This was brought home to me by the recent outage in Microsoft’s Azure platform. For those that didn’t hear, Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) went down on 29th February and many people lost access until well into the next day. This isn’t a service we use (we’re with Amazon – by far and away the market leader) but it’s certainly a warning shot. AWS itself had problems in one of its regions not so long ago too. Losing access is one thing, but losing data is quite another. Although I’m not aware of any instances of this happening yet it’s only a matter of time (and a company with the wealth of experience of MS still struggling with leap years shows that the cloud is a brave new world and still has some maturing to do).

Overall our experience has been overwhelmingly positive – and of course outages are still possible on-premise too – just don’t think that because you’ve moved to an enterprise size cloud provider (or even one of the smaller, newer ‘niche’ providers) that you’re immune from things going awry.

If you read this blog and haven’t yet added the Succeed blog into your feed reader I suggest you do so as there’ll be an increasing amount of content there, both from myself and my colleagues.

It enables you to quickly set-up a new user’s PIA homepage by cloning from an existing user. Using this utility you can easily boost everyone’s productivity by giving them one-click access to important areas on their homepage, without the need to create complex matrices of optional/required pagelets.

See a screenshot and more details here.

In comes Graham Smith’s blog, Jiju Vengal’s Blog, Oracle’s own PeopleTools blog and – of course – the new Succeed Consultancy blog.

If you’ve not checked any of them out yet and added them to your feed reader I encourage you to do so!

The intention is for users to be able to browse a central repository for PeopleSoft apps. There’s plenty of precedent for this type of site with the Android Marketplace or Apple AppStore on mobile platforms, and the Salesforce AppExchange or SAPs App Store (which was even longer coming than this site!). Top blogger Jiju has spoken about this also, although the concept is broadly similar his ideas are very different.

I’ve put a few small-ish ‘apps’ live already, and the intention is to add many more apps and improve the site as time goes on (I’m aping the Facebook “Done is better than perfect” philosophy).

Have a look and let me know what you think.

There’s some interesting content in all of the streams, however just highlighting some of the Tech stream:

• Jeff Robbins is over from the US to talk us through PeopleTools 8.52 and the PeopleTools roadmap,
• Chris Heller from Grey Sparling is also coming over – he’ll be giving a session on the Test Framework, however come and find him around the Succeed stand if you want to talk to him about their Mobile Framework.
• Steve Smith from Cambridge Uni is going to talk about security/auditing, and having seen first hand some of the work they’ve done there to customise PeopleSoft I’m looking forward to an interesting session (no pressure Steve!)
• We’ll also have a round-table session, so if you’ve got anything that’s challenging you technically bring it along and see if the awesome combined PeopleTools brainpower we’ve assembled can help out.

You can see the full agenda here.

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’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

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!

We’re particularly pleased as this is voted for by the end users.

The full list of winners can be found here.