above)

biggest release since 8.0

Tools testers had to build 10,000 new test cases to QA the new features

Enterprise Portal collaboration tools now built into 8.50

Major overhaul of UI (http://usableapps.oracle.com/ shows how Oracle take UI seriously)

Jeffs team has launched code sharing site for customer and Oracle staff to share useful code snippets and projects. https://peoplesoft-projects.samplecode.oracle.com/

Future PeopleTools plans

Contextual navigation menus (a regular portal menu would be dynamically loaded
with application data based on the context of the current component).

Integrated search results.

More UI improvements

Secondary/associated pages

Improvements to related content feature

Bring more portal features into core Tools from Ent. Portal

More LMS (LifeCycle Management) features

Improvements around patching

Release more prebuilt installs on VMs

PeopleTools 8.50 Customer Highlights.
Mark Hoenermann (Oracle)
This was a packed standing room only audience listening to the beta test experiences of customers working on 8.50 beta. Oxfam was one of those selected for the beta programme and as 8.50 is now GA I guess it's ok for me talk about what we found. I also sat on the customer panel for this session and explained that Oxfam had concentrated it's initial testing on the network impact of the new AJAX based UI. Our findings to date show that the UI is good but a little rough around the edges (Some of the PeopleTools developers indicated patches 01 and 02 fix a number of UI related issues and 03 (out soon) and 04 wll fix more.

Generally the feedback from the beta testing was very positive. Installations went smoothly, UI testing was good and well received by users, performance seemed "snappy" and list of new eatures to explore extensive.

On the PeopleTools demo pod I met the developer responsible for the new Org Chart Class in PeopleCode. This is pure html and Javascript based hierarchical charting tool. Used in HCM for org charts but can be used for any hierarchical data. The org chart object maps onto a Tree API object and the visual effect is just awesome. I took a picture of the screen but you need to see it in action to get the full effect.

SOA and PeopleTools 8.50
David Bain (Oracle)
The big change in Integration Broker occurred in 8.48 and the 8.50 release changes
were described as "thin but wide". In other words a lot of new features added but
under the hood IB hasn't changed.
Key features were highlighted :

Messages can now be reused, nexted and combined in a "container" message.
Gateway loggin has been extended and is now easier to find error logs via PIA.
A new Application Engine handler type has been added so an inegration can trigger an AW to run to the process scheduler and still return a message on completion.
Improved and more accessible performance stats on messages including a graphical
view of each stage of a message through IB with timings for each stage.
Various security enhancements
SAML node security
whole or part message encryption without using https
Options to exclude PSFT authentication token for specific integrations. This means that a Finance users can message HR without needing to be a user in HR (hooray).
Bulk load handler has been extended to allow an external system to map it's XML to a rowset message.
Improved service test tools- Single page to activate/deactivate all components of an integration (ie Service, Service Operation, handlers and routings)
Graphical representation of integration routings (this is nice)All IB objects can now be compared and copied in App designer (hooray!)

My last session of the day was a look at some of the web and app server features of 8.50.

Key features highlighted were

web server jolt pooling is now fixed for attachments in 8.50
jolt pooling can now be enabled at a site level rather than just for the whole
PIA instance
Verity search server is now supported for all platforms and can be setup for
failover and failback.
Separate PS_HOME and PS_CFG_HOME so that PeopleTools binaries can be secured but still allowing admin and reconfig of PIA, app server domains and process scheduler.
App domains for Integration Broker can be cloned and new "slave" domains created allowing offloading IB traffice from main transaction domains.

In conclusion.... what I like most about OOW are the things I liked about the old PeopleSoft Connect conferences and that is "the people you get to meet". Where else do you get to talk face to face with customers, PeopleSoft developers, Tools architects and product strategy.

There are thousands of PeopleSoft customers here and loads of Oracle PeopleSoft staff to network with. Looking forward to tomorrow.

More photos from the conference here.... http://picasaweb.google.com/Smiggers/SanFrancisco2009#5392341449381632434

Monday Afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld

2009-10-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

What a full day. There's a real buzz about this conference. Attended three sessions this afternoon and short summaries follow below.

My lunch box. knife and fork were all made of compostable potato starch. Cool! I think the ham sandwich was made of the same stuff though... not so cool!

One of Oracle's middleware competitors has had an army of "prison inmate clad" stunt guys chanting "I'd rather be dead than red" outside Moscone West. Hilarious - just waiting for a big punch up to happen! :-)

Several sessions throughout the day on the new 9.1 releases. I went to the Financials one and you can read more here http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/peoplesoft-enterprise/index.htm

PeopleSoft Financials 9.1 is Released
Amira Marcos (PeopleSoft Financials Strategy) went at her usual breakneck speed to try and fit into the allotted hour the volume of new features in 9.1. I've just picked out a few...

Improved Period Close process using the Collaborative Workspaces now available in PeopleTools 8.50
Improved sub-system reconciliation
Improved consolidation reporting
New approval framework for GL, BI, AP and AR
New chartfield security (not row level) allowing 2 chartfields to be used to restrict access to transactions data using roles.
New searchable file attachments available on most Financials transactions (journals, vouchers, bills, etc)
New configurable transaction auditing. More sophisticated and easier to report on than PSAUDIT
Delivered Ledger Cube process for Hyperpion Essbase reporting.
Enhanced Commitment control
Enhanced Project Costing

Plans for 9.1+ include more user productivity improvements continuing to use the Web 2.0 features of 8.50 to improve data entry, flexible field framework to provide adding custom fields to transaction pages without the need for customisation (this sounds like a an 8.51 tools feature to me.... i'll confirm this tomorrow) and Oracle Business Intelligence realtime operational reporting into PeopleSoft database directly.

SOA and Web Services for PeopleSoft
Dan Cenido from Oracle's Integration team did a brave and successful live demo in front of 200+ people where he showed how to build and consume Web Services using PeopleTools 8.50. Dan did a superb job of building a functioning synchronous WSDL published integration in under 15 minutes. I'v done this myself in PeopleTools 8.49 and the tools to generate XSDs, WSDLs and to turn Component Interfaces into services are awesome but in 8.50 they get even better. Debugging and testing tools have improved, routings can viewed graphically (this is cool), services are now decoupled from service operations (in other words an Service Op can now belong to more than one Service) and a wizard now exists for consuming a web service.

PeopleSoft Platform Update
Mark Horneman (Principal PeopleTools Product Strategy Manager), Ravi Shankar (Oracle DB Platforms) and Jerry Zarate (Oracle). These guys are all part of Jeff Robbin's PeopleTools strategy team. Just a few significant highlights (in no particular order) regarding the new 8.50 release.

PeopleTools 8.50 requires 64 bit platform even though Tuxedo and WebLogic run as 32bit apps.
A very significant announcement was made that all new platform patches and service packs will be automatically certified by Oracle (I'm going to seek clarification on this tomorrow and try and establigh the level of testing done prior to certification).
NetScape browser no longer supported along with IE 6. IE8 is on it's way to being certified soon along with Windows 7 for client PeopleTools.
JROCKIT JVM now standard with 8.50. This consumes slightly more RAM that Sun's JAVA but is much faster. (incidentally at the Oracle 11g launch in London I heard that JROCKIT can run natively in a Hypervisor (Oracles own initially but soon VMWARE ESX). This means a web server with no operating system! ...interesting!
JOLT pooling can now be configured by PIA site rather than for the entire WebLogic domain.
Verity search server now runs in Tuxedo and can thereforebe configured to failover to another search domain just a like a regular app server. This can also take search load off your app servers.
Oracle are soon to make available Oracle Virtual Machines (OVM) of a Linux based install of PeopleSoft HCM demo system. This is a very nice service to provide for customers wanting to test PeopleTools (or HCM for that matter). And, because it's on OVM it's a fully supported platform.
MS SQL Server 2008 supported and on SQL Server the ACCESSID login now does not need to be a SQL sys admin level user.
Oracle DB native encryption (TDE) is now supported at a PeopleTools record object level.

Other News

Just a few other snippets of news from various out of session conversations and from the PeopleSoft demo pods.

There is a Microsoft Oracle CAB meeting scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Not part of OOW but the SF Microsoft office is on the same block as the conference.

Saw a couple of nice features in 8.50 including

New Reporting Console component to replace/compliment Process Monitor and Report Manager.

Chart object in App Designer can now be used with a new Org Chart Class in PeopleCode to render hierarchical data in a very funky Web 2.0 draggable, interactive org chart. This is a really cool new 8.50 feature with loads of new possible uses.

Looking forward to tomorrow where more discussion on 8.50 is scheduled and I plan to explore some of the new Reporting Tools available.

Monday's photos can be found from here. http://picasaweb.google.com/Smiggers/SanFrancisco2009#5391925781901733202

Check back for more updates tomorrow.

Monday morning at OpenWorld

2009-10-12T10:46:00.001-07:00

So the IT world has turned full circle. From the days of the 70's when you bought "everything" from one computer vendor through the heady days of "open systems" and "open standards" in the 80's and 90's we now have Oracle wanting and "now able" to sell you everything again.

Charles Philips (Oracle President) said that buying IT solutions was like buying a car but needing to buy all the car components from several different vendors and having them all delivered to your garage where you'd hire a team of mechanics to try and fit it all together (without a manual for some of it). "Not anymore" he claims.

Just like OOW 2008 there was no mention of Fusion Apps but a very strong a clear message that their acquired apps (PeopleSoft, JDE, Demantra, etc) have been substantially develeoped and will continue to be developed. Their best in class apps coupled with Fusion Middelware technology and Oracle's inovation and services was todays reality. Paco Aubrejuan (Head of PeopleSoft at Oracle) shared the stage in the keynote with Philips and gave a brilliant demo of integrated budgeting and planning using PeopleSoft and Hyperion.

More later today. They just put the coffee and buns out!

Oracle OpenWorld 2009

2009-08-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

I will be attending Oracle OpenWorld again this year and am really looking forward to networking with PeopleSoft customers and Oracle staff.

I'll be leading a session for PeopleSoft developers, analysts and project managers entitled "How to Customize PeopleSoft Applications Safely". It's session S308411 and I'll be sharing my own take on how to make safe customisations in PeopleSoft. Moscone West L3 at 5.00pm on Wednesday. Read more here. yes.... you'll still have time to get to the party!

UKOUG PeopleSoft Annual Conference 19 -20 May 2009

2009-04-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

This annual event for PeopleSoft customers has always been a very useful couple of days with plenty of opportunity for networking and hearing about product strategy. There are two solid days packed with PeopleSoft Technology, Finance and HR presentations and roundtables.

Agenda for this event can be found here.

Hope to see you there.

Graham

UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference 2008

2008-12-16T06:39:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the annual UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference at the ICC in Birmingham.

This was the first year we have had a dedicated conference space for the PeopleSoft community and this worked really well. Knowing that everyone you bumped into in the breaks, lunch and exhibition had something to do with PeopleSoft was a great benefit. There's nothing worse than mingling with 2,000 people trying to find your friends let alone meet new people.

Big thankyou to UKOUG staff who succesfully planned and organised this event and to all the PeopleSoft customers, vendors and Oracle staff that attended and supported.

Here's just a quick run down of the content from the PeopleSoft Technology Stream.

Jim Marion from Oracle gave a whistle stop tour through some great developer ideas, tips and tricks on how to improve productivity and extend existing PeopleTools functionality. Jim is a great bloke who loves to share what he's learned and it was wonderful to meet Jim face to face after years of reading Jim's PeopleSoft Journal. Thanks Jim for making the trip over to the UKOUG.

Conference would not be conference without a look at what's coming in the next release in PeopleTools and to hear and see what the PeopleTools developers are dreaming of. This year was no exception and we were delighted to see again our friend Jeff Robbins from Oracle. He took us down the long list of genuinely cool and radical enhancements being planned for Tools release 8.50 and the PeopleSoft Portal. You can see these and more on the Oracle PeopleTools blog. We really value your presence at our user events especially as most of us don't make it to OpenWorld. Thanks Jeff.

Again, yet more good friends of the PeopleSoft Technology user community made the long journey over from the USA to support and contribute ideas, knowledge and opinion. So, we were delighted so see Larry and Chris from Grey Sparling giving their usual brand of high value, high quality content on developer best practise and using social networking ideas with PeopleSoft. Again, you should all know about these guys from theire prolific blogging. Good to see you both again and thank you.

Of course the local boys and girls were also out in force and a very useful session by Dave Kurtz of Go-Faster Consulting on Performance Monitor and a quite inspiring session on upgrading application configuration by our friends from Succeed Consulting and Tescos ended my day on Thursday with a warm feeling!

I missed the last day of conference to attend a family funeral but one of my developers from Oxfam gave me some positive feedback from all the tech sessions and discussions he went to.

These events only have value if people come and share.

There's value in community and I believe the PeopleSoft community in the UK is very much alive, seeking to get value from existing investments in these challenging economic times and looking to the future for opportunities like PeopleTools 8.50 and application upgrades such as FSCM and HR 9.1.

It was great to see old friends and some new ones.

See you all in 2009 at the UKOUG PeopleSoft conference and Technology SIG meetings.

Graham

Virtualisation

2008-10-23T01:52:00.000-07:00

Just having a few thoughts on virtualisation. I grew up on MPE, VMS and started developing on MS-DOS v1.0. Is history about to repeat itself?

As more and more companies switch to virtualisation (aka buying fewer, bigger mainframes!) the hardware manufacturers will sell fewer low and mid range servers. The result of this will be that the high end servers required for virtualisation will increase in price thus reducing (or even negating) the hardware saving benefit of virtualisation through hardware rationalisation.

One of the reasons mainframe manufacturers got overtaken by the "mini computer" in the 1980s and 1990s was that the price of many small servers was significantly less than one or two big ones. Hardware vendors kept prices low because of the economies of scale in producing large numbers of smaller servers. Open Systems also drove this change but in my experience Finance Directors were persuaded more by cost than the value proposition of Open Systems.

Hardware vendors DID NOT INVENT virtualisation. This has been driven by software vendors. Hardware vendors are therefore having to ensure they position now to gain a market share so that when they do increase prices they'll have a captive market tied into their "proprietary" hardware.

OK..ok..ok.... I'm just speculating. But it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves.

1980s the rise of personal computers
1990s the rise of the network server and the demise of the mainframe
2000s the rise of SANs and the emergence of virtualisation
2010s the demise of the network server and rise of the mainframe

My Oracle OpenWorld 2008

2008-09-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

Well this was my second trip to San Francisco. The first time was in 1989 for a Hewlett-Packard Interex Conference just weeks before the big earthquake! It was my first Oracle OpenWorld Conference though and was able to attend due to getting a speaker ticket. So here's my summary of the weeks events, news and gossip.

Oracle Opening KeyNote was given by Oracle President Charles Phillips and I really got the impression that Oracle is not only a VERY BIG organisation but is also VERY diverse. Consequently Oracle had an audience made up of everyone from hardcore, oily-rag DBA types all the way to thought leaders in relationship marketing. The keynote was therefore pitched accordingly - impossible to engage with everyone in the room. If I went to a VolksWagon owners club then I'd be with thousands of others that owned Volkswagan vehicles - we all have something in common. I'm not sure what an Oracle Java developer and a VP of Finance that uses Oracle applications has in comon?

I have to say before I write more that this was one of the best IT events I have ever attended for quality and volume of content and for the brilliant event logistics and venues. San Francisco was also a great city to host this in - albeit a bit of a culture shock for an Oxford Brit like me.

So down to some useful PeopleSoft and Oracle related stuff. These are in no particular order and I'm going to write in my own "brief" style just to keep this short. I've ranted enough already.

PeopleTools 8.50 (probably out sometime late 2009) looks awesome. AJAX based calls for all the things in PIA that we wanted FieldEdits, RowInserts/Deletes, callapsible areas, warnings/errros, prompt edit lookups, hover pages, a great new looking style (which you only get with a 9.1 apps upgrade) and some lovely grid features that allow dynamic re-sizing of columns, drag and drop column ordering and freezable and scrollable column blocks. A new style header based drop down menu looks great and frees up a load of pixels on the left of every page now. A rich text edit box is now available in PIA and mechanism to keep track of what menu items you visit (a bit like browser history). Read and see more on the Oracle PeopleTools Blog This is an exciting tools release that you can apply to any apps release from 8.4 upwards. Now THIS is the power of meta driven development frameworks like PeopleTools. Without upgrading the application you can apply PeopleTools 8.50 and get a totally revamped user interface experience. Oh yes!!!!!

The Collaboration components of the Enterprise Portal Collaboration Suite are being packaged and sold separatley (for a small "fee") so that customers without the full Enterprise Portal can attach tags, wikis, discussions and documents to everyday transactions like vendors, employees, purchase orders, etc.

Oracle Beehive was announced as a new product for Oracle. This is a WEB 2.0 based collaboration suite and backoffice system. As if Oracle wasn't divers already - now their competing with Microsoft Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes. Lots of Oracle staff buzzing around wearing black with yellow stripe t-shirts!

The HP Oracle Database Machine was an major announcement by Larry himself taking stage with a big black box with an Oracle badge on it. I'm not a hardware expert so will just direct you to the Oracle blurb.

PeopleSoft Finance 9.1 is planned for release sometime 2009.
All the plastic cups, lunch boxes and cutlery were made from compostable potato and corn starch. Green Oracle!
IBM were sponsoring several spots around the venue where you could plug your phone or laptop into a bike and using pedal power to recharge it. THIS WAS SO COOL - except they didn't have a British 3 pin adapter form me.
Ever wondered how high you can safely set your WebLogic JVM heap size to? Well, the word from Oracle and several PeopleSoft customers who had tried it is 1024MB. Any higher than this and "weird things" start happening.
.... my brain is getting all fuzzy now at the end of this manic week so I'm going to stop and continue this later.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008

2008-08-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

I will be presenting two sessions at this years Oracle OpenWorld 2008 event in San Francisco.

I will be giving a live demo of how to setup a Synchronous Message and Web Service in PeopleSoft 8.49 and also highlighting and discussing many of the PeopleSoft timeout and cache settings available.

More details can be found here at the Session Builder

Fix to serious SQL Server Performance Problems

2008-08-12T01:58:00.000-07:00

You'll see from an earlier post I made back in March 2008 (http://i-like-trains.blogspot.com/2008/03/upgrading-to-microsoft-sql-server-2005.html) that after an upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to 2005 many serious performance problems were encountered.

After a massive amount of testing and research I believe most of the issues are resolved by applying two Microsoft hotfixes.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951184/

and

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946793/en-us

These cannot be applied individually and are only available as part of a Cumulative Update package. CU Package 7 contains both of these fixes.

However, just installing CU7 will not activate these hotfixes and a two trace flags need to be set in order for any benefit to be seen.

They are

DBCC TRACEON (212,-1) 
and
DBCC TRACEON (4115,-1)

We are in the process of regression testing to make sure that CU7 does not break anything and that these hotfixes resolve most of our most serious performance problems. So far it's looking hopeful.

Upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2005

2008-03-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

We are in the process of upgrading FSCM 8.9 to SQL Server 2005 and
have hit very few problems. However, I thought it might be useful to
someone if I listed the few issues that we did have.

1. We had a Query expression which preserved the native SQL Server datetime format.

Replace....
CAST(A.DTTM_STAMP_SECas DATETIME(109))
with
CONVERT( DATETIME, A.DTTM_STAMP_SEC ,109)

2. In PeopleTools 8.1x PS Query did not support Outer Joins using the ANSI sql OUTER JOIN. Therefore Queries had to use the *= and =* notation embedded within expresssions. In SQL Server compatibility mode 90 this old style syntax is not supported. However, when you re-write your queries make sure you verify the results. One of the reasons *= was unpopular was that you could not differentiate between row selector criteria and join criteria as all predictes came after the WHERE clause. This sometimes gave undesired results. For example...

select COL1, COL2
from TABLE1 A, TABLE2 B
where A.COL1 *= B.COL1
and A.COL2 = 'something'

does not give the same results as

select COL1, COL2
from TABLE1 A
outer join TABLE2 B ON A.COL1 = B.COL1
where A.COL2 = 'something'

To obtain the same results as the original you would beed to add the row selector critiera and make it part of the join criteria. Like this

select COL1, COL2
from TABLE1 A
outer join TABLE2 B ON A.COL1 = B.COL1 and A.COL2 = 'something'

One of the side effects of rebuilding a query using the new OUTER JOIN syntax is that table alias names may change. If they do and the query is used in a Crystal report you must verify your Crystal report and remap any fields where the alias has changed.

3) Look out for NEW reserved words in SQL 2005. We had a few column aliases that are now reserved words in 2005.

Apart from these fairly trivial issues we are seeing some major benefits from moving SQL 2005. We're not live in production yet but will be by the end of March 2008.

Final note.... read and take note of the Oracle White Paper for SQL Server 2005 here. http://www.microsoft-oracle.com/assets/pdf/Oracle_whitepaper_FINAL.PDF

UKOUG PeopleSoft Technology SIG - 23 April 2008

2008-02-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

The next PeopleSoft Technology Special Interest Group will be on 23 April 2008 in London.

This event is looking for speakers to present PeopleTools related topics. You don't need to talk for an hour. Just 15 minutes PeopleTools related story telling is all that's required.

Contact me if you think you'd like to contribute something to this PeopleSoft community event.

WebLogic 9 and enabling static file reloads

2008-01-31T04:32:00.000-08:00

PeopleTools 8.49 ships with WebLogic 9. The Oracle supplied default configuration will not check if static resources (files) located in your PORTAL home directory have been changed.

The resulting problem is that if you change your index.html file (or any static resource) then WebLogic server will correctly pass the new file back to the client but for some reason WebLogic decides to pickup the fact that the file has changed but not that the size of the file has changed. So when WebLogic attempts to send the new file to the client it keeps the content-length directive in the http header the same as the original. The new file is therefore truncated if the new one is larger or you get a server error if it's shorter. The workaround ? .... reboot PIA whenever a static resource changes. Clearly not a viable option.

Of course in the PeopleSoft application all static files (.js, .jpg, .css, etc) are served using the cs servlet so if you are 100% vanilla with no need to change any static files on your PS web server then this will never be a problem for you.

The solution is to add the following directive (in bold) into the weblogic.xml file under WEB-INF inside the container-discriptor section.

<container-descriptor>
<servlet-reload-check-secs>-1</servlet-reload-check-secs>
<session-monitoring->true</session-monitoring-enabled>
<resource-reload-check-secs>0</resource-reload-check-secs>

I have found that if you reload the web profile using the (undocumented and probably unsupported) web server PIA directives then you can make a change to the signon.html file and have these changes take effect without bouncing the PIA service. Just make the change to the file and use the ?cmd=reloadconfig switch.