The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

More info on PeopleTools 8.51 August 30, 2010

I put a post up a short while back on the RVP for PeopleTools 8.51, but this week an Advisor Session has been released where Jeff Robbins gives a little more info (although sadly no screen-shots).

Much of what is covered is similar to the RVP, with a few extras (or maybe I just didn’t notice first time around).

1) The Test Framework really is a big deal.

I semi-dismissed this last time as I suspected that it was the PS Unit Test tool with a rebrand, however it seems like it’s significantly more (which Bauke Gehem did in fact tell me in the comments to my post).  I’m looking forward to getting this up and running.

2) The Business Practice Change

It seems that software components that are part of the PeopleSoft stack that are not Oracle-owned might be finding life a little harder in future.  Tools 8.51 is the last release that Crystal, WebSphere and Business Objects will be packaged with.  Unless you are already a user of these tools, if you want to use them in future you’ll have to get a license directly from the vendor, not Oracle.

Balsamiq Mockups and PeopleSoft April 9, 2010

About a month ago I stumbled across a fantastic tool called Balsamiq Mockups.  It’s a product that lets you rapidly prototype the UI for some new functionality.  It’s aimed at web development in general, not just PeopleSoft, but I think it’s so good that it’s something that the PeopleSoft community can embrace.

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.

ExcelToCI and SSL April 7, 2010

ExcelToCI is a very handy tool in the right circumstances.  It has got significantly easier to use as each new version of PeopleSoft has been released too.  It does have some quirks however.  Among these is that it can be a little difficult to use with SSL.

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!

PeopleSoft Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) February 10, 2010

A week or so ago PeopleSoft released Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) to anyone with a My Oracle Support account.  Although it has always been possible to source them, you had to go through your Account Manager or raise a ticket.  Now (provided you have an account on My Oracle Support) you can download them (using note id 1051533.1).

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.

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A new Blog worth reading February 10, 2010

For those of you outside the UK – or for those who haven’t worked with Global Payroll before – one of the UK’s preeminent GP experts is a lovely chap called John Eckersley, and he’s just started blogging.

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.

A Custom Message on the Signon Page (Final Word) January 4, 2010

Some people have been having issues with the signon page messages and caching on more recent versions of Weblogic (after all I posted the original more than 2 years ago now).  I thought I’d revisit it on an up-to-date environment and try to fix it.

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

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PeopleSoft and Google Wave November 25, 2009

So is anyone in the PeopleSoft community doing anything exciting with Google Wave?

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.

Combined SIG – 24th Nov 09 November 23, 2009

I’m going to be presenting a session in the Technical Stream of the UKOUG Combined SIG taking place in Slough tomorrow.  If you’re part of the UKOUG and not coming I encourage you to have another look.

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.

Stress/Performance Testing PeopleSoft November 12, 2009

A colleague from my company has just landed a role testing the performance of PeopleSoft at a client.  The client wanted to use free software and settled on ‘The Grinder‘ by Philip Aston (who I believe works for Oracle).  Other open-source online performance testing tools are Apache’s JMeter and OpenSTA.)

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.