We at Grey Sparling just learned that Ben Rugg passed away on November 22, 2006 from a heart attack. If you use PeopleSoft Accounts Payable, his name is a name you should really know.

Over the years PeopleSoft had several people take on the role of AP Product Manager. Ben, however, knew more about Accounts Payable than anybody else on the planet (but you would never hear him tell you that). For many years, Ben was the top AP developer: always the guy behind the scenes tackling the hard work and making sure that customers' issues were addressed. He eventually (and reluctantly) accepted the Product Management when his expertise was needed most. Ben was also passionate about doing the right thing, even when it wasn't popular.

Ben, we salute you and honor your memory. You were a true PeopleSoft expert in every sense of the word.

Labels: 2006, Financials, PeopleSoft

Out with the Old
We watched Dick Clark, drank Champagne, and sang Auld Lang Syne. We also began work on our year-end close, just like so many of the PeopleSoft customers who read our blog. This must mean that 2006 is over and 2007 is beginning. It was such a great year for us that we felt we would be remiss not to blog the year.

In with the New
2006 marked the first full year of operations for Grey Sparling Solutions. It was a great year to be part of the Oracle/PeopleSoft world. 2005 was a year of uncertainty for PeopleSoft customers (what is Oracle going to do? what is Fusion all about? who planned the PeopleSoft content at the 2005 OpenWorld?), but 2006 was a huge improvement.

Oracle announced Applications Unlimited at the Collaborate 2006 conference, and that has been hugely popular. Oracle also announced that the PeopleSoft products would have their own General Manager structure, with longtime PeopleSofter Doris Wong heading things up. Another interesting metric is that all of the system integrator companies that we work with seem to have more business with PeopleSoft projects than ever before

The Grey Sparling Effect
We saw a significant increase in the number of customers using Grey Sparling products. That wasn't too hard since we shipped our first product in November 2005, but we have more customers than employees now, which I always remember as being a key statistic for enterprise software.

It also helped that we have several new products that we shipped this year:

• nVision Drilling Snap-On
• Report Explorer
• PSIDE Helper Snap-On
• Desktop Single Signon
• nVision Context Helper Snap-On

All of that helped us turn a profit for 2006. Woo hoo! Well, it wasn't a very large profit, but it still feels pretty good to hit profitability in our first 18 months of operation. We also became an official Oracle partner this year.

PeopleSoft Experts on the Road
Aside from folks that became Grey Sparling customers this year, we talked with a large number of people at various conferences. We were extremely flattered to be asked as subject matter experts by conference organizers to give Oracle (versus vendor) presentations. This allowed us to connect with over 2,000 PeopleSoft customers in person in 2006.

• Financial Services Industry User Group
• Alliance Conference (Higher Education User Group, State and Local User Group, Federal User Network)
• Northern California PeopleSoft User Group
• Mid-Atlantic User Group
• Quest Mid-West
• Oracle OpenWorld
• UK Oracle User Group
• Santa's Helpers User Group (just seeing if you're still reading!)

PeopleSoft Experts Online
In addition to physical meetings with folks, we also met lots of people via our weblog. I'm always surprised that there aren't more PeopleSoft bloggers out there - we certainly know plenty of people with lots to say about PeopleSoft!

We were also proud to be credited with inspiring some new bloggers out there.

• Marion Crkon
• Dan Iverson
• Jim Marion

2006 Blog Entry awards.
We figured that if Time Magazine can have its set of top 10's, we should too.:

• Most Unusual blog entry. Who would have thought about integrating instant messaging with PeopleTools? Chris, of course!
• Most Humorous blog entry. Before it was posted on YouTube, the top link to see SAP's take on Larry Ellison was from our site.
• Most Historical blog entry. Think scoping a PeopleSoft release took lots of analysis and effort? It did, but if certain features made it in, the world may actually have come to an end.
• Best Fusion Preparation series (Java and PeopleCode 1, Java and PeopleCode 2, Java and PeopleCode 3). J2EE and Web 2.0 your PeopleSoft application, because that's a big part of Fusion!
• Most popular blog entry that almost didn't get written. Is anybody really thinking about Setids and Business Units any more? Apparently Yes!

Top Grey Sparling Conference Stories of 2006
While we're putting together our top blog entries, we might as well list out our top conference stories of the year.

• Best Sales story. At Oracle Open World, we literally had a PeopleSoft customer come up to our booth on the first day and ask us how quickly we could generate an invoice for our Desktop Single Signon product. We did a remote install using the Open World wireless, and they were using the product live within 2 weeks for their 2007 Open Enrollment. Initial contact to Production in less than 2 weeks!
• Runner-Up Sales story. At the FSIUG in New York after demonstrating the nVision Drilling Snap-on, we did a remote installation of a trial version at a customer. This customer was able to use WebEx to show it to end-users who were not at the conference, and decide to purchase it right then and there.
• Best Cheapskate story. This had to be at the Alliance Conference, where we discovered how expensive it would be to rent an additional table for our booth for the 3 days the exhibition hall was open. Bert Laws of BearingPoint (a local of Nashville) was kind enough to make a run to Costco and buy a table for us (yes, it was significantly less expensive to buy a table than to rent it). We ended up giving the table to the folks at the Dell booth next to ours at the end of the conference (it would have been too difficult to check with our baggage).
• Best Clueless travel story. As good interenet users, we used Google Maps to print driving directions for all the places we were going in the UK while we were there for the UKOUG (knowing that Chris's mobile account for his Blackberry wouldn't work there). I don't remember the last time I had to look at a map to get where I needed to go in the states. This didn't work too well in the UK, and we ended up getting hopelessly lost many times on the trip. We ended up buying a map to help us make it through the trip.

2007 - The Year Ahead
The coming year looks to be an exciting one as well. With the success of the conferences we attended last year, we're signed up for lots of conferences this year as well. Although the sessions haven't been formally approved for these conference, expect to see us at:

• 2007 Northern California Training Day
• 2007 Alliance Conference
• 2007 EMEA Conference
• 2007 Collaborate
• 2007 Open World

From an engineering perspective, we've got two new products that we're partnering with customers to build in the first half of the year:

• nVision Bolt-on. This will address most of the outstanding nVision issues that we had hoped to address while we were still at PeopleSoft.
• Workflow Notifications. This is a product requested by a long-time Higher Education customer who saw our email notification functionality in our report distribution product, and are currently grappling with the best way to deploy workflow with eProcurement and HCM applications.

We also have plans to add some new features to our existing products, so if you've already licensed something from us, you'll probably hear from us soon.

Labels: 2006, Events, nVision, PeopleCode, PeopleSoft, Reporting, Security, User

For those who were interested in downloading the powerpoint to the presentation Chris gave, here it is.

It contains the tips he gave in the following areas:

• Drilling Into Application Designer
• Security Drilling / Portal Administration Drilling
• Dynamic Tracing or Row Level Security
• Enhancing PeopleSoft User Experience
• Automating "Save As" Processing

Update: here are the code snippets from my demo. As mentioned in the presentation, these are PeopleTools 8.4 projects that you can import into your environment.

Labels: 2006, Events, Security

For those who were interested in downloading the powerpoint to the presentation I gave, here it is.

It contains the tips I gave in the following areas:

• Drilling from and to PeopleSoft Reports
• Applying Data Security to PeopleSoft Reports
• Setting up reporting jobstreams in process scheduler
• Getting Context from numbers in nVision Reports

Labels: 2006, Drilling, Events, nVision

We survived Oracle OpenWorld 2006. A very long, but rewarding week. We originally planned to to blog the show as some other folks did. However, it was a little too hectic.

Our sessions turned out great, approximately 600 people attended each session, so we got some great feedback and questions from people (so look for some good new blog entries coming up). For those of you that provided contact info for copies of some of our products, look for those coming your way next week.

It was amazing the difference between this year and last year. Last year, we were a company that was only several weeks old and we didn't have an official presence. This year we have several products with live and happy customers. We also presented two highly-attended and (we think) successful sessions. From a PeopleSoft customer perspective, it was obvious that Oracle had listened to the feedback from last year, and provided a lot more presentations focused on providing information needed by the PeopleSoft customers.

Out of all the customers we talked with, people were definitely a lot happier this year. Applications Unlimited is turning out to be a great hit.

Our Oracle Open World Kodak moment has to be the following:

It was the first day the exhibit hall was open, and we had spent much of
the previous day trying to iron out the kinks in our booth. 2 hours into
that morning, a PeopleSoft customer made a bee-line to our booth, and started
peppering us with questions, verifying features and pricing for one of our
products.

After about two minutes of talking with us, he paused and asked, "We're in
a hurry to get something put in for this. How long would it take for you
to generate an invoice?"

Needless to say, we got him an invoice. We subsequently helped him
install the product from the Starbucks next to Moscone Center (while he
was still here at the show), and now has it up and running in one of his
environments. The customer expects to put it into production
next week.

We definitely want to thank all of you that came to our sessions and to our booth. Special thanks go out to Jeff Robbins and David Bain for being our co-presenters. Thanks also go to Mike Ni and Nadia Bendjedou for their upfront work in having us as presenters. Finally, we wanted to thank Jake Abrams for helping out in our booth. Jake has more expertise in implementing our products than anyone else, so having him help answer questions at our booth was great.

And thanks to whoever planned out the evening event at the Cow Palace. That was fun (almost too fun - it was hard to work the next day).

Our only recommendation for Oracle next year is to do something better with the Meet The Experts sessions. We went to visit some of the folks that we used to work with and they were hidden off in the mezzanine level where customers couldn't easily find them.

Labels: 2006, Events

Well, it seems our sessions at Open World were so popular, that they're full. Our message: fear not!

Right now, the conference organizers are looking at alternatives, such as changing the room or scheduling repeat sessions. We talked a bit with them, and their suggestion was to tell customers who want get into these sessions should use the "notify me" link. This gives the conference planners an accurate count of the total number of people they need to accomodate.

We'll keep you posted as things develop.

Labels: 2006, Events

In addition to some various roadtrips coming up, Larry and I will be presenting at Oracle OpenWorld this year in the Applications Technology track.

Larry is co-presenting with Rich Halket of Oracle on PeopleSoft Reporting. Here's the particulars.

Session ID: S281460
Session Title: Advanced Reporting Techniques for PeopleSoft Enterprise
Session Description:

Come to this session to learn how to solve new problems with the reporting technology available to you. The session discusses techniques for improving the use and adoption of PS/Query and nVision, plus techniques for reducing the ongoing operational costs of reporting in your organization. You'll leave this session with a greater understanding of how to get more from your existing Oracle's PeopleSoft installation as you prepare for Oracle Fusion.

I'll be co-presenting with David Bain of Oracle on PeopleTools.

Session ID: S281435
Session Title: PeopleTools Advanced Tips and Techniques
Session Description:

This session teaches you how to take better advantage of your Oracle's PeopleSoft applications. The session covers tips that you can use to make your end-users' life easier (you'll be a hero when you return!). You'll also leave the session with some tips that will make your life as a developer easier. In fact, your attendance at this session alone will make you glad you came to Oracle OpenWorld.

The (tentative) schedule is that my session will be Wednesday, Oct. 25 at 2:30pm in room 2007 of Moscone West. Larry's session is Thursday, Oct. at 11am and is also in room 2007 of Moscone West.

That room has capacity of 300 people so if you're planning on attending, be sure to indicate so when you register. There were a lot of PeopleSoft sessions last year at OpenWorld that had huge lines of people that couldn't get in because of capacity problems. And Larry knows how to pack 'em in. We used to joke that the 3 biggest sessions at PeopleSoft Connect conferences were Dave Duffield or Craig Conway doing the intro keynote, the closing keynote (this ranged from Bill Clinton to Bill O'Reilly to Garry Kasparov, etc. ), and then Larry doing the reporting session. I think that Larry's record was 2000+ people in a single room one year.

Hopefully we'll see you there!

Labels: 2006, Events

Well, at least a city near you if you live near Richmond, VA or Washington DC.

We've been asked to present at the Mid Atlantic Regional Users Group in Richmond, VA on Friday, August 11. As part of that trip, we've been setting up meetings in the Washington DC area on August 9, and in Richmond on August 10. We still have a few open slots, so if you'd like to meet personally with one of the experts, contact us (we are giving out freebies to customers we meet with that will help with developer productivity).

Look for upcoming announcements for other conferences and user groups in the coming weeks.

Labels: 2006