The advantages that this setup gives us are:

• Global access (we don’t need to be in a certain office or use a VPN to get to PeopleSoft)
• Flexibility (we don’t need to buy all of the kit in advance and then wait a month for the servers to arrive)
• Hourly pricing (you only pay for the server when it’s booted)
• Processing power (we’ve found that the hardware performs pretty well compared to other – more traditional – hosting providers)
• Price (the amount of horsepower you get for your money compares well)
• Frighteningly fast bandwidth (want to download the latest Tools patch … it’ll only take a few minutes!)

We’ve been using Windows 2008 and MS SQL 2008, however there’s nothing stopping anyone going Linux/Oracle.  We are running 7 environments with all of the PeopleSoft tiers on a single server with the following specs:

High-Memory Extra Large Instance

17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform

All things considered, we’re pretty pleased with how it has gone.  There have been some issues however:

- VPN access:

I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with Windows RRAS (Routing and Remote Access) trying to get a reasonable VPN for developers to use to access the backend (SQL Server Management Studio, App Designer etc).  Although I can get the VPN to work, the server frequently disappeared from the network (even other servers in the Amazon Cloud couldn’t ping it).  There are many others on the Amazon forums with the same issue, so I gave up and used a different route for developer access (RDP into smaller ‘satellite’ servers with PeopleTools already installed).

- 3-Tier Debugger

This doesn’t seem to work between the satellite servers and the PeopleSoft server, even with all firewalls turned off.  I’ve never had a problem configuring this before and I’m at a loss to explain why it doesn’t work.  We have a perfectly acceptable workaround so this isn’t a big problem.

- Config Manager Settings

On some of the servers the Config Manager settings don’t persist, even when logged in as an Administrator (and running the app as administrator).

I’ll probably add to this post over time as we get more experience with it, and I’d be interested to hear from others who’ve been trying similar things.

Mockups are useful for a number of reasons.  They help the business understand what they’re going to get much earlier in the design process, meaning that any changes they want to make can be proposed early, when the cost to change is lower.  It also helps the developer clearly understand what the requirements are.  All very Agile.

Balsamiq beats other mockup methods hands down.

1. It’s Fast. It has a pre-built library of controls so creating a mockup is fast, much much quicker than PowerPoint or MS Paint.  So quick that you can create them on-the-fly in meetings.
2. It’s more efficient. With pen and paper or a whiteboard it’s not easy to quickly rearrange what you’ve drawn.  Plus, there’s no electronic copy to mail around at the end of the workshop.
3. It shows only what’s necessary. Its style is more wireframe than glossy perfection, and that’s why it’s so good.  No-one will be under the illusion that it’s a screenshot of something that’s nearly built.

I’ve put together a YouTube video so you can see it in action (click the video to view it on the YouTube site for higher definition).

If you like it head on over to the Balsamiq website.  They let you use most of the functionality for free.

Many companies use HTTP for test environments, in which case your ExcelToCI upload might be fine in these environments, but in Production (which likely uses HTTPS) there is extra work to do.

If your SSL certificate is valid for the hostname, not expired and was issued by a trusted root certificate authority you might well be fine.  Just change the parameters on the Connection tab and you’re good to go.

If your certificate was issued by a Company stand-alone CA things can be a little trickier.  I faced this issue recently and received a cryptic error message relating to GetCIShape (error number 2146697208 – “The download of the specified resource has failed”).  It took a while to work out what was wrong.  There were no results on MyOracleSupport and Google didn’t turn up anything useful.

It was only when I turned to Bing (yes, I know!) that I found something.

http://javier-ps.blogspot.com/2010/02/exceltoci-under-https-with-ssl.html

Thank you Javier!

So why are they useful?  They are a visual representation of the schema of parts of the database, so they tell you – at a glance – how the tables relate to one another, which fields are within each table and what the keys are.  If you have them to hand it can save you browsing record definitions in App Designer.

You install them by running the supplied Change Assistant job and then performing some manual additional steps from the included documentation.  After a server bounce and cache clear there’ll be a new root menu ‘Data Models’.  Providing your Environment Management infrastructure is up and running the install doesn’t take more than about 30 mins.

This should keep your Business Analysts/Functional Consultants happy.  Now if only there was a PeopleTools ERD …

Please make sure that you add his site to your feed-reader:

http://jreconsulting.blogspot.com/

John has a lot of good experience to share and an easy to read writing style.

These are the steps I took (Tools 8.50.04/Weblogic 10.3):

Follow steps 1-4 from part 4.  These are:

1) Create a Message File

Create a file called MOTD.txt (or whatever you wish) and place it in the ‘<pshome>\webserv\<domain>\applications\peoplesoft\PORTAL\’ folder. Then make sure you can access it using ‘http://<server>:<port>/MOTD.txt’ from your browser. Note this URL for later.

2) Edit Signin Page

Edit signin.html (under the above path, plus \WEB-INF\psftdocs\<PIA>\)

3) Create Place-Holder Div

Look for the section near the bottom with the text ‘tracelink’ in. Add the line in red below:

<td><div align="center">
<div id="updateDiv" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 9pt; color: #C00000;"></div>
<p> <%=traceLink%> </p>
<p> <%=error%> </p>
<p> <%=ps.discovery.error%> </p>
</div></td>

This is a place-holder for our message. Giving the Div a name allows us to easily refer to it in JavaScript, and we are also applying a style at Div level to the text that we will insert.

4) Set the Script up to be called on Load

Alter the Body tag to read as follows (section to add in red – change the url to the one you used previously):

<BODY onLoad="setFocus();include('http://<server>:<port>/MOTD.txt'); <%=framebreak%>">

This is all on one line in the HTML.

5) Add the script

In the scripts section, add the following script (add all the lines, regardless of what colour I’ve made them):

function include(url) {
var xmlhttp=false;
/*@cc_on @*/
/*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5)
// JScript gives us Conditional compilation, we can cope with old IE versions.
// and security blocked creation of the objects.
try {
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
try {
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (E) {
xmlhttp = false;
}
}
@end @*/
if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!='undefined') {
try {
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch (e) {
xmlhttp=false;
}
}
if (!xmlhttp && window.createRequest) {
try {
xmlhttp = window.createRequest();
} catch (e) {
xmlhttp=false;
}
}
xmlhttp.open("HEAD", url, true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
//alert("Status is "+xmlhttp.status);
if (xmlhttp.status==200) {
xmlhttp.open("GET", url ,true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
//alert(xmlhttp.responseText);
var updateDiv = document.getElementById('updateDiv');
newParagraph = document.createElement('p');
newText = document.createTextNode(xmlhttp.responseText);
newParagraph.appendChild(newText);
updateDiv.appendChild(newParagraph);
updateDiv.style.border = "1px solid #FF0000";
updateDiv.style.backgroundColor="#FFE0E0"
}
}
xmlhttp.send(null)
}
}
}
xmlhttp.send(null)
}

For those that have implemented this previously, the red section has changed slightly.  I’ve applied a style to the DIV to make the message more noticeable.  I’ve done this here so that if there is no message the styling is not applied and the signon page appears as normal.

6) Amend the caching parameter

Edit your weblogic.xml file (found in ‘<PS_HOME>\webserv\peoplesoft\applications\peoplesoft\PORTAL.war\WEB-INF\’).  Locate the Container Descriptor section and add the line in red:

<container-descriptor>
<servlet-reload-check-secs>-1</servlet-reload-check-secs>
<session-monitoring-enabled>true</session-monitoring-enabled>
<resource-reload-check-secs>0</resource-reload-check-secs>
</container-descriptor>

Bounce your PIA and your message should appear. I’ve tested this in both IE and Firefox and it works fine. You do not need to subsequently bounce the PIA to change the message of the day, however it may require you to reload your browser, depending upon your browser’s cache settings. If you use IE and it’s set to check with every page visit then just hitting the refresh button works.

Being a bit of a tech magpie I’m attracted by anything shiney and new, and I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces.

I get that it’s great for using with family and friends, and for collaboration within a team at work.  Has anyone had any inspirations for utilising it to help within the PeopleSoft sphere?

PS. I have some invites left if anyone is still waiting to join.

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.

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.

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.