PeopleSoft and iPhone/Smart Phones June 28, 2010
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft.7 comments
At the recent UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference Succeed Consultancy (who I work for) demonstrated an iPhone application that we’ve written to allow users to access PeopleSoft and walked through how we’ve put it together. We’ve also recorded a quick video showing it in action (click the video to go through to youtube for higher resolution video):
The components we’re using in the iPhone app are requesting and approving of absences, but any PeopleSoft functionality could be exposed in the same manner.
We’ve also been working on the same app in other phone platforms (so users can also book/approve absence on Android, Blackberry or any smart phone that has a browser). Here are some (pretty grainy, sorry!) pictures of it working on an HTC Desire and a lower resolution Samsung):
If anyone has any comments or great ideas on how we could improve this I’d be interested to hear.
Real or Fake? July 16, 2009
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft.2 comments
Every site will have at least one environment with Demo data in it, and many developers will have a favourite PeopleSoft Demo data employee, one they know the Emplid for better than their own.
Some pick the first in the list, so that’ll be Rebekah Jones or Kimberly Adams. It’s often wise not to pick the top ones as they’re also likely to be chosen by others – and it’s good to find an employee that others don’t mess with.
These names will be instantly familiar to most long-time PeopleSoft (HR) developers:
Darlene Bergsten,
Leo Puddephat,
Paul Acosta,
Beatrice Test,
and my personal favourite: Ginger Buckalew.
I’ve often wondered – and perhaps a PeopleSoft alumni can help with this – were these ever real people? Or did someone fake up a load of demo data one day?
PeopleSoft Timings Records October 14, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.3 comments
Have you ever wanted to retrieve timing information for a process only to find out the the purge has removed all trace from Process Monitor? Or have you ever wanted more granular information about which parts of an App Engine took the longest? Or maybe you’re not troubleshooting an individual process but want to establish a baseline for long-term performance gathering on your batch window to identify potential future issues.
There is an easy way to accomplish all of the above as PeopleSoft can (although it doesn’t by default) write some really useful data on processes to database records, all ready to be queried.
(more…)
Skills shortage? September 22, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PeopleSoft.2 comments
Frank Scavo has a post covering an article from CIO magazine discussing the Oracle and SAP skills shortage.
He muses over a comment on the article concerning whether the skills shortage is independant of experience, or whether it’s only the more experienced end of the spectrum that has a shortage.
My first reaction is to agree with this. From the consultants I know here in the UK there are those that seem to skip from project to project, only having gaps in between where it’s by their own volition. Pondering this further though, are these the best consultants or just those that are better organised or with better networks?
It’s difficult to tell the difference, because the most experienced consultants are likely to have a wider network of contacts, and will have changed projects many times so will be well versed in the traps novices may fall foul of.
So which is it? I’d like to think it was the former. A talented and experienced consultant will always get work. However I fear it’s the latter as I’ve come across a few that have succeeded by being barely adequate developers but expert schmoozers.
And is the comment on the article correct? Is there a surplus of inexperienced consultants around, but a dearth of their experienced colleagues?
What are your experiences?
Creating an entirely read-only user in PeopleSoft August 28, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, SQL, Security.4 comments
On big projects it is quite likely that large numbers of developers have access to a many environments. Occasionally they can have access to environment which is quite important, for instance one that the customer is using for training or testing.
To reduce the likelihood of developers accidentally deleting some data that they shouldn’t it would be quite normal to remove their access to the environment altogether. However if they need access for troubleshooting purposes then (at least on projects I’ve seen) it’s quite normal for developers to be told “OK, you can have access, but be careful not to do anything destructive”. Occasionally – as with everything – things can go wrong. Either someone forgets which environment they’re in, or does something with unintended consequences. An alternative to the “just be careful” approach would be to create an entirely read-only user profile (i.e. one that has display only privileges to every component system-wide).
A read-only user profile is shown in screenshot below, where no fields are editable and the save button is inactivated:
Also, on Run Control pages the ‘Run’ button is inactive. It’s going to be pretty difficult to alter data in this environment.
Here’s how to do it quickly and easily …
PeopleCode records: PSPCMNAME and PSPCMPROG August 11, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, SQL.2 comments
A widely known tip and a new (at least for me) discovery:
Widely known tip
Most techies who’ve looked under the covers will be aware of PSPCMPROG. It’s the underlying table where PeopleCode is storeed. This isn’t immediately useful however as the actual code itself is stored in the PROGTXT field in binary so it’s not easily accessible. This isn’t an insurmountable issue however as there are a couple of routines to decode the field (an SQR and a Java version, both by David L Price). I’ve not used either method personally, but a colleague has used the SQR version with great success.
For me, this field isn’t quite the most useful on PSPCMPROG. You may have noticed that if you update the PeopleCode on a record, the record properties aren’t updated to reflect the change – I guess because the record definition itself hasn’t changed (although strangely Component and Page PeopleCode do update the timestamp on the corresponding Component/Page definition – so there’s a bit of an inconsistency there). So how do you check when and by whom a piece of Record PeopleCode was last updated? If you check the LASTUPDDTTM and LASTUPDOPRID fields on the PSPCMPROG record via SQL then it’s all recorded there. This snippet of knowledge has saved me (or at least expedited troubleshooting by showing me the correct person to ask about the change) innumerable times.
Lesser known tip
I’ve not really had much reason to look at the PSPCMNAME record in the past, however a colleague and I checked it recently and discovered the RECNAME and REFNAME fields. Every time you create some PeopleCode your code is parsed and a line inserted into PSPCMNAME for every reference to a Tools object. I assume that this is the record searched when using ‘Find Definition References’ within App Designer. However, now we know the SQL table behind this we can therefore query this table to quickly find out objects affected by code in a specified project, for example.
Both the company I currently work for and my previous employer had utilities to export project details to file, printing out settings and details from Tools objects to speed-up the documentation process (and we know how much techies love documenting!). Now we can add to that utility any objects that are affected but which aren’t included in the project.
Oracle’s Fusion Progress and secrecy August 4, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Fusion, Oracle, PeopleSoft.add a comment
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.
MonkeyGrease Plea July 16, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.3 comments
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.
Intriguing Oracle WebCast July 1, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Fusion, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Strategy.3 comments
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.
VMWare Player and IP Ranges June 30, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Administration, Oracle, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, Virtualisation.1 comment so far
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.
