PeopleSoft Tipster

There’s a good summary post on Oracle and how they’re far more secretive about their products than PeopleSoft ever used to be.  The post deals with Fusion, but I think that the same point applies to many products, including PeopleSoft applications and Tools releases.  Even tools patches have very vague release dates.

When I posted a year or so ago that I’d heard Jesper Andersen say that the Fusion Applications suite wouldn’t GA until 2009 there was a fair bit of feedback (to put it politely - I even had to edit one comment for profanity), but now it seems more likely that Jesper was correct.

How much we read into this Gartner report is up to our own faith in Oracle, but statements like

‘Oracle plans to only sell Fusion to new customers and that “migrating the installed base to Fusion is no longer a near-term goal”.’

and

‘the 2008 Fusion applications will not include any core ERP products’

don’t fill me with confidence that we’ll see clients implementing Fusion any time soon.

It’s great news though for anyone hoping that the PeopleSoft product line remains around for a long time.

It doesn’t feel like over three years since SAP purchased TomorrowNow, but now apparently it is to close in the next few months.

http://www.reuters.com/article/mergersNews/idUSN2140305320080721

Whilst this isn’t a huge surprise - the Oracle lawsuit over TomorrowNow’s alleged mass downloading of Customer Connection content has made the company almost unsellable and it’s continued operation prolongs the legal action handing Oracle great PR.

I’m not aware of how many customers it has here in the UK so won’t speculate as to whether we’ll see any effect.

I’m going to be looking at MonkeyGrease over the next couple of weeks and wondered if anyone felt like sharing their experiences.

I’ll be setting it up in a VM and tinkering with it to see what it can do.  As a result I’d love to see screenshots, descriptions or - if you’re feeling particularly generous - some code if you’ve used MonkeyGrease in the past.  I’ll give full credit to anything used, and if you do send code I won’t use it on client site, purely for the purposes of demonstrating MonkeyGrease’s functionality.

I’m aware that others have blogged about this in the past, including Jim Marion, Rich Manalang and one of the Grey Sparling team, and there is a Google Group for it.  If there is anything else out there I’d love to know.  Once I’ve got all the info in I’ll post a consolidated write-up and include all the links.

For those new to MonkeyGrease, see here.

Oracle have made available a WebCast outlining their future direction for MiddleWare strategy, and announcing what’s in store for the BEA product line.

I must admit that I haven’t listened to the WebCast myself (to be honest I didn’t think there’d be much there that affects PeopleSoft in the short term) but after reading summary posts on a couple of other blogs it seems I was wrong.

The most surprising announcement for me was that going forward

“BEA WebLogic Server is now Oracle’s strategic JEE container and will be integrated into Fusion Middleware stack immediately; OC4J dev to continue though”

This was a bit of a shock as I expected Oracle App Server to be slowly pushed as the Web Server of choice. It’s a change of tack too as in many ‘prepare now to get a headstart for Fusion’ presentations I’ve got the impression that clients should be implementing what they perceive to be Fusion middleware components now, and I’d have had Oracle App Server down as one of those applications.

Antony Reynolds also says:

“But the surprising bit was the emphasis that Thomas Kurian made on Tuxedo. It seems as though the Tuxedo guys are being rehabilitated after years in the wilderness at BEA since the WebLogic acquisition. I was amazed at the increase in connectivity and functionality that has occurred in Tux since I last came into contact with it some ten years ago.”

I’ve tried to view the webcast to find out exactly what’s behind this but can’t seem to view it. I’ll post more if I can get it working …

EDIT: Mulling this over further, I think the decision to use WebLogic over Oracle’s own product is good news for the other acquisitions. If Oracle is willing to use a product that it deigns is superior instead of just using its own product ‘because it’s Oracle’ then that bodes well for any areas of functionality within PeopleSoft, Siebel etc that may be better than corresponding areas of eBusiness suite.

I’ve been doing some work with VMWare Server and VMWare Player. They’re both free tools (download links can be found on the Applications page) and can be invaluable when you need a sandbox environment.

VMWare Server is great for creating the VMs, and you need it while you’re adding virtual disks etc. However once the VM is in place it may be worthwhile switching to VMWare Player. The Player is slightly faster but you can’t perform maintenance like add disks when using it. Also, they don’t co-exist on the same client machine, it’s either one or the other. To be honest, I just uninstall and install as it doesn’t take that long.

The issue I faced, and the reason for this post is that VMWare Server lets the user configure the IP Address assignments and DHCP ranges from within the application, while VMWare player doesn’t. This is a bit of an issue if you have a VM that you’ve configured with a static IP address in a non-default range, then when you switch to VMWare Player the static IP isn’t in the default range.

The secret to know is that the ability is still there, you just have to go looking for it. The utility you need is ‘vmnetcfg.exe’ and it’s under the VMWare Player install directory (i.e. ‘C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player’). From here you can configure the IP Ranges to be whatever you wish.

When I spoke before about the REN Server window and inserting into it, I mentioned that as well as text a progress bar was a possible inclusion.

The benefit of a progress bar to the users is that they can tell at a glance how far through a long running process is.

There are inherant problems with progress bars of course, in that they’re often less than 100% accurate.  Most people have at some point joked at the time estimates for file copy progress bars within Windows, and ‘Microsoft Minutes’ is sometimes used as an ananlogy for inaccurate and super-cautious time estimates.

Despite this, I believe they have a place.  For some processes - particularly those that run row-by-row - it’d be pretty easy to work out how far through it is by comparing the row number to the total number of rows.

Here’s how it’s done … (more…)

I’ve been on holiday so the posts have slowed over the last fortnight.  I also don’t have any PeopleSoft tips to share, however I do have the following two observations:

Glipse of the future

I came across this amazing video in my feed reader (from Guy Kawasaki, I think).

http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html

And all acomplished without a small R2 unit to project it …

Glance at the past

Whilst using a local cashpoint (ATM machine) from one of the UK’s largest banks the other day it appeared to hang.  No amount of key pounding or patient waiting led to a returned card so I ventured inside.  A member of staff kindly came to help, rummaged in the back of the machine and it rebooted.  Being a tech I was of course interested to see what OS it was running, and was surprised.

Windows Embedded?  Nope.

A Linux variant?  Nope.

It was OS2!  I’m wasn’t sure how reassured I was that part of the infrastructure of my bank runs on IBM’s creaking software but after a bit of research it appears quite common.

I’d wager just about everyone involved in PeopleSoft technically has - at some point or other - resorted to using one of SysInternal’s utilities before to troubleshoot an issue with either a Windows server or a client PC. Whether it’s AutoRuns, Contig (useful for defragmenting large VM disk files), diskmon, filemon, regmon, handle, portmon (just which port is that process using), or even the Blue Screen of Death screensaver …

There was a bit of a clamour when Microsoft bought them out, but it appears these must-have tools are still available for free. They’re now hosted in a file share for easy access:

http://live.sysinternals.com/

This post is from a coupl of months ago, but I don’t know how I missed it.  Tim Dexter discusses how to use an Excel spreadsheet as a data-source.

http://blogs.oracle.com/xmlpublisher/2007/03/13#a192

This has the potential to be quite useful as clients frequently ask for some kind of Excel output which they then update ‘offline’ (i.e. disconnected from PeopleSoft) and then need a method of reloading the updates back into PeopleSoft.

All,

many of the presentations from Collaborate 08 are now online (the library has been up for a while, but the number of presentations available wasn’t high to start with - it’s much more complete now).

It looks like theres some great content on there. Lots on existing PeopleTooks technologies, and some of the newer stuff too (XMLP, SOA, BPEL),  plus some good lower level techie sessions.

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing so I’ve downloaded 45 presentations for going through to pick up little gems of knowledge (heaven knows when!).

They can be found here:

http://www.questdirect.org/QuestDirect/Events/COLLABORATE/Browse+Education+Sessions.htm

Filter on PeopleSoft to shorten the list.