Recently I presented "More Advanced Reporting Tips and Techniques" at the Northern California RUG training day and showed instant messaging integration with the process scheduler and reporting tools. This generated quite a bit of interest.

This is a follow-on to this post, but has been updated and enhanced.

Why should I care about integrating instant messaging and PeopleSoft?
Good question, especially since PeopleSoft has delivered notification of reports through the Real-Time Event Notification service (or REN Server).

Let's start by covering limitations of the REN server:

• It only works when a person runs processes for himself (and only when he requests the output to be run to window).
• It doesn't work for distributing to multiple people at the same time.
• If the browser window receiving the results is closed, the automatic notification is lost, even if another window is started.
• It doesn't work for process scheduler jobs.
• It doesn't work for scoped nVision reports.
• You must have the REN Server configured for it to work.
• You must be on PeopleTools 8.42 or greater.

With these limitations, the instant messaging integration we are discussing here does the following:

• You are notified when any process is completed, not just the ones you run to window
• Users are notified any time output for them is ready, regardless of whether they ran it or how many people are on the distribution list.
• Output from process scheduler jobs is notified.
• This works regardless of whether the REN Server is available or set up.

Click here to watch it in action.

Update on Installing and Configuring the IM example
Although the rough steps are included in the original posting, we ended up updating the code to make it easier to get up and running. For example, we included an application engine program that can be modified with your own IM accounts to test to make sure that the connection to the IM client is working independently of running processes through the process scheduler.

The hook we are using is subscription PeopleCode on the PSRF_REPORT_CREATE message (which gets published each time a process completes that has output, such as a report, log file, or trace).

Update on SMACK libraries for IM connectivity
The connection to the instant messaging service is done with an open source java library (based on the XMPP standard), called SMACK. One thing we found was that the version on the website supports a newer version of java than what our environments support (8.47). Therefore, you'll want to go here to get the libraries for version 2.21 (and put them in the class folder in the PS_HOME of your app servers)

New Project
Click on the following link to download the Application Designer project with the new code. Keep in mind that you'll want to replace gsdemo.user (and password) and the service names with the ones you will use in both the app engine program and the subscription peoplecode.

Labels: Email, Process_Scheduler, Reporting