The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

UKOUG RoundUp – Part 1 – Tuesday December 19, 2007

This is probably going to be a bit wordy, but here’s a quick overview of the sessions I attended at the UKOUG held in Birmingham a week or two ago.

I attended the following:

• Synchronous Messaging and Web Services in PeopleTools 8.48
• Getting a file into PeopleSoft for processing
• Developing a strategy for PeopleSoft Global Payroll bundles
• Operational Excellence with PeopleSoft Version Control
• PeopleSoft Application Classes – Easing the Path to Fusion

Synchronous Messaging and Web Services in PeopleTools 8.48 by Graham Smith

We’ve all seen the wide array of acronyms that surround the area of Web Services/messaging. Graham explained which of those matters to us, briefly stepped through an overview of the changes in Integration Broker in 8.48+, then stepped through a live demo of creating a CI, creating the services, operations, messages etc using the CI Service Wizard, generated the WDSL and showed a utility called SoapUI to interact with the Service from outside of PeopleSoft. With the time available Graham exposed the Get and Find methods but it wouldn’t take a huge amount of extra time to open up create and save methods also.

Getting a file into PeopleSoft for processing by Steve Smith

I must admit I was reticent to attend this session as from the title I expected it to be just discussing AddAttachment PeopleCode, and I’d already used that many times before. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Steve and his colleagues at Cambridge University have taken file uploading considerably further than this and showcased some good ideas. Additional functionality they’ve added includes:

• duplicate file checking
• checksum based duplicate checking
• file locking during processing / on error
• upload file size limit
• upload file type restriction

I’m sure there was more, but at the time of writing Steve’s powerpoint isn’t available on the UKOUG website so I can’t fill in the gaps in this list.

Developing a strategy for PeopleSoft Global Payroll bundles by Chris Smith & Simon Coyle

Continuing the unintentional theme of attending presentations by people called Smith, I thought I’d come and hear Chris and Simon speak. I’ve been on some Global Payroll implemenations and have also worked (very briefly) with Chris before so came along to see what experience they had to share. The advice was:

• Change Assistant is broadly a good thing, which is something I’ve also found myself – it has improved since its first incarnation in Tools 8.44 – though Chris and Simon did mention something that many will have found – that the file copy is far slower than doing it manually.
• Treat bundles as a mini upgrade (freeze development, apply the changes, then make the users test it)
• There are a lot of bundles out there, particularly as GP customers should be applying HR bundles in addition to the GP ones (as there is some crossover in areas the patches apply to). The advice given was to stay no more than 3 GP bundles from current and when you do apply them, combine the bundles into a mini maintenance pack. Also, there are no GP country bundles any more – they’re rolled in to the GP Core ones – so you end up with fewer, but larger bundles to apply.

Operational Excellence with PeopleSoft Version Control by Chris Heller

It’s always great to hear the Grey Sparling guys talk as they’ve a wealth of experience with the product and an engaging presentation style. I always come away with at least one gem of knowledge that I wouldn’t have found any other way than attending one of their sessions. Most of what Chris spoke about is achievable with Open Source software (the hugely popular Subversion), although to fully leverage what you’ve implemented you’d probably need their PS IDE Helper product.

The need for version control is pretty clear as that which ships with the product is pretty lightweight and although some customers purchase another commercial product (like Stat) in some of the cases I’ve seen it just remains unused on the shelf. The solution that Chris suggests was a half-way house, it is lower cost but contains a good deal of the functionality that you’d need. An unexpected bonus for me was the ability to point multiple Process Schedulers at virtual SQR directory hosted within Subversion – thereby reducing the need to keep multiple repositories in sync (you’d obviously have to watch out that a development SQR doesn’t get read by the Production Process Scheduler though). Probably most use on larger implementations, but good stuff all the same.

PeopleSoft Application Classes – Easing the Path to Fusion by Simon Huggins

Simon is an ex-colleague of mine and tackling Application Classes (especially in the last session of the day) was always going to be a big ask. He managed to keep it fairly jovial by abstracting it from a business context and even gave out a prize at one point when someone correctly identified a quote as being from Monty Python. We ran out of time when there were many slides left to show but Simon has posted his full presentation here to allow us to catch up.

A link to the presentations will be on Part 2 (Wednesday).