It’s the blog of many of my colleagues at Succeed consultancy – and they’re going to post genuine soundbites of knowledge, not promotional content for Succeed. Many of them are well worth listening too, and as there’s lots of them I hope they’ll post a bit more frequently than I can on here. The address is http://blog.succeed.co.uk/.

We also have a twitter account, @SucceedUK. If you follow it, then look at that account’s follower list you’ll find the twitter accounts of many Succeed employees who might also be worth a look.

It nicely shows all of the objects on the page and layers them, so you can see where in the DOM tree they sit and what the containing elements are. I was excited to see what a PeopleSoft page would look like through Tilt, so I picked a fairly straightforward component (User Profiles) and started it up.

I guess the only useful conclusion I can draw from this little experiment is that the DOM for PeopleSoft pages is very complex indeed!

I can’t wait. I’m looking forward to meeting a whole lot of people and trying to soak up as much of the content as I can. Sure, much of my focus will be on PeopleSoft, but I’m itching to see more of Fusion too.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

- I’m hoping to get a couple of goes at Fusion demo pods. I want to see it in action.

- I want to know when it’s going to available outside of the ‘early adopter program’

- I’d like to know what Oracle is doing about the ‘hot areas’ at the moment (NoSQL databases, mobile/tablet accessibility, multi-tenant/full SaaS)

- What the highlights are with Fusion for Partners. I’m thinking extending, hosting etc.

Picking what to attend has been difficult as there’s a lot of great content that conflicts.  Here’s my current thinking:

Sunday:

Oracle ACE Dinner

Monday:

Leave Your Search at Home: PeopleSoft Workcenter Brings Context to You

Approval Workflow Engine Approvals in PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9.1

Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management: Enterprise-Grade SaaS

Oracle Fusion HCM: Make Smarter Decisions, Take Action, and Prepare for Workf…

PeopleTools Product Roadmap

Tuesday:

Extend Your Applications into the Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware

Best Practices for Using PeopleSoft Test Framework

PeopleSoft Answers: How to Create a Great PeopleSoft UI

PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips and Techniques

Upgrading to PeopleSoft Feature Pack Releases

Wednesday:

Oracle Fusion Applications: Technology Essentials Overview

PeopleTools Release 8.52: How PeopleSoft’s New Search Features Will Change the World

Customer Success with Oracle On Demand for PeopleSoft Applications

Larry’s Keynote

PeopleSoft Success: PeopleSoft Portal Creates Great Self-Service Solutions

Thursday:

Extending PeopleSoft Applications with Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite

PeopleSoft Answers: How to Enable PeopleSoft for Mobile Users

PeopleSoft in the Cloud

Install Release 9.1 of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management in Minutes with Oracle VM

PeopleSoft Success: Using the Related Content Framework to Empower Users

If you see me around please come up and say hello, and I’ll introduce you to the other Succeed guys who are there with me.

Duncan

For those that don’t know, it gives a timing for each of the tiers in the Internet Architecture (Browser, Web, App and Database).

One thing that I noticed that I wasn’t expecting was the difference between browsers.  If I ran a ping test to the same environment, at the same time, using different web browsers I’d get wildly different results.

As you would expect, the Database, App Server and Web server timings are broadly the same.  The browser times are surprisingly different though.  IE8 was consistently in the 0.33 – 0.35 range, whilst FireFox 6 was around 0.07.  So IE takes approximately 5 times the time that FireFox does.

I repeated the test with different environments, and disabled anti-virus and all IE plugins but still the difference remained.

My curiosity was piqued so I repeated the test at home (against a different environment) still using FireFox 6, but this time IE9 and Google Chrome.  Chrome was the fastest, closely followed by IE9 and FireFox trailing slightly (about double the time for Chrome).

This raises a question and suggests a number of findings:

Question 1) Why was my IE8 5x slower than FireFox, when all other parameters are the same?

Hypothesis 1) Internet Explorer 9 is significantly faster than Internet Explorer 8 for browsing PeopleSoft.

Hypothesis 2) Chrome is currently the fastest browser to use with the PIA.

I’d be interested to hear your results.

The users were broken down into different populations: Employees, Managers and Head Office/power users; each function having a different dashboard.  Everyone has the Employee Self Service dashboard, only a subset get one or other of the other two.  Employees are automatically redirected on sign-on to the correct homepage.

Head Office users

Head office users just get the normal PIA with a custom colour scheme, background image and graphics:

Managers

The managers get a dashboard that is far less formal, but still contains only business related options:

The buttons along the top are the top level menu items.  These are dynamically read from the PeopleSoft Portal Registry, clicking one shows a side menu and so on down the menu hierarchy etc.  You’ll also see a burgundy footer bar (this uses jQuery to fade between different messages to communicate to the managers).  Towards the lower half of the picture are a series of traffic lights showing the status of different KPIs within the business – this uses Succeed’s Alerts Framework as the technology to make this simple and configurable.

Employees

The Employee experience is a good deal less formal again.  Although they can access all of the expected functionality (timesheets, rotas, holiday booking, personal data changes, payslips etc) from the menu bar there are other aspects to make the experience compelling and keep the usage high.

The main content area of the homepage is used for displaying news items.  These are fully configurable and the amount shown and topics changes from week to week.  The comms team can upload PDFs to be linked to, or can write news items to be published using the Rich Text editor.  Everything is stored within PeopleSoft.

On the right is an employee poll.  Every employee gets to vote online and once you select an answer the running total is displayed showing how the other employees voted.

Across the top there is a sprinkling of social media goodness.

There is a heap of other functionality not shown, some colleagues have done some great work on integration with Google maps, others have taken the most complex of requirements for timesheets/rotas and produced some elegant pages.

This was all achieved using just PeopleSoft … no other products were used for hosting portals etc.  It’s all built within PeopleTools and shows what can be done when a client is willing to move a little away from the ‘zero customisation’ mantra.

If you’d like a little more detail on what we did and how we did it – particularly if it’s a path that you’d be interested in following yourself – please get in touch.

If you’re UK based and work with PeopleSoft then there’ll be something for you there.  This year there are 4 streams, the usual three of Tech, HR and Financials, plus a new Global Payroll stream, and all 4 are full of content.

The agenda is available here, but in the Tech stream there’s lots to grab the interest.  I’ll be spending most of my time in the Tech stream where we have sessions on some of the new features for those interested in Tools 8.5x (Reporting Console, Web Services, Test Framework) and some other sessions that apply to older versions of PeopleTools too (Archiving, Query, Batch Scheduling).

I’ll also be giving a couple of sessions myself.  The first is “Case Study: How using ‘The Cloud’ accelerated Pret’s PeopleSoft project”, where I’ll walk through how we used Amazon EC2 to dramatically speed-up/improve Pret a Manger’s PeopleSoft implementation.  I’m also doing a joint session with a very smart colleague of mine – Simon Wilson … I’ll be talking about “Automating and Monitoring PeopleSoft using Open Source Tools” and Simon will be showing his solution for “Comparing and Syncronising Config between Environments”.

Although there’s some great content, that’s only half of the value of attending.  It’s also awesome to meet like-minded peers to discuss what’s happening at different customers and hear the great things that they’re doing.

Looking forward to it!

Step 1 – Create your icons

It’s probably a good idea to have one for each environment excluding Production that shows the environment name, and then have Production as the corporate logo (or your PeopleSoft system logo etc).  I created my 32×32 pixel images in GIMP as it can save as a .ico file, but any graphics package will do (as will this online ico creator).  I didn’t experiment with other sizes or file formats, let me know if you do and I’ll update the post.

Upload your icons as images in App Designer.

Step 2 – Create a Function to return your Favicon

We need to create a function to provide the correct image for each environment as we’ll be calling this from more than one place.  I added my function to WEBLIB_PT_NAV.ISCRIPT1 as we’ll be customising it later anyway.

Function GetFavicon() Returns string

   Local string &Favicon;
   Evaluate %DbName
   When = "DEV"
      &Favicon = %Response.GetImageURL(Image.<<DEV_IMAGE>>);
      Break;
   When = "TST"
      &Favicon = %Response.GetImageURL(Image.<<TST_IMAGE>>);
      Break;
   ...etc...
   End-Evaluate;

   &Favicon = "<link href=""" | &Favicon | """ rel=""shortcut icon"" type=""image/x-icon"" />";
   Return &Favicon;
End-Function;

Step 3 – Amend the HTML Definitions

You need to amend both PT_HNAV_TEMPLATE and PT_IFRAME_HDR_SWAN HTML templates so that the code for the Favicon can be passed in.

Amend PT_HNAV_TEMPLATE thus (I’m just showing the top 6 lines – lines 4 and 5 are the ones I’ve added):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html dir="%Direction" lang="%LanguageISO">
<head>
<!--Favicon-->
%bind(:23)
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8">
...

Amend PT_IFRAME_HDR_SWAN thus (I’m just showing the top 5 lines – lines 3 and 4 are the ones I’ve added):

<head>
<meta http-equiv='content-type' content='text/html; charset=%bind(:1)'>
<!--Favicon-->
%bind(:25)
<link rel="stylesheet" href="%bind(:2)" type="text/css">
...

Note: Your bind numbers may vary. You can check they’re correct when we get to the calling functions shortly.

Step 4 – Pass the Favicon into the HTML templates

The final step is to amend the PeopleCode so that the string provided by our GetFavicon function is passed into our HTML definitions.  Open PT_BRANDING.BrandingBase.  Scroll down to where the delivered code is declaring functions (it’s around line 155 for me) and declare the function that you created in Step 2.

Next, find method ‘getIframeHeaderHTML’ and scroll down to near the bottom.  You’ll see a call to one of the HTML objects that you just amended ‘PT_IFRAME_HDR_SWAN’.  Add your function as a parameter to the end thus:

&hdrHTML = GetHTMLText(HTML.PT_IFRAME_HDR_SWAN, &charSet, ... , &hoverNavLoc, GetFavicon());

As a double-check, you should also make sure that it’s the same number parameter as the bind variable that you added in the previous step.

You’ll need to make a similar change for the other HTML template.  Open WEBLIB_PT_NAV.ISCRIPT1.FieldFormula and search for the function ‘buildIframeTemplate’.  Again, scroll down to the end of the function and add your function as a parameter to the end:

Return GetHTMLText(@("HTML." | &templateHTMLObjName), &charSet, &requiredToolsSS, ... , &ptcxmCollapseImgURL, GetFavicon());

Again, make sure that the parameter number matches the bind number in the HTML file (PT_HNAV_TEMPLATE) earlier.

Testing

You should be able to sign in and see the results immediately.  Good luck and let me know how you get on!

Although adding a favicon made the web surfing experience marginally more attractive (the favicon also appears in your bookmarks/favourites menu to make it easier to identify each website, for example) it was pretty unimportant to us in the PeopleSoft world.  Now that tabbed browsers are starting to proliferate into company workstation rollouts the favicon is starting to become more useful.

As an example, can you identify these 9 favicons from my open browser tabs (I’ve redacted the text from a couple as they’re pretty easy):

I’m quite a fan of finding methods to make it easy to differentiate your PeopleSoft environments.  I think it’s a useful productivity tweak to be able to instantly know whether you’re in DEV, TST or PRD without having to check the address bar and parse through the URL (for less technical business users especially).

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a different Favicon for each environment?  That way you can easily tell which tab you need.  When you’re trying to find a specific environment that you’ve logged into, how useful is it to go from this:

to this:

And with grouped taskbar buttons being the default in recent versions of Windows, it’s also handy to go from this:

to this:

So how is it done?

It’s not a big customisation, although it does obviously touch a couple of Tools objects.  I’ve written it up here.

There’s a problem with the Applicant Search process in HR9.1 (we’re currently on MP2).  When you build the Applicant Index it starts the HRS_SRCH_IDX process.  This App Engine starts one or more HRS_SRCH_APP processes.  Sometimes HRS_SRCH_APP runs to Success, other times it doesn’t.  Initially we thought this was down to locking (if there are more than one running simultaneously one was trying to delete from a table that the other was inserting into), however we set the concurrency to 1 and this was still occurring.

Examining the log files we could see that it loops through all languages in the system (regardless of how many languages had been installed) and creates a subdirectory under ps_cfg_home\data\search\HRS_ResumeText\<env-name>\ for each language. The process gets as far as Italian and then fails (it creates an ITA directory and all the containing files, but does not create JPN – the next language).

We checked out customer connection My Oracle Support and there wasn’t a great deal.  The only relevant post we could find was this one which suggested deleting the JPN language from PSLANGUAGES (and I suspect all of those following JPN).  Unfortunately we need multi-language support so this wasn’t a viable option for us.  There wasn’t anything on Google either so we were on our own.

Looking through the log files we found this:
mkvdk - Verity, Inc. Version 6.2.0 (_nti40, Jan 30 2008)
Error   E0-1509 (Drvr): dlopen() returned: <nil>
Error   E0-1510 (Drvr): Error loading driver library 'D:\ps_home\verity\winx86\_nti40\bin\locbasis.dll'
Error   E0-1203 (Language): Error reading language definition file: D:/ps_home/verity/winx86/common/japanb/loc00.lng
Error   E0-1230 (Language): Could not create locale japanb
Error    (): Fatal error - exiting
mkvdk done
mkvdk: VDK error -200: couldn't create VDK session
Both of the files referenced in the error message (locbasis.dll and loc00.lng) are present and read/write to the Process Scheduler user account though, so this wasn’t much help.

The code in the App Engine calls a fair sized chunk of Application Package PeopleCode, but eventually I found the logic that creates the directories/Verity Search collections.  The last command issued before the error was:

bin\server\winx86\mkvdk -create -collection -locale japanb d:\ps_cfg_home\data\search\HRS_ResumeText\TST\JPN -logfile d:\ps_cfg_home\data\search\HRS_ResumeText\TST\veritybuild.log

When I run this in a command prompt window (after setting the ps_home env var) I get the following error message:

The program cannot start because MSVCP71.dll is missing from your computer.

Interesting, so I have a missing dll.  Using Process Monitor (the SysInternals one, not PeopleSoft Process Monitor) I can see that it’s looking for the dll in ‘<ps_home>\verity\winx86\_nti40\bin\’.

Once I located a copy of the DLL and copied it there the HRS_SRCH_APP process ran fine and the directories were created for all languages.

So why is this file missing?  I believe it’s an issue of Oracle assuming that Microsoft bundles it in Windows, and Microsoft no longer doing so.  See this from Microsoft:

The shared CRT DLL has been distributed by Microsoft in the past as a shared system component.  This may cause problems when you run applications that are linked to a different version of the CRT on computers that do not have the correct versions of the CRT DLL installed. This is commonly referred to as the “DLL Conflict” problem.  To address this issue, the CRT DLL is no longer considered a system file, therefore, distribute the CRT DLL with any application that relies on it.