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.

I had to miss a couple of the sessions that I’d have liked to have seen today as we had to leave early to catch our flights, I was particularly disappointed to miss out on Robert Half International talking about PeopleSoft on Amazon Web Services.

I did manage to go and see some of the Oracle UK team (Debi Ashby, Diana Draghici and Mike Everitt) talking about what you can do to improve the PeopleSoft UI. The team walked through some role-playing scenarios for adding navigation collections, portal pagelets etc and then showed some screenshots of the work that Succeed has done at Pret, which was nice.

I started day 3 squeezing into a pretty packed room for a Fusion Technical Overview from Nadia Bendjedou.  There was quite a lot of detail in this section so I’m not going to fill up this post with everything, but the stand-out points for me were:

• All applications are based on a common unified data model (not split into multiple pillars like PeopleSoft), so you install the database once and you get EVERYTHING, even if you only want one small module! It doesn’t matter if you just want Talent Management, you not only get a database full of every HR module, but all other applications too (Financials, CRM etc).
• Everything in Fusion is meta-data driven.  When you change something, the core isn’t changed, the change is stored at a higher level.
• The data model is largely based on eBusiness Suite, however it has been enhanced with some of the best bits from PeopleSoft, namely effective dating, Trees and Setids for striping the data.

Next up was PeopleTools Search from Matthew Haavisto. I think this is going to be the single best change in Tools 8.52, users are going to love it! In Matthew’s words “It’s more than just a way of finding things, it’s a better way to navigate.” The Search box appears on homepage, plus keyword search on component pages. The most relevant results are shown at the top with facets down the side for additional filtering.

In the afternoon I went to PeopleSoft On-Demand with Marc Weintraub. This is an area of real interest to me as I’ve done a lot of PeopleSoft work in the cloud, and it seems like Oracle are starting to flesh out their offerings. Anything that Oracle sells is now available On-Demand, and across their entire suite of products they host 700 customers and 5.5million users on Oracle On-Demand.

Next up was Larry’s hotly anticipated keynote.  There was a sponsor session first, which was particularly arduous to sit through. I won’t name them here, and I appreciate that they’d spent a lot of money to get such a good billing, but I don’t think much that they said was relevant to the broad interests of those sat waiting for Larry. They’d have been better putting their logo up as a big backdrop and getting a proper professional speaker (Clinton or someone) to talk instead. As for Larry, it was a session of two halves. He started in barn-storming fashion, really sticking it to Marc Benioff and overturning some of the accusations from SalesForce. It was really enjoyable to see one of the world’s foremost CEOs really in a combative mood. He then announced three products, the GA of Fusion, the Oracle Social Network and the Oracle Public Cloud. The energy level tapered off during an overlong demo of the Social Network – but it’s good to see a CEO doing demos (a la Jobs) as many don’t know the products well enough and pass the responsibility to someone else.

The final session was PeopleSoft Portal creates a great UI with Southern Company and Matthew Haavisto. This was a showcase for Southern Company’s portal. The UI itself was pretty nice, good use of Lightboxes etc, however the real surprise was the amount of content that they’d included. It had taked a big team to put it in (2.5 consultants for 10 months, plus internal resources) but when they showed the volume of content it’s easy to see where all that effort went.

I started off the second day by having another look around the demo grounds. One of the booths had a ‘proof of concept’ demo of how Fusion apps might look on the iPad and it was very impressive. Really slick and gorgeous to look at. I know that there has been a lot of fuss over the Workday iPad functionality, and although I haven’t seen it I fail to see how it could look much better than what was demoed here.

My first session of the day was Best Practices for Using PeopleSoft Test Framework by David Howard and Scott Shafer.  They asked for a show of hands at the start, and although a lot of people present were on Tools 8.51 not many had used PTF yet. It was an interesting session and I learnt quite a lot, for instance that PTF is the next version of PS Script (for those that have been around a while) and that it works well with the Usage Monitor to narrow down exactly what needs testing. Other things I didn’t know are that there is a debug mode for stepping through the tests, and that you can use variables to make the tests more repeatable. There are apparently bug fixes for this in each of the Tools8.51 patches, and a lot of nice new functionality coming in Tools 8.52.

Next up was Creating a great PeopleSoft UI with Jim Marion, Robert Taylor, Matthew Haavisto.  This was an interesting one for me as I do enjoy the UI side of PeopleSoft. Much was made of Workcenters, Dashboards and the role based branding in Application Portal and how it makes the task a lot simpler (and more dynamic – different users can have different UIs). Rebranding is normally accomplished by a team of 3 – a graphic artist, a web developer (jQuery and XSL) and a PeopleTools expert. They also showed some eye-candy examples of their handiwork:It seems that the more attractive portions are accomplished by either jQueryUI or XSL (I guess that’s where the Web Developer of the trio comes in).  Other tips included not using Query pagelets on the homepage too often as they’re not great for load-time, and use pagelet caching as much as you can (particularly on static HTML based pagelets). They also mentioned that there is a big focus on the UI in upcoming versions, and that some features are going to move from the Applications Portal to PeopleTools.

We started today with a tour of the exhibition area.  There’s far too much to take in in one day, but special mention is deserved for the stand that let brave volunteers grapple an actual Sumo wrestler. There’s a large area of demo-pods, where you can walk up and ask specialists either for a quick demo or about an issue that you need help with. I’ve met some of the guys behind PeopleTools (who’ve previously only been names before) and had a great demo of Fusion HCM.  It’s really encouraging (for PeopleSoft, at least) to witness the crowds around the PeopleSoft booths compared to other products – it’s noticeably busier.

Of the sessions I’ve been to today I started with Shawn Haynes of Cardinal Point talking about Workcenter pages.  I’ve not done much 8.51 work – the client I’ve been working on is 8.50 – so a lot of it was new to me.  It seems a really powerful concept though, and Shawn is an engaging and knowledgeable speaker. He also gets bonus points for having the courage to go with a live demo – always good to see!  I cornered him afterwards for a couple of questions and he seems a thoroughly nice chap too.

Next up was William Varma on Performance Monitor.  This was a much lower level session, and contained a lot of info, not only on Performance Monitor but also some good intel on pre-loading cache too.

After lunch was Humair Ghauri and Daan van Egmond on Fusion HCM: Enterprise grade SaaS.  I really enjoyed this session for a number of reasons.  Both are excellent speakers, and I can recall Daan from many years ago when he presented on PeopleTools to the UKOUG.  What impressed me most was the strength of the Fusion SaaS offering, and the breadth – there is a complete set of options, whether you want on-premise, hybrid or cloud (both single or multi-tenant). You get the advantages of everyone on the same release, regular updates etc without the downside of being on a proprietary platform  It’s also very extensible, so you have the ability to tailor (not customise, but tailor!) the application to the client’s needs. I’m hoping to get a look at the tools behind this at a demo pod during the week.

Finally I went to Jeff Robbins PeopleTools Roadmap session.  Jeff also had a lot of live demos (which was bold considering the number in attendance) and shared a lot about 8.52, upcoming Portal functionality plus glimpses of what’s a little further out.  The one question he wasn’t asked, was “where is Tools 8.52?”.

I’ll try to add more during the rest of the week.

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