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.

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:

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.

There were a couple of docs floating around that listed 18th Sept as the release date, but no official confirmation from Oracle, so I wasn’t 100% sure that it was coming.  Further details here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/2009/09/general_availability_ga_of_peopletools_850.html

Rather intriguingly not only is there this release (which is the biggest in the PeopleSoft world for a good year or so) but also a new release of the Oracle Database, and a hardware tie-in with Sun in the last few days.  Why are these being released now, with OpenWorld so close?  Is there something even bigger that is going to be unveiled during OpenWorld?

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.