How do you "roll your own" Tax Updates for HR and Financials?

Besides being able to upgrade at some point in the future and production support insurance, getting regular Tax Updates is one of the reasons companies give for not cancelling their support.  I’ll bet it’s not all that hard.

If I was a new college IT grad, would I want to learn PeopleSoft?

Okay, I really do like the PeopleSoft products.  But I got a call today from a recent college grad wanting some help with installing the PeopleSoft CD’s.  She asked how long it would take to learn PeopleSoft, because she noticed there were a lot of PeopleSoft jobs posted and thought it would be a good thing to know.  After explaining how PeopleSoft is a very broad and deep application and how she’d have to pick an area and specialize in that, I felt like I needed to give her the bigger picture.  PeopleSoft’s product line has a finite future.  The language is proprietary and specific to PeopleSoft applications.  Oracle isn’t investing in it the way PeopleSoft used to.  Applications Unlimited notwithstanding, the state of the art ERP application will be Fusion in the foreseeable future.  As much as I hated to, I told her she might look at SAP if she wanted to learn a product that’s likely to be in demand 10+ years down the road.

How much downward rate pressure (if any) are you independent consultants seeing out there?

What I've heard so far isn't too encouraging.

Should I offer reasonably priced ExcelToCI spreadsheet downloads configured for the more popular components?

I do keep getting requests for Voucher ExcelToCI spreadsheets, and others like Pending Item uploads aren't all that straightforward.

Have you tried out this Augmented Reality demo?

Very cool.

So you are tasked with a maintenance pack install, or worse yet, a full blown upgrade.  You follow the upgrade procedures as best you can understand them.  You are at the step where you have run the compare reports, and are waiting for the developers to look over the reports.  Sure, they cursed at the fact that you wasted five hours of the print queue and half the trees Johnny Appleseed managed to plant, but the real fact is they have to shift through 1000’s of pages of compare reports that are meaningless due to their size.

What your developers need is a simple Excel list of all objects changed, which ones were custom work, and who the last developer was who touched the object.  This last point is crucial.  The work can be divided up quickly, if only we knew who last touched the object.  This becomes paramount when the system is shared by multiple development teams (as in HRMS and Campus Solutions).  Fortunately, it’s possible to write an SQL to give the developers what they need because the majority of App Designer objects have a field called “lastupdoprid” which holds the user who last saved that object in the current environment.  The delivered compare reports utilize this field as follows: if the userid is not equal to PPLSOFT, then the object has been updated by a customer site (and the asterisk will be used to indicate the delivered object has been modified).

Tim Jones is an IT practitioner with many years of experience, and a good friend of mine.  He puts together a monthly newsletter about trends and interesting stories surrounding software development and testing.  I finally got around to asking him if I could republish it here for the benefit of the PeopleSoft Corner community, and he graciously agreed.   I hope you find it as valuable of a resource as I do.  Please click the Read More link to see the complete newsletter.  If you would like to see more, back issues (back to 1999) are available at http://swtest.workshopmultimedia.com/.

May 2009 Newsletter

Quotable Quotes

 Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.  –Ivern Ball

 Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.  –Jonathan Kozol

 The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.  –Chinese proverb

 The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.  –Nikola Tesla

 Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.  –E. Stanley Jones

 Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted, the leader must be doubly vigilant.  –Colin Powell

 There is only one you... Don't you dare change just because you're outnumbered!  –Charles Swindoll

 Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.  –Aesop

Charles Phillips announced today at Collaborate 09 that Extended Support fees would be waived for the PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 releases through June 2011. Extended support adds about 10% to the Premier Support, so that'll bring a bit of relief to IT budgets.

I believe that Extended Support is for products that have been released for five years or more.  It's interesting that after five years release 8.9 is only one release back from being current.  From a consulting perspective it's been nice to relax a bit from the biennial task of getting up to speed on a new release, but I have to wonder if PeopleSoft customers are getting as much value from their support dollars as they used to.  Either way I think Oracle is doing the right thing by not charging extra for supporting this not-so-outdated release.