August 21, 2013
Issue #54 – 21st August 2013
Welcome to our slightly bigger issue this week due to summer holidays.
News and Latest Developments
As a result of the ill-fated Queensland Health Payroll system – which will cost taxpayers AU$1.2 billion and needs to be replaced – IBM has been banned from entering into any new state government contracts.
Oracle have released the .06 patch of PeopleTools 8.53. A quick scan of the release notes shows that it contains a lot of fixes for PUM (Update Manager), IE10 and PTF (Test Framework) in particular (Support Login Required).
Yury Chadour has posted an infographic on his blog which gives an idea of the size and scale of Oracle’s flagship annual conference.
The Smart Panda has a blog post that starts off sounding quite niche – about a particular set of circumstances in Change Assistant – but the resolution is a good reminder of one of the stranger limitations in PeopleSoft.
There’s a useful post on the Capital-IT blog detailing a scenario (and it sounds like it would be fairly common for PeopleTools 8.53 clients) where merging PDFs results in all pages beyond the first being produced blank.
Succeeder Duncan has tried navigating PeopleSoft with one of the new Leap Motion controllers.
Reading
Succeeder Jacki spotted this analysis of whether the massive program of outsourcing embarked upon by the UK Inland Revenue has delivered the cost savings expected.
We love Seth Godin, and some of us were lucky enough to hear him speak during the CX event at last years’ OOW. This is probably one of the shortest blog posts I’ve read in a while, but it’s certainly one of the most inspirational.
How do you unleash inventiveness and creativity at work? An interesting round-up of how to encourage it, which companies do it well, and why having an innovative CEO might not be good. It includes some great quotes from two of the most innovative leaders in the IT industry currently – Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff.
Training
Yury Chadour pointed out the above link on his blog. Over the last couple of years the advisor webcasts had tailed off a touch, but Oracle seem to be regularly providing new recordings now (Support Login Required).
Watching
The NSA Prism scandal will have some executives questioning the wisdom of putting data in the cloud, however this article adds some perspective. Also, Larry Ellison has no doubts on its merits. (Scroll to the bottom for an interesting 7min video interview with Larry on the subject).
We’re quite excited about this at Succeed Towers as this is the first time – to our knowledge – that recently acquired Endeca has been used within PeopleSoft. It’s a peek into the near-ish future, where we have access to both structured and unstructured data from within our data query tools.
And Finally…
A great post with some staggering charts. As a British company Map 3 is a shock to us, whereas some are just strange (Map 39).
It seems that one of the oft-cited benefits of working for Google – the 1 day a week of ‘side project’ time – is no longer easy to get. Whilst it sounds wonderful in theory, and did spawn some great products (eg. gmail and adsense) we did always think of this Dilbert comic when it was mentioned.
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August 7, 2013
Issue #53 – 7th August 2013
News and Latest Developments
Colin Barker writes on the ZD Net blog about the cloud, and how over the next 10 years it’ll change the ERP landscape. He includes some sage advice (using the hybrid cloud as a stepping stone), however we’d strongly disagree with his final remarks as PeopleSoftcan work very well in the cloud too!
Succeeder Tim spotted that Oracle has now certified Windows Server 2012 with PeopleTools 8.53 and 8.52. The certification includes the database server, web server, application server and batch server, although there are some limitations (Support login required).
Functional
Talina Lambeth writes on the Animato blog on the dilemma she faced when designing a multi-tiered salary range system, whilst still maintaining the alerting to HR when entries are outside the ranges.
Chirag Mehta talks about Big Data and where it fits within the field of of BI. Will it be as big a disruption as the Internet or the Cloud?
Technical
Nanda Kumar from the Kovaion Consulting Blog shows some of the improvements that they’ve made to the BI Publisher reporting routines, from page counts, PDF merging and Barcodes to watermarks, images and Excel output.
Daniel Kibler has started using the PeopleSoft Test Framework, these are his findings.
Reading
Many companies have a long history of donating money to soup kitchens and food-banks. Toyota approached it differently and offered assistance to improve their processes – with significant results.
A really interesting tweak to the education model has occurred in South Korea, where after-school tutors are paid according to their popularity with their students.
OpenWorld
The ‘Apps Consultant’ gives his Top 10 tips on what will happen at OpenWorld, what to bring, and how to make the most of your time there.
A short podcast on the merits of having ‘a healthy heart’, by which they mean quality master data. The Oracle ‘Enterprise Data Quality’ product can help with this. Succeed have used it on a number of sites and can vouch for its effectiveness.
And Finally…
Breaking Bad is one of the highest regarded TV series, and this article highlights some of the management lessons that can be found within – not just from Walt, but also loveable lawyer Saul Goodman. (Warning: contains season 5 spoilers!)
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July 31, 2013
Issue #52 – 31st July 2013
News and Latest Developments
Chris Kanaracus has summarised his predictions for what the big announcements will be at this year’s OOW. Will we see unveils of In-memory database tech, new hardware, Fusion updates and new features of the Oracle Cloud?
Paco Aubrejuan (SVP of PeopleSoft Enterprise) is touring some North American cities to explain the benefits of 9.2 and how PeopleSoft continues to deliver value. Chicago, NYC, Boston and Toronto are his August destinations (Support Login required).
Functional
Anne Mayer has added a post to the Mipro blog with a video walkthrough of Guided Life Events within HCM 9.2. This kind of assisted navigation is made possible with the new Activity Guide functionality.
Brooke Lindsey writes on the Animato blog on the PSPLDTL1 process, aka ‘Time and Labor Load to Paysheets’ and what to do if it fails.
Derek Tomei gives some great examples for how business users can upgrade their Query skills by learning how to use Connected Queries.
Technical
Alok Bhardwaj has posted a very useful walkthrough of the Data Migration Workbench. This is new functionality in Tools 8.53 which allows us to migrate config as a managed object, and means we can use fewer Data Mover scripts.
Randy from the Remote PS Admins blog continues his series on the installation and configuration of Secure Enterprise Search with PeopleSoft. Part 3 focuses more on the administration side.
Reading
Within Google there’s a team dedicated to fixing niggles and removing frustration caused by poor code. The article also covers the Go language, but the concept of an anti-glitch hit-squad sounds good to us.
Utilities
This week’s Utilities section is entirely given over to the excellent work that Lee Greffin has been doing on his Greffin’s Feather blog in documenting PS Unit. The above linked post is an introduction, however Lee has also recently posted blog entries on PSUnit Assert Tests, Adding Tests and some concluding Odds and Ends.
And Finally…
Orange orchards in Florida (and in the rest of the world too) are being infected with ‘citrus greening’. It spoils the crop, and there’s no immunity available from Mother Nature. Is altering the Orange’s DNA the only way we can save our morning glass of OJ?
Some University of Texas students created a device that sent false GPS signals to a ship, overrode the existing GPS signals, and gained control of the navigation of an $80 million yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.
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July 24, 2013
Issue #51 – 24th July 2013
News and Latest Developments
Jim Marion has picked out some of his highlights from the Open World agenda. In related news, the
early bird discount has been extended.
Last week Oracle released new patches for its supported PeopleTools versions. PeopleTools 8.53.05 is linked to above. Oracle also released
Tools 8.52.17 and
8.51.24 (Support Login required).
Functional
Following on from the previous post about the new Workcenters in the Contracts Module, this week the Cardinal Point team have turned their attention to Billing Workcenters.
Hakan Biroglu has found what looks like beta/trial functionality within Tools 8.53, functionality which may well become part of the core feature set in upcoming versions. For those that build quite a few environments (and it’s something that we’ll all be doing with the PeopleSoft Update Manager) this is going to be pretty useful.
A great post by Mustapha Atar of the Animato blog. Mustapha details the steps you can take to ensure that your production environment doesn’t suffer from degraded performance.
Another entry this week from the PeopleSoft Blog. It shows us how to identify which objects are locked, by whom, and the object type.
Reading
Enterprises should do more to upgrade or remove old versions of Java in their systems, as running these legacy versions could leave them open to attack.
There’s an awful lot of excitement and intrigue about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop idea. The concept of travelling at twice the speed of the bullet train sounds a tantalising prospect, but will it work, and can he deliver it? If he can, it’ll change a lot of things for the transport industry world-wide.
Utilities
Iouri Chadour has spotted that the excellent TraceMagic tool (the free Oracle-built trace analysis tool) has been updated.
The first reviews for the Leap Motion controller includes this video review – which does it a lot more justice than a page of words could. Although it’s commercially available it still sounds like early days for the product, but it has some great apps and is one to watch.
A haunting series of photographs of modern day Detroit. It looks like scenes from a zombie/apocalypse movie, but it’s real.
It’s pretty warm on both sides of the Atlantic right now, but spare a thought for those who had to endure the heat in the years before Air Con.
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July 17, 2013
Issue #50 – 17th July 2013
Welcome to our 50th issue of PeopleSoft Weekly!
News and Latest Developments
The headlining artists for the OOW appreciation event on Treasure Island have been announced. This year, Maroon 5 (Moves Like Jagger) and The Black Keys (Lonely Boy) will be sharing the stage.
It’s always interesting to see the results of these surveys, especially this one which has combined rankings of both the company and the CEO. Google comes out on top, and Oracle doesn’t fare too badly (the company’s ranking is 65%, but Larry will be pleased with his 80% approval rating). Below Oracle are many rivals, including IBM, Northgate, Kronos, Fujitsu, HP, Unisys and Infor.
Functional
Succeeder Sravya has an analysis of the latest method of measuring employee performance, and it’s a large improvement on the trusty 9-box grid.
The first batch of pre-built User Productivity Kit content for the 9.2 applications has been made available. It is downloadable from eDelivery and cover Financials and (some) HCM.
Technical
Chris Malek from the Cedar Hills Group has blogged on how to synchronise tables in two different databases where there is no delivered message/process to do so.
Daniel Kibler has spotted a bug in SQRs in Tools 8.53. The bug manifests itself in the way that the logos are embedded in the .pdf output.
Randy from the Remote PS Admin blog has posted the first two in a series of posts on setting up SES with PeopleSoft. The first is linked to above, the second can be found
here.
Reading
An interesting thought-piece from the Business Insider blog on the improvements in technology and where they will take us in the next 10 years. There is much mention of various laws (incl the well known Moore’s Law) showing that cpu speed, disk space and bandwidth are increasing rapidly. Now we just need someone to break “Duncan’s Law”, which posits that battery life decreases with every device upgrade that we purchase.
Where did the Ctrl + Alt + Delete keystroke combination come from, and how did it gain the prominence that it once had?
Utilities
Neil Yetman at the GetLevel(0) blog highlights a Chrome browser extension written forPeopleSoft by Uffe Graakjaer. Neil also points out another Chrome extension by Shelby Melban called
PSChrome.
The ‘PeopleSoft Career Guy’ pointed us to this Oracle produced video on the HCM to ELM Full Sync setup – which has been much improved in 9.2 and is now a ‘guided process’.
A marvellous example of how technology can enrich the classroom experience – by bringing the black death to a room full of Australian children.
An ingenious developer has modified his microwave using a Raspberry Pi to perform all sorts of functions that really should have been included by manufacturers before now.
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July 10, 2013
Issue #49 – 10th July 2013
News and Latest Developments
Iouri Chadour was the first to spot that the Content Catalogue for OpenWorld has been posted.
Oracle has released bundle 14 for CRM 9.1. It’s dated for the tail end of June but we’re sure it wasn’t listed last week! (Support login required).
Functional
Continuing their run of being featured on this newsletter, this week Cardinal Point have blogged on the WorkCenters delivered with PeopleSoft that will help you to work even more effectively in the Contracts module.
A great slide deck on why LinkedIn is so crucial. It’s a really interesting update on the position LinkedIn has managed to get itself into as the dominant player in both the online resume and job-board markets. It also covers initiatives such as ‘Apply via LinkedIn’ and the huge benefits of access to passive candidates.
Technical
Jim Marion has posted an entry on usage of advanced formatting within Pagelets, and how to prevent your code being incorrectly handled by PeopleSoft.
Lee Greffin has posted a couple of entries on his Greffins Feather blog concerning the usage of PeopleSoft Application Packages. The article linked above is about handling of constants, and he’s also posted on
Instance Variables.
The PeopleSoft Blog has a follow-up piece on controlling the appearance of the mouse-over popup.
Reading
Spurred by the success of the Pebble watch, most consumer electronics manufacturers are now making smart watches. It’s not just Microsoft, Google and Apple. Acer, Blackberry, LG, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and even Dell are either making or planning one.
The Italian luxury car automaker is limiting its employees to 3 internal email recipients on each email in a bid to get its employees to talk to each other more, and email each other less.
Driverless cars will impact many, many things – and not just for taxi drivers. As ~30% of urban driving is spent looking for a parking spot, and up to ⅓ of city land is taken up by space for parking things will clearly improve. However, will people be open to even longer commutes (as they can sleep or even workout while being driven)?
Quotes
There’s a new book out about Larry Ellison’s quest for the America’s Cup. Here are 10 Larry quotes from the book. Some will help perpetuate his commonly held image, others – particularly the school one – show a softer side.
There’s a lot of euphoria at the moment in the UK after Andy Murray’s Wimbledon win, but with the drug-testing regime considerably lighter than some other sports (notably cycling) might some players be benefiting from illegal enhancement?
PE Teacher Dale Irby from Texas has worn the same disco shirt and sweater for every school photo at his school for the last 40 years. There’s even a
video/slideshow.
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July 3, 2013
Issue #48 – 3rd July 2013
News and Latest Developments
Oracle’s long awaited new database was released last week and there is some nice new functionality to play with – notably Multitenant pluggable databases. This is a huge advance and will reshape the way in which multi-tenancy is done within the industry. There’s further coverage here. The latest version of Enterprise Manager was also released.
Functional
There’s a new post on the Hexaware blog investigating the Timesheet Lock-down functionality in HCM 9.2. It details the effect – exactly what is made read-only – and contains some analysis of when it would be useful.
Mustapha Atar on the Animato blog discusses how the Secure Enterprise Search/PeopleSoft Search Framework can change the method your end-users use to navigate the system.
The Hexaware blog also has a summary of the new Recruiting dashboard that’s part of the HCM 9.2 release, including an individual look at some of the pagelets.
Technical
This post on the Smart Panda blog shows a use for the PeopleSoft Virtual Servers that we hadn’t come across before – altering the Operating System clock to simulate Year-End. It’s a lot easier on a virtual system than a physical machine.
Jim Marion has more experience than most at effectively using jQuery within PeopleSoft, and he’s posted his method of ensuring that the delivered version of jQuery is used in the most tidy and elegant manner.
It’s been a while since we included a BI Publisher article. This post – from Tim Dexter on the Oracle BI Publisher Blog – includes some nice looking charts and the code needed to produce them.
Derek Tomei has posted an article to the IT Toolbox blog breaking down exactly what we should and shouldn’t be using App Engine for.
Reading
We mentioned Oracle’s deal with Microsoft Azure in last week’s newsletter, but the other tie-ups were too late to be included. Here’s an analysis of the deals by Succeeder Duncan.
Richard George from Cedar Crestone picks his favourite 3 features from the HCM v9.2 release.
Sure, there’s a lot of water … but what else is there inside your morning cup?
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June 26, 2013
Issue #47 – 26th June 2013
Thanks from Mathew from Boise Inc who is our 500th subscriber
News and Latest Developments
Oracle’s Q4 results disappointed in a few areas. Despite Oracle’s assertion that SaaS and engineered hardware sales were up, overall sales just missed the target. Commentary from Information Week can be found
here.
Much of Oracle’s earnings update was taken up by Larry proclaiming that he was going to make a series of announcements this week that would reshape the cloud. The first of these is a deal which makes Oracle Linux, Database, Weblogic and Java available on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. For two companies that have competing database products to come to a deal like this is a real surprise – and a closer partnership than many had predicted.
The updated (patched) versions of the PeopleSoft images within VirtualBox (akaPeopleSoft Update Manager) have been released for HCM and Financials (Support login required).
Functional
A guest post on ZDNet by Holger Mueller about the inner workings of Enterprise Development. How do they decide which updates to make, and whether a particular fix is within maintenance or not?
The Cardinal Point team look at some of the new WorkCenters that come with PeopleSoftv9.2, with particular focus on Project Costing.
Steve Boese charts the progress of Mary Barra. Mary is currently General Motors Chief Product Officer, and previously held the post of HR Director. She’s being tipped as a future CEO of the company. The path from HR to CEO isn’t a well trodden one, so what makes Mary different?
Technical
The venerable Jim Marion returns with a post on the new component which allows you to upload Images, CSS, HTML and JavaScript via the PIA, plus a set of iScripts to enable you to make use of these new objects.
This is a great blog that was pointed out by Succeeder Dave. It has a list of bookmarklets – you can save these to your browser like bookmarks/favourites – which take you to a particular component (regardless of which environment you’re in).
There’s an entry from the ‘PeopleSoft Blog’ for the second week running. This time the topic is the extra setup needed if you want to add mouse-over popups to customised pages.
Reading
Larry Dignan (Editor in Chief of ZDNet) postulates that automation and cloud computing may just undo the outsourcing boom of the early 2000s. Can some of the tasks that have been offshored be accomplished via automation instead?
Eric Kimberling on the IT Toolbox blog talks about the effect of customisation. Although the title sounds pretty damning, the article treads the balance nicely between “customization can create problems during implementation” and “Vanilla ERP systems can create strategic disadvantages”.
Holger Mueller – Constellation Research’s newest recruit – talks about the newly released Oracle 12c database, and what it will do for the current state of multi-tenancy.
Bob Warfield on the Smoothspan blog discusses Google’s move to can its Reader product (which seems bizarre as many other companies are building RSS Reader products). Why is Google doing it, and will it be a strategic error?
An amusing summary of the state of personal data in 2013, in pictorial form.
And Finally…
They build them much, much better. In an interesting experiment in car safety, a modern Chevy was crashed into one from 50 years ago. The difference in occupant protection is astounding, spotted by
Rands.
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June 19, 2013
Issue #46 – 19th June 2013
News and Latest Developments
A video interview with John Webb (VP PeopleSoft Product Strategy) who talks about the new In-Memory applications on the Exa-platforms, use cases for the 9.2 Applications, usability labs leading to a reduction in training needs and the enthusiasm in the user community for 9.2.
The PeopleSoft Statement of Direction has been updated. It’s an interesting read to see what is planned for upcoming releases and Feature Packs. The integration with LinkedIn sounds particularly interesting, however there are sections for the other applications too. (Support login required.)
Functional
Succeeder Dave spotted this post on the Hexaware blog about the functionality in the T&L Workcenter that’s new in HCM 9.2.
The next in the ‘10 Innovations in PeopleSoft 9.2’ series, this time focusing on Supplier Relationship Management and the new Self Service functionality.
Technical
There’s a new post on the PeopleSoft Blog showing a straightforward way to tidy up after BI Publisher. It’s a delivered process that hunts for orphaned objects and removes them.
Chris Malek from the Cedar Hills Group blogs about his first impressions looking at the REST capability in PeopleSoft.
Roger Martin on the Mundo PeopleSoft blog shows an alternative to the attachment code for executing files on the application server.
Reading
A thought provoking piece from Tommy Walker of Smashing Magazine about how we’ll interact with computers in the future using technologies similar to the three mentioned above. It’s amazing how much that scene from Minority Report – which was released 11 years ago – is still impacting UI designers’ thoughts for the future.
Eric Kimberling on the IT Toolbox blog talks about the longevity of ERP. Of particular note is his description of a pendulum which swings back and forth between large ERP vendors and niche providers.
Rebecca Vilsack (IT director, University of Central Florida and member of the Quest International Users Group board of directors) talks about making the most of new functionality when upgrading, not just completing the upgrade and stopping. (Scroll down to read the full article.)
Grey Heller’s Larry Grey has posted a YouTube video showing how you can prevent your system being hacked – the video focuses on Campus Solutions, but this could apply to any application – using their ERP Firewall product.
And Finally…
An intriguing entry on the arstechnica blog showing how easy it is to crack passwords – it took the author less than 24 hours to become competent. Key takeaways from this are that password security is better in PeopleTools 8.53 (now passwords are salted as well as hashed), and if your password is 6 characters or less, with an additional one or two numbers on the end it’ll be very easy to crack.
Pepsi disguised pro racing driver Jeff Gordon and sent him to a car dealership to take a Camaro for a test drive. The poor car salesman lets Jeff behind the wheel but has no idea what Jeff is going to do. (Warning, contains some profanity.)
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June 12, 2013
Issue #45 – 12th June 2013
News and Latest Developments
The latest release of the CRM application has been made available to download from eDelivery/Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. (Support Login Required.)
In a move slightly reminiscent of Oracle’s hiring of ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd, Salesforce have appointed former Oracle executive VP for North America Keith Block as their President and Vice Chairman. It’s a big announcement for Salesforce and further fires the feud between Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff.
Oracle have released the 8.53.04 patch (linked to above) and the
8.52.16 patch. (Support login required.)
Functional
A 13 minute PodCast/interview with Amira Morcos (Snr Director of Product Management for PeopleSoft Financials). Topics covered include mobile solutions, analytics, automation of core business flows Oracle’s commitment to continue improving the product.
Technical
There’s a new post on the My Tech Speak blog showing which Integration Broker Service Operations to activate if the My Reports homepage pagelet isn’t showing any report output.
Matthew Haavisto has posted an updated version of the red paper on configuring a contemporary UI using the Interaction Hub.
Daniel Kibler posts his findings on the differences between how JavaScript is handled in Tools 8.53 and 8.49.
Randy from the Remote PS Admin blog has noticed that in PeopleTools 8.53 Oracle has changed how the TEMP and TMP environment variables are handled.
Chris Heller (from Grey Heller) has noticed that the 10th anniversary of the Oracle takeover has passed. Much has changed in the intervening decade, but PeopleSoft does seem to be holding strong. (Grey Heller are making good sales of their PeopleSoft products, and Succeed has recently won another greenfield PeopleSoft project.)
Richard George of Cedar Crestone discusses the benefits of a hosted PeopleSoft solution and shows that there are many cases where it can deliver real value and savings. He also compares it to a SasS solution and concludes that there are genuine advantages to hosting there too.
A 10 minute video showing some of the improvements available in 9.2. Some of the areas getting focus are the Interaction Hub, Enterprise Search, Dashboards and Workcenters, the new patching process and the Company Directory mobile solution.
And Finally…
It seems a touch ironic, but Facebook’s first data centre once had an issue with a ‘real cloud’ materialising and raining on its servers, or as they put it “a humidity event”.
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Posted by corrinadavies2012
The PeopleSoft Weekly newsletter 