PeopleSoft Tipster

I’m going to be presenting a session in the Technical Stream of the UKOUG Combined SIG taking place in Slough tomorrow.  If you’re part of the UKOUG and not coming I encourage you to have another look.

There’s going to be some decent content there.  All streams are starting with a keynote from Paco Aubrejuan – the VP of Development for the PeopleSoft product line – who’ll be running through some of the new features in the 9.1 Apps and Tools 8.50.

In the tech stream we have a strong focus on Tools 8.50, with further slots from Graham Smith (talking about Related Content, the Org Chart class and what’s new in Portal) and myself (taking on Connected Query, the Reporting Console and other non-UI enhancements).

Other presentations from David Kurtz (database level wizardry) and Steve Smith (building an ad-hoc Query Tool) round out the content and the day finishes with a Q&A with Paco.

The full agenda (including the HR and Financials streams) can be found here.

Oracle’s new support portal ‘My Oracle Support’ has been out there for a while now, but it’s not overly popular with users (or at least the more vocal ones).  It was never going to be an easy task combining many support portals into one as there’ll always be at least one set of users who miss functionality that they’d used previously.  These users will therefore view the move as a step backwards (in much the same way that I imagine some PeopleSoft users will great Fusion).

There will also always be some proportion of the population who view change as a bad thing.  They were happy with what they had before and any change – even if it’s a progressive one – will take some time to get used to.

Having said all that, some of the decisions seem baffling.  For all Oracle’s talk about open standards, why choose to develop it in proprietary technology (Flash)?  I would have thought Oracle would be embracing HTML5 instead.  It’s far more open, and rammed with functionality.

Also, the landing page is full of content that I don’t use.  I’d wager that many others are the same.  All I want is access to Documentation, Issues and Bundles.  I don’t want Health Recommendations and samples of what it could look like if I use Oracle Configuration Manager.  I only want to see that if I’ve actually installed it.

Finally, the HTML only option is trumpeted as a fall-back for those that can’t use the Flash version of the site.  It is missing a good proportion of the content in the main site, which lessens its use significantly.  What use is an alternative if it has reduced content?

There is an interesting survey here by Daniel Fink.  As well as the results, Daniel has collated some great comments.  My favourite highlights the irony in the graphic that you have to sit and watch while it’s loading, which tells you how much faster it is.

A colleague from my company has just landed a role testing the performance of PeopleSoft at a client.  The client wanted to use free software and settled on ‘The Grinder‘ by Philip Aston (who I believe works for Oracle).  Other open-source online performance testing tools are Apache’s JMeter and OpenSTA.)

I was really interested as I’d not done anything similar before, and the use of Open Source software was also a plus as I’d only heard of LoadRunner in this domain before (anything that makes PeopleSoft cheaper for clients is a good thing).

After a bit of experimenting we discovered that The Grinder is an nifty piece of software.  It uses a central console as the controller and one or more agents, one per machine.  The agents run worker threads that execute scripts (written in the jython scripting language).

It also contains TCPProxy, which you can use to record scripts (saving you from writing the jython from scratch).

Setting up SSL was a little fiddlier, involving messing around with keystores etc, but was nothing too challenging.

There’s not much info on the Internet concerning using The Grinder with PeopleSoft (there isn’t much for OpenSTA either, and only Brent’s post for JMeter).

Anyone wanting to know more can either get in touch, or check out the following resources:

The Grinder website user guide.

The Grinder usergroup archives.

A few years ago I put together a set of five alternate colour schemes for the PeopleSoft PIA and made them available for free download.  The intention was that clients could use a colour for each environment, for example, DEV could be Red, TST could be brown, UAT could be green, SIT could be purple etc.

Version 1 of the colour schemes had a surprising amount of downloads, and it’s quite gratifying to walk onto a customer site and see them in use.  There were however, some flaws:

1. The PIA Header at the top was not altered (as it relied on graphics, not style sheet changes),
2. The small icons in the menu, the navigation collections and the pages themselves were still blue, and
3. I’d missed a couple of minor style classes

So, I’ve now finished Version 2 of the colour schemes which addresses each of the above issues.

Details and download here.