It’s a straightforward task to lock the accounts, but once you have your security setup in place and your own template user profiles to clone then these ‘example’ accounts no longer serve any purpose. Here’s an easy way to delete them.

First of all, a warning. Before you delete anything make sure that you have adequate backups and have performed a trial restore recently.

For a little while now (at least from Tools 8.49) there has been functionality to delete inactive users. It classes an inactive user as one who hasn’t logged on for a set amount of days (using the LASTSIGNONDTTM field on PSOPRDEFN). You can check for user profiles that haven’t logged in for a long time (say, 2 years) using SQL like this:

select OPRID
     , LASTSIGNONDTTM
  from PSOPRDEFN 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM <= sysdate-730

(note: sysdate-730 is approximately 2 years ago)

You’ll probably find that the list contains none of your users, but a lot of the ‘example’ accounts. These are the accounts that will be purged, so make sure that you’re happy that there are no important accounts in the list.

There are also a lot of example user profiles that have never signed in who therefore have a null LASTSIGNONDTTM. These need to be updated so that the process will also purge them:

update PSOPRDEFN 
   set LASTSIGNONDTTM = '01-JAN-01 00.00.00.000000000' 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM is null

Once you’re happy with the purge list, we need to setup the process. Go to:

PeopleTools > Security > Password Configuration > Password Controls

Under the Purge User Profiles heading enter the amount of days that you’ve chosen (730 in my example) and click Save.

Then either click the Schedule button, or go to:

PeopleTools > Security > User Profiles > Purge Inactive User Profiles

Select a Run Control ID and run the Purge process. It’s not particularly fast (as it’s done via CI), but if you run the following piece of SQL you’ll be able to see your unneeded OPRIDs slowly disappearing:

select count(OPRID) 
  from PSOPRDEFN 
 where LASTSIGNONDTTM <= sysdate-730

I had to miss a couple of the sessions that I’d have liked to have seen today as we had to leave early to catch our flights, I was particularly disappointed to miss out on Robert Half International talking about PeopleSoft on Amazon Web Services.

I did manage to go and see some of the Oracle UK team (Debi Ashby, Diana Draghici and Mike Everitt) talking about what you can do to improve the PeopleSoft UI. The team walked through some role-playing scenarios for adding navigation collections, portal pagelets etc and then showed some screenshots of the work that Succeed has done at Pret, which was nice.

I started day 3 squeezing into a pretty packed room for a Fusion Technical Overview from Nadia Bendjedou.  There was quite a lot of detail in this section so I’m not going to fill up this post with everything, but the stand-out points for me were:

• All applications are based on a common unified data model (not split into multiple pillars like PeopleSoft), so you install the database once and you get EVERYTHING, even if you only want one small module! It doesn’t matter if you just want Talent Management, you not only get a database full of every HR module, but all other applications too (Financials, CRM etc).
• Everything in Fusion is meta-data driven.  When you change something, the core isn’t changed, the change is stored at a higher level.
• The data model is largely based on eBusiness Suite, however it has been enhanced with some of the best bits from PeopleSoft, namely effective dating, Trees and Setids for striping the data.

Next up was PeopleTools Search from Matthew Haavisto. I think this is going to be the single best change in Tools 8.52, users are going to love it! In Matthew’s words “It’s more than just a way of finding things, it’s a better way to navigate.” The Search box appears on homepage, plus keyword search on component pages. The most relevant results are shown at the top with facets down the side for additional filtering.

In the afternoon I went to PeopleSoft On-Demand with Marc Weintraub. This is an area of real interest to me as I’ve done a lot of PeopleSoft work in the cloud, and it seems like Oracle are starting to flesh out their offerings. Anything that Oracle sells is now available On-Demand, and across their entire suite of products they host 700 customers and 5.5million users on Oracle On-Demand.

Next up was Larry’s hotly anticipated keynote.  There was a sponsor session first, which was particularly arduous to sit through. I won’t name them here, and I appreciate that they’d spent a lot of money to get such a good billing, but I don’t think much that they said was relevant to the broad interests of those sat waiting for Larry. They’d have been better putting their logo up as a big backdrop and getting a proper professional speaker (Clinton or someone) to talk instead. As for Larry, it was a session of two halves. He started in barn-storming fashion, really sticking it to Marc Benioff and overturning some of the accusations from SalesForce. It was really enjoyable to see one of the world’s foremost CEOs really in a combative mood. He then announced three products, the GA of Fusion, the Oracle Social Network and the Oracle Public Cloud. The energy level tapered off during an overlong demo of the Social Network – but it’s good to see a CEO doing demos (a la Jobs) as many don’t know the products well enough and pass the responsibility to someone else.

The final session was PeopleSoft Portal creates a great UI with Southern Company and Matthew Haavisto. This was a showcase for Southern Company’s portal. The UI itself was pretty nice, good use of Lightboxes etc, however the real surprise was the amount of content that they’d included. It had taked a big team to put it in (2.5 consultants for 10 months, plus internal resources) but when they showed the volume of content it’s easy to see where all that effort went.

I started off the second day by having another look around the demo grounds. One of the booths had a ‘proof of concept’ demo of how Fusion apps might look on the iPad and it was very impressive. Really slick and gorgeous to look at. I know that there has been a lot of fuss over the Workday iPad functionality, and although I haven’t seen it I fail to see how it could look much better than what was demoed here.

My first session of the day was Best Practices for Using PeopleSoft Test Framework by David Howard and Scott Shafer.  They asked for a show of hands at the start, and although a lot of people present were on Tools 8.51 not many had used PTF yet. It was an interesting session and I learnt quite a lot, for instance that PTF is the next version of PS Script (for those that have been around a while) and that it works well with the Usage Monitor to narrow down exactly what needs testing. Other things I didn’t know are that there is a debug mode for stepping through the tests, and that you can use variables to make the tests more repeatable. There are apparently bug fixes for this in each of the Tools8.51 patches, and a lot of nice new functionality coming in Tools 8.52.

Next up was Creating a great PeopleSoft UI with Jim Marion, Robert Taylor, Matthew Haavisto.  This was an interesting one for me as I do enjoy the UI side of PeopleSoft. Much was made of Workcenters, Dashboards and the role based branding in Application Portal and how it makes the task a lot simpler (and more dynamic – different users can have different UIs). Rebranding is normally accomplished by a team of 3 – a graphic artist, a web developer (jQuery and XSL) and a PeopleTools expert. They also showed some eye-candy examples of their handiwork:It seems that the more attractive portions are accomplished by either jQueryUI or XSL (I guess that’s where the Web Developer of the trio comes in).  Other tips included not using Query pagelets on the homepage too often as they’re not great for load-time, and use pagelet caching as much as you can (particularly on static HTML based pagelets). They also mentioned that there is a big focus on the UI in upcoming versions, and that some features are going to move from the Applications Portal to PeopleTools.

We started today with a tour of the exhibition area.  There’s far too much to take in in one day, but special mention is deserved for the stand that let brave volunteers grapple an actual Sumo wrestler. There’s a large area of demo-pods, where you can walk up and ask specialists either for a quick demo or about an issue that you need help with. I’ve met some of the guys behind PeopleTools (who’ve previously only been names before) and had a great demo of Fusion HCM.  It’s really encouraging (for PeopleSoft, at least) to witness the crowds around the PeopleSoft booths compared to other products – it’s noticeably busier.

Of the sessions I’ve been to today I started with Shawn Haynes of Cardinal Point talking about Workcenter pages.  I’ve not done much 8.51 work – the client I’ve been working on is 8.50 – so a lot of it was new to me.  It seems a really powerful concept though, and Shawn is an engaging and knowledgeable speaker. He also gets bonus points for having the courage to go with a live demo – always good to see!  I cornered him afterwards for a couple of questions and he seems a thoroughly nice chap too.

Next up was William Varma on Performance Monitor.  This was a much lower level session, and contained a lot of info, not only on Performance Monitor but also some good intel on pre-loading cache too.

After lunch was Humair Ghauri and Daan van Egmond on Fusion HCM: Enterprise grade SaaS.  I really enjoyed this session for a number of reasons.  Both are excellent speakers, and I can recall Daan from many years ago when he presented on PeopleTools to the UKOUG.  What impressed me most was the strength of the Fusion SaaS offering, and the breadth – there is a complete set of options, whether you want on-premise, hybrid or cloud (both single or multi-tenant). You get the advantages of everyone on the same release, regular updates etc without the downside of being on a proprietary platform  It’s also very extensible, so you have the ability to tailor (not customise, but tailor!) the application to the client’s needs. I’m hoping to get a look at the tools behind this at a demo pod during the week.

Finally I went to Jeff Robbins PeopleTools Roadmap session.  Jeff also had a lot of live demos (which was bold considering the number in attendance) and shared a lot about 8.52, upcoming Portal functionality plus glimpses of what’s a little further out.  The one question he wasn’t asked, was “where is Tools 8.52?”.

I’ll try to add more during the rest of the week.

It has been a challenging project and we’ve all worked really hard. The end is in sight now though, and we’re proud of what we’ve delivered.

It has been refreshing to work with a client that isn’t afraid of customisation if it improves the user experience for their employees. And Pret really have held the engagement of their Self Service users as of paramount importance.

This short video shows some of the highlights:

We wanted to use the “closed by default, open by exception” approach, so we would start by blocking access to everything and then open the areas we needed access to URL by URL.  I suspected that the final ‘URL Whitelist’ might take many iterations to get right and as the Reverse Proxy in the DMZ was outside of my control I needed to trial it somewhere else first.

I commandeered one of our less frequently used environments and went about searching for a quick/free method of blocking access.  After trying a few different approaches I settled on Squid, the open-source forward-proxy / web-caching server.  Although it’s better known for running on Unix systems, there is a Windows implementation and it can operate perfectly well as a reverse-proxy.

Setting up Squid

Once I’d downloaded and unzipped the binaries, and installed it as a service (using this helpful write-up as a guide) it was just a case of setting the rules.

In the ACLs section I added my bad and good URLs:

acl bad_url urlpath_regex *DEV*
acl good_url urlpath_regex "c:\squid\etc\good-urls.squid"

This would block any URL with DEV in (my chosen environment was DEV), but then allow any URLs in the ‘good-urls.squid’ file.  I then had specify in the http_access section what to do with these ACL groups.

http_access allow good_url
http_access deny bad_url
http_access allow all

It took me a few goes to get this right as the last line confused me for a while, but luckily there are copious notes in the provided .conf file:

If none of the “access” lines cause a match, the default is the opposite of the last line in the list.  If the last line was deny, the default is allow. Conversely, if the last line is allow, the default will be deny.

I was happy leaving my PeopleSoft environment on port 80 and Squid on 3128 as this is just a temporary setup for my testing.  Obviously Squid would be on port 80 if this was a production setup.

I amended the default port line thus:

http_port 3128 defaultsite=xxx.yyy.com

(where xxx is the hostname and yyy is the domain name)

And finally I added this line:

cache_peer 127.0.0.1 parent 80 0 originserver default
 

I used 127.0.0.1 as Squid is on the same host as the PIA, and the rest is for forwarding.

Setup PeopleSoft

In the Web Profile ‘Virtual Addressing’ tab, add the reverse proxy details.  This willensure that PeopleSoft uses the reverse-proxy port number.  Bounce the PIA.

Custom Error Page

If you want a nice custom ‘Access Denied’ page instead of the default Squid one, they can be found in ‘C:\squid\share\errors\English’.  They have no file extension, but they’re HTML so a cinch to amend.

Building up the good-urls.squid file

This is largely going to vary depending upon what you want to expose to the external users.  A lot of what we opened up were custom pages so there isn’t a lot of value sharing the full file here.  Having said that, here is a snippet of our file:

*login*
*css
*/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/h/*
*/cs/ps/cache/*
*/ps/images/*
*/psc/ps/*viewattach*
*/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/ROLE_EMPLOYEE.GP_SS_EE_PSLP.GBL*
*/ps/ckeditor/*
*/psc/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL*
*/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL*
*/psc/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/s/WEBLIB_TIMEOUT.PT_TIMEOUTWARNING.FieldFormula.IScript_TIMEOUTWARNING
*/psc/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/\?cmd=expire
*/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/\?cmd=expire
*/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/\?cmd=logout

Lines 1 and 2 sort out the signon page.

Line 3 is the Employee Portal homepage.

Lines 4 and 5 are for images.  Lines 6 and 8 are for viewing attachments and the Rich Text editor.

Lines 7, 9 and 10 are sample PeopleSoft pages/components.

The remainder deal with the timeout and signout links.

(Assuming that your PIA site is ‘ps’)

Gotchas

And you’re done.  There are a few little quirks to note.

Firstly, every time you change your URLs file you’ll need to restart the Squid service, but it’s a quick process so doesn’t hold you up too much.

Secondly, PeopleSoft frequently uses the ‘?’ special character as a URL delimiter so Squid only matches against the characters before this point.  There are several occasions when you need to match against the full URL which is why I’ve used url_path_regex in the ACL section above.  This allowed me to escape the special characters so that the log-out, time-out and view attachment links work ok.

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.

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?

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.

There are three records that data is logged to, all keyed by Process Instance.  The records are:

BAT_TIMINGS_LOG – Parent/Header record
BAT_TIMINGS_DTL – Child/Detail record
BAT_TIMINGS_FN – Peoplecode Function details

PS_BAT_TIMINGS_LOG contains standard fare like the Process Name, Oprid and Run Control ID, plus timing information.  In addition to start and end DateTime there is a time elapsed, Time in PeopleCode and Time in SQL.  There are also some trace level flags.  If you’re just after processing times this would be the first stop.

If you’re after more granular data then look into PS_BAT_TIMINGS_DTL.  In this table the timing data is broken down to App Engine Step/Action level (where the Step contains a SQL action) and even within the PeopleCode programs to individual SQL statement level where the PeopleCode actions contain SQLExecs or RowSet code.

I’ve not found a use for the third table (PS_BAT_TIMINGS_FN) yet, but it appears to hold further PeopleCode level timings and execution counts.

Whether these records are populated or not can be controlled at the Process Scheduler level, or on the individual process using the -TRACE flag (either on the command line if running 2-tier or in the appedn flags on the Process Definition if using the Process Scheduler).  The trace value should include a value of 1024 to activate population of these records.

To set this on a Process Scheduler edit the AE Tracing Bitfield section.

; AE Tracing Bitfield
;
; Bit       Type of tracing
; —       —————
; 1         – Trace STEP execution sequence to AET file
; 2         – Trace Application SQL statements to AET file
; 4         – Trace Dedicated Temp Table Allocation to AET file
; 8         – not yet allocated
; 16        – not yet allocated
; 32        – not yet allocated
; 64        – not yet allocated
; 128       – Timings Report to AET file
; 256       – Method/BuiltIn detail instead of summary in AET Timings Report
; 512       – not yet allocated
; 1024      – Timings Report to tables
; 2048      – DB optimizer trace to file
; 4096      – DB optimizer trace to tables
TraceAE=1024

Set the TraceAE value to a value containing 1024 to output the timings to tables.