The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

UKOUG PeopleSoft Roadshow 2013 April 30, 2013

Last week – along with others from Succeed – I attended the UKOUG PeopleSoft Roadshow. Although it’s just a single day event (where the Apps Conference is spread over two days) it does have the benefit of Senior Oracle US speakers – Jeff Robbins and Marc Weintraub.

As we have for a few years now, Succeed sponsored the event/the post event drinks.

We also took out a stand, here’s John and I attempting to charm some delegates:

There’s many reasons why I enjoy attending these events. It’s great to catch up with friends I’ve worked with previously, it’s great to meet new people who we might be able to help in some way, and it’s always a treat to hear what innovations are coming down the line in recently released and future versions of PeopleSoft and PeopleTools.

So, other than the exhibition, what did we learn?

From Jeff, (other than what we’ve previously discussed on Tools 8.53) we found out:

- the release frequency of PeopleTools is now around every 12-18 months, so Tools 8.54 would be mid-2014.

- Tools 8.54 is fully defined scope-wise and the developers are almost done with it. About half of the scope for 8.55 is done.

- the way PeopleTools handles mobile devices is changing, allowing it to be much more responsive to the resolution of the requesting browser based on templates (so a page would have different templates, a large and graphically rich one for PCs on the LAN, a smaller resolution graphically leaner template for mobiles etc).

- the new Update Manager Tool isn’t that new. It’s something that Oracle/PeopleSoft have been using internally for a decade, so it should be stable and mature already.

- there’s a new ‘Mastering PeopleTools’ scheme that is starting, enabling everyone easier access to Best Practice and to make sure that customers aren’t just upgrading to stay supported, but gain genuine value from the new functionality

Jeff also flashed up some brief glimpses of something that his team are trying with Tools 8.54. They’re changing the UI a little more – and it’s a tile-based layout (more akin to Windows 8 or Pinterest, I guess). This is the landing page:

Also, to access the menu you’d hit the orange button on the right:

Finally, there were a host of other ‘coming soon’ areas, like In Memory Processing, TimesTen for nVision and a ‘TCO lower than SaaS’ which will be really interesting to see how it’s done. Jeff actually said PeopleSoft will have the lowest TCO in the market, bar none, which we’ll all really look forward to.

One of the most interesting take-aways for me wasn’t something that was said, but was more of a general feeling. A couple of years ago when Oracle said “we’re still investing in PeopleSoft” I don’t think many people believed them – I was certainly sceptical. However with the content in the latest Tools and App releases their claim is much more credible. There were certainly a lot of customers that I spoke to who were either planning a 9.2 upgrade or had it on their roadmap.

The first two photos are from the UKOUG Facebook page which contains many more photos of the event.

A quick shortcut for 3-tier access March 4, 2013

I’m not sure how long you’ve been able to do this, it may have been in the product for a while, however I’ve only just discovered it.

Normally, when I need 3-tier access in App Designer I go through the process of setting up a profile in Config Manager. I believed this to be the one and only way of getting it to connect.  There is a shortcut, however:

This isn’t a strangely named profile chosen from the dropdown. I’ve just specified the App Server IP (or hostname) and the WSL port and it will connect. This also gets around having to know the Domain Connection password (which you’d need to enter if setting up a Config Manager profile.

Off topic – The Pebble Watch February 28, 2013

This post is nothing whatsover to do with PeopleSoft but I’m hoping that some of you will find it interesting nonetheless.

You may have heard of Kickstarter. It’s a web-site where enterprising inventors/creative types can post an idea, a promotional video and a funding target. Users can browse the site and if they spot a project that they like they can pledge money towards it. There are typically different levels of pledge amounts, and each level has an appropriate reward.

One of the higher profile projects was the ‘Pebble Watch’, a bluetooth smartwatch that integrates with your smartphone (iPhone or Android). They posted their project with a $100,000 funding target that they raised within the first 2 hours(!) and hit $10.2m in the month-long period that it was open. I was one of the 69,000 that pledged to support the project, and in return they promised each of us one of the watches. Mine arrived this afternoon!

This is what it looks like:

There are a range of different watch faces, including standard analogue designs and variations on digital clocks. The chief benefit though is that it communicates with your phone via bluetooth. Any time you receive an email, text or incoming call the watch vibrates and displays what is happening on the screen. For texts or emails it displays the contents, enabling you to scroll up and down to read the message. For incoming calls it displays the caller, and gives the option to answer or decline the call. You can also do things like control the music on your phone remotely.

When I was out for a meal with the family earlier this evening I was able to subtly screen emails and texts, and even decline an incoming call (sorry boss!) without taking my phone from my pocket or my wife even noticing (a real plus!). I imagine that it’ll be far more discreet in meetings than glancing at mobile phone screens to see if the interruption is important.

A further point to note is that Pebble allow you to create your own Apps for the device. Even at this early stage there are already apps for adding additional notifications, and a RunKeeper app and an IFTTT channel are on the way.

If anyone is intrigued, there are more details and a video here.

Disabling paste on an input field February 14, 2013

A colleague of mine recently had a requirement to place an email address field on a page, and then just below it a ‘confirm email address’ – however the user should not be permitted to copy and paste from the first field to the second, they should retype their email address.

We didn’t think that there was a way of disabling paste via PeopleCode, so resorted to JavaScript. The solution was actually quite straightforward in the end:

1) Place the two input fields on the page and connect them to the records you wish to save to, as usual.

2) Place an HTML Area on the page, making sure it’s beneath the other fields (both on this screen and the order tab).

3) Make the HTML Area contents static, and paste in the following:

<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>
var message = "Paste disabled. Please re-key.";
 
function disablepaste(){
alert(message);
return false;
}
 
document.getElementById('DERIVED_TEST_TEXT2')
.onpaste=disablepaste;
</SCRIPT>

4) Swap DERIVED_TEST_TEXT2 in the above code snippet for you Record/Field name (i.e. it’s the record name, then an underscore, then the fieldname. Look in View Source or Chrome Dev Tools/Firebug if you’re not sure.)

5) You might also want to make the alert message a little more user friendly too.

Jim Marion’s new book February 5, 2013

I’ve been meaning to read Jim Marion’s new book ‘PeopleTools Data Management and Upgrade Handbook’ for a while, and last month it finally got to the top of my reading pile. This time he has co-authored with Paula Dean who also has a strong past in the PeopleSoft world.

Here’s a link to it on Amazon.com.

And here’s a link on Amazon UK.

Those are direct links, not affiliate links.

I also wrote a review of the book on Amazon.com. Here’s what I said:

The ‘Data Management and Upgrade Handbook’ fills a large gap in the PeopleSoft book marketplace. We have Jim’s first book which caters for genuine hard-core PeopleCode developers. We also have David Kurtz’s book which caters for DBAs. For a long time we’ve been missing a book for those of us that sit in between, maybe we do some development, but we also perform some system administration activities too (like migrating code between environments, using data mover, applying the odd patch or bundle etc). This book is aimed squarely at these ‘DevOps’ staff – and there are a lot of us.

In the first part of the book (Data and Change Management) Jim and Paula take us methodically through each of the tools that you’re going to need to use as part of your day job (like Change Assistant and Data Mover) and introduces those that you might not ‘have’ to use, but should make your life easier (like Data Archive Manager and Version Control).

In the second part (Upgrades) they walk us through a typical upgrade, covering the factors that govern the time and manpower required, through project teams and activities, and onto the tools that smooth the process (like PeopleSoft Test Framework and automated test suites).

It’s just over 300 pages, so it’s short enough to read through cover-to-cover when you’re trying to upskill someone with a few years experience, but it’s also detailed enough to keep around as a reference manual. There’s not a single customer that couldn’t benefit from having a copy or two of this in the project office.

PeopleSoft Weekly Stats January 11, 2013

After showing some stats for this blog yesterday, I thought I’d show some for the PeopleSoft Weekly newsletter too. As most of you will know, the PeopleSoft Weekly is a newsletter that we started back in August to give people an alternative mechanism for receiving news and opinions to RSS Feed Readers, with the added bonus that it’s curated so you should miss most of the spam and re-blogged content.

So, 5 months in, this is where we are:

The blue bars are the subscriber numbers, which are mounting up nicely. We’ve just passed 350 and are adding 15-20 readers a week. As this is an opt-in newsletter it’s unlikely to ever rocket up, so we’re very happy with how it’s going.

The red columns are the ‘unique opens’, or how many people actually read the newsletter. This is also increasing, however a little slower than sign-ups. Ideally I’d like this to be increasing at the same rate, however we still have over 50% of those that receive the email who open it which is much better than the industry average of 17%.

The most clicked on articles across all issues are these:

1. PeopleSoft Video Feature Overviews for 9.1 Feature Packs and 9.2
2. The Oracle OpenWorld content catalog
3. Oracle Sues Yet Another Partner Over Support Services
4. User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft: Direct from Jeff Robbins
5. Paco Aubrejuan’s letter to Customers attending OpenWorld
6. Jeff Kemp’s Top 10 Confusing Things in Oracle
7. How to check if a user has access to a Content Reference
8. Jim Marion’s Query for Component and/or CREF Navigation Take II
9. PeopleSoft Business Process Maps
10. I’m Duncan Davies and this is how I work
11. Create appealing Dashboards with PeopleTools 8.52
12. Oracle OpenWorld Day 0 (Larry’s Keynote)
13. Workday files IPO as Oracle Fusion Builds Momentum
14. I’m David Kurtz and this is how I work
15. Chris Malek’s Some Options for Sending Emails in PeopleTools
16. Derek Tomei’s The PIA Explained
17. PeopleSoft CRM 9.2 Release Value Proposition
18. PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Prerelease Notes
19. Chris Malek’s Running a PeopleSoft Query with Ruby over HTTP
20. The scariest chart in the history of computing (for one company at least)

If there are any good sources that we miss, or suggestions for improvement please let me know in the comments. Thanks.

Blog stats for 2012 January 10, 2013

At the turn of every year WordPress (who host this blog) send out a ‘your year in blogging’ email which triggered my interest enough to spend 15 mins looking back at the posts and the stats on this blog, to see what went down well and what didn’t.

Over the course of the year, this blog was viewed approx 120,000 times. Here’s a graph of the views over the last few years:

You can see the general trend is slowly up, but it really varies between months – none more so than every December when there’s a huge dip. Most visitors are from the US, followed by India and Canada.

Apart from Google and Twitter, the top referring sites in 2012 were:

The PeopleSoft Wiki
IT Toolbox forums
Jim Marion’s Blog
The PeopleSoft Customizer.com

Thanks guys!

Those that have commented the most on posts are Jim Marion, Jeremy Radwan, Graham Smith and Nicolas Gasparotto. I’m grateful for all of your corrections

When people have arrived at this blog from a search engine WordPress logs the search terms. Most of the top 20 from last year are fairly predictable, however these caught my eye (they’re either a term that people don’t already have enough info on, or are common yet confusing errors):

tmboot: cmdtux_cat:827: error: fatal error encountered; initiating user error handler
ren server
peoplesoft erd
peopletools 8.53 release date
peoplesoft cloud

The most popular posts since I started (in 2007) tend to be those that have been around the longest, so SQL Developer tips, PeopleSoft ERDs, what’s coming in PeopleTools 8.50 etc all feature highly. Excluding the ‘How I work’ posts, the most popular new entries from last year are these:

Highlights from the PeopleTools 8.53 RVP
Oracle OpenWorld Day 0 (Larry’s Keynote)
Deleting old User Profiles
Monitoring/Automating PeopleSoft with Open Source Tools
PeopleSoft App Store
PeopleSoft and IE9 redux

The value of Oracle OpenWorld September 30, 2012

Where else would you get to meet this many PeopleSoft experts?

From L-R: me, Jim Marion (Jim’s PeopleSoft Journal), Graham Smith (Graham’s PeopleSoft Blog), Steve Elcock (Succeed Blog), Mark Hoernemann (Oracle’s PeopleTools Blog), Hakan Biroglu (Blogging about Oracle Applications)

Photo kindly taken by Jim’s beautiful wife Sarah.

An update on the PeopleSoft Weekly September 24, 2012

I posted a short while ago about the launch of the PeopleSoft Weekly, our free PeopleSoft-related weekly news bulletin. For those that are interested, I thought I’d give a quick update on its progress.

We started with some ‘internal beta’ dry-runs and our first public issue was 8th August.  In those 6 weeks the subscriber base has grown to more than 150 people. From that list just under half is from North America, 28% from Europe, 11% from Asia and 3% from Australia (plus some unknowns from gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc).

Looking at the domains in the email addresses it’s about 75% end clients, with the remainder being partners or Oracle employees themselves.

The software we’re using tells us that the industry average ‘open rate’ for newsletters is 15.4%, however the PeopleSoft Weekly has maintained an open rate of between 60% and 65% which is a good sign as it means that most of you are interested enough in our industry to read the newsletter. The ‘click rate’ averages about 50% also (industry average of 2.6%) so over half of you find something worth reading further.

In the most recent newsletter I can see that the most popular story was Oracle’s paper on the Interaction Hub and PeopleTools, followed by Logica’s hackathon and the Google Spanner database. Previous newsletters show that the subjects of User Interface, Fusion and most technical posts get good click figures. Topics that aren’t so hot are Workday and mobile related.

If you have any feedback I’d be happy to receive it. Please feel free to subscribe and pass it on to any interested colleagues.

PeopleSoft and IE9 redux August 9, 2012

I’ve blogged about an issue with PeopleSoft and Internet Explorer 9 before here, but in the latest version of Tools there’s a different – although probably related – problem.

Previously the issue was with IE9 adding a white margin to the top of the header (only on pages within the application, not on the homepage). This time the opposite has occurred, there is a negative margin applied to the header so it disappears off the top of the browser window:

This only happens in IE9, FireFox and Chrome are fine. I’ve only seen it occur in Tools 8.52.09, not earlier releases.

Looking at the code it appears that there’s an inline style applied:

Although the top margin for the pthdr2container div is set to zero in CSS, because this is an inline style it’s overriding it – and hence hiding part of the header. We need to stop this override happening, either by removing the code or by use of the CSS !important directive.

I suspect the issue is actually because of code inserted to prevent the ‘too much whitespace’ issue.

Coincidentally, the solution that Oracle support identified to fix the problem mentioned in my first post actually works for this one too, even though the description of the issue is for the ‘too much whitespace’ issue, not this one. Here’s the Oracle support post that shows the fix.

Looking at the HTML behind the page (in this case, Process Monitor), I can see the offending code:

I can’t see how this code is being inserted though.