Visual page diff/merge was one of the cool new features added back in PeopleTools 8.48. Visual page diff/merge lets you see two instances of the same page definition side by side and step through the differences visually. It's a huge improvement over just seeing the page field attributes in the classic PeopleTools compare reports.

We've recently added native support in our Version Control for PeopleSoft product to support this, but the last few people that we have shown our integration work to weren't even aware that Application Designer even had this functionality this at all. So, to kick off 2010 we'll take a look at how visual page diff/merge works.

Visual Page Diff

The page that we'll use is from our PSIDE Helper product. The purpose of the page is to allow someone to select different PeopleTools objects in the current database and see how to generate a URL opens that object in Application Designer. The different prompt fields that are displayed are hidden/unhidden based on the definition type that you have selected. Here is what it normally looks like.


We went ahead and made some changes to the page so we have some differences to look at. The page below is what is currently in the database that we are logged in to.


In Application Designer select Tools -> Diff/Merge Page. This menu item only appears when you have a page definition open (which is probably part of the reason that this feature is not more widely known). You'd then select your target; either another database or an Application Designer project export file.


This opens up a window that shows both page definitions side by side, highlighting the fields that are different in some way.


The toolbar in App Designer gets four new buttons when the visual diff/merge is active. Two are for navigating up and down through each field that has differences, and two are for choosing whether to keep the current field or merge in it's definition from the target (there are corresponding menu items as well).

As you navigate up and down between the changed fields, the properties values dialog box changes to show just what properties have changed for the current field.

The properties dialog does not show the field name (it just shows field ID at the top), but the currently selected field does get a dashed outline to help you see which field is the current one. In the screenshot below the bottom field ("Field Name") has been selected.

It doesn't show as well via static screenshots, but as you navigate up and down through the fields in App Designer, it's quite usable.

Visual Page Merge

Seeing the differences in their visual context is nice, but how about the merging? Let's suppose that we wanted to merge back the fields for Component and Market, but not for the others. Click the down button until the Component field is selected.


Then click B in the toolbar and the Component field from the target is merged into your current page definition. The screenshot below shows the Component field back in it's original position on the left side. The properties dialog shows that the properties that were different when we started the merge are now the same. Note that the merge is at the field level, not property by property.


If you wanted to put it back before saving, then just click the A button in the toolbar and the Component field would move back to the right side of the page definition.

To do the same for the Market field, just click the down button once more to select the Market field.



Then click the B button.


Much better than trying to move fields around and set properties manually when there are differences!

At this point you can close the window and since there were changes, you'll get prompted to save them.

This saves the changes to the PeopleSoft database that you are logged into just like you had modified the fields manually.


Version Control Support for Visual Page Diff/Merge

As I mentioned in the beginning we have added native support for using a Grey Sparling Version Control repository as the target for doing the visual diff/merge.



By selecting "Version Control" as the target, we will automatically grab the page definition from the Version Control repository and use that. In the screenshot below we're using the latest revision (colloquially known as the HEAD revision) from the DEV branch of version control.


You're not limited to just using the latest revision in version control though. You can pick any earlier revision that has been committed to version control. You can also pick different branches from version control. Maybe you want to use the revision that was migrated to production last month for doing the diff/merge; not a problem.

Labels: 2010, Upgrade, VersionControl

Duke Energy did a great session this morning at OpenWorld about how they handle PeopleSoft maintenance and upgrades. After Scott Shafer of Oracle kicked off the session with some introductions and background info, Keith Jenkins and Richard Donaldson of Duke Energy took over and described how they "won the battle" with dealing with maintenance and upgrades.

They started by describing how things had gotten a bit out of hand with falling behind on maintenance. Falling behind on maintenance was not really a planned strategy, just something that the organization sort of fell into. The longer being off maintenance, the harder to get back on maintenance, which (among other things) led to a lot customizations. On the order of multiple thousands of customizations.

This got bad enough that they went for a period of about 4 years without taking any new PeopleSoft functionality at all and began having a harder time dealing with things like OS level upgrades because they so were far enough behind with PeopleSoft.

Part of the problem with an environment that is slowly eroding is that there isn't any one incident that causes change. However, they were having financial closes take 11 ("grueling") days, cases where it wasn't obvious what the source of the truth was, and other SOX related issues. The net is that they did finally come to the realization that, as an organization, they could still meet their business requirements even with doing more advance planning and process management of their PeopleSoft environment.

The major project in this transformation was their upgrade from Financials 8.0 to Financials 8.9. This upgrade not only involved financial process re-engineering, but a switch from running PeopleSoft on DB2 on the mainframe to running on Oracle on AIX.

A Financial Program Office was created as well. One of the outputs from the Financials Program Office is a roadmap of where they are headed as an organization (related to Financials), and how that translates down to application projects. They made sure to include things like applying PeopleTools maintenance as specific items on the roadmap, recognizing that infrastructure investments are part of the overall health of the application. This has now been successfully in place through other upgrades and maintenance (although nothing else the scope of the 8.0 to 8.9 upgrade).

They had a number of practical tips and techniques, such as involving their production support teams earlier on in projects, so that the transitions are smoother when new functionality goes live.

They did a good job of taking questions from the audience during the session as well. After the first few people stood up and asked questions in the middle of the session, I had my doubts that they would be able to finish in time, but it actually worked out fairly well.

Labels: 2009, OpenWorld, Upgrade

Just got my first login on a local PeopleTools 8.50 installation. The installation was great - kudos to the PeopleTools development team.

Things worked perfectly after finally getting it downloaded (I get the feeling that there were a lot of downloads from Oracle's site today :-). Here are some quick random observations.

• The installers not only worked well, but they look a lot nicer. They also look a lot more consistent across the entire install (Tuxedo, WebLogic, PeopleTools).
• I was caught off guard for a second when the Tuxedo installer asked for "Oracle Home" instead of "BEA Home" :-)
• The WebLogic and PeopleTools installers both prompt you to subscribe to Oracle Security Alerts and guilt you a little bit when you turn them down. I forget the exact wording, but something to the effect of "failure to keep on security alerts makes you a bad person" :-) This is a Good Thing ; encouraging/shaming people into keeping up on current security threats will have an overall net positive effect.
  
• PeopleTools installer is now smart enough to understand that installing from CD copies on the filesystem is common. So if you unzip everything with Disk1, Disk2, and Disk3 all in the same directory the installer continues along. Of course I was already installing from Disk1 before Disk2 had finished downloading so I didn't get the immediate benefit...
• I did minimal installs for Tuxedo and WebLogic. Those took about 1GB of disk space.
  
• I did the full install of PeopleTools (multi-language, SDK, etc.). That took about 5.5GB of disk space.
  
• Nothing prompted me about the new separation of binaries vs log files in PSHOME. When I created a domain in psadmin though it was automatically created under a subdirectory of the user account that I was logged in with; PSHOME didn't get touched.
  
• After logging in and clicking around through the environment I noticed that things just felt snappier. I haven't done any extensive testing on this yet, but even places that aren't impacted by the new Ajax functionality seemed to load quicker (portal home page, component loading, etc.).
  
• No more "Processing" image blinking when server trips happen :-) Now it's a very Web 2.0-ish looking spinner.
  

There's a whole lot more to write about, but overall first impressions are that this is a top notch release. If you're trying to avoid upgrading for some reason, then you'd better keep your users away from playing with this because the reality matches the hype.

Labels: 2009, PeopleTools, PT850, Upgrade

As a follow on to the last post on quick searching of Metalink3 / My Oracle Support, I wanted to add a page with links for the searches for PeopleTools patches. There have been a lot of serious security issues resolved in recent PeopleTools patches, so you need to stay on top of these.

As a reminder, you need to be logged in to Metalink3 / My Oracle Support with your Oracle/PeopleSoft account for these links to work. If you're not logged in, then you'll get prompted for your credentials.

PeopleTools Patches for PeopleTools 8.4x

• 8.50


• 8.49


• 8.48


• 8.47


• 8.46


• 8.45


• 8.44

PeopleTools Patches for PeopleTools 8.1x

• 8.22


• 8.21


• 8.20

Labels: 2009, PeopleTools, Support, Upgrade

Kudos to Oracle for making virtual machine templates available for the Oracle/Siebel applications.

Oracle is also making templates available for some of their lower level components as well (Oracle 11g, Enterprise Linux, Enterprise Manager), but the applications template are a bit of a milestone. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first instance of anyone making an enterprise application available via virtual machine this way.

Enterprise application delivery via virtual machine has the potential to flip some momentum back from the SaaS model (who generally have offered easy trials of their applications; just sign up and start using it). On premise software becoming simple enough to install and manage as to be competitive with SaaS is a much broader topic than I'll touch on in this post, but as Vinnie would tell you, there's lots of room for improvement with on-premise software.

Now all we need for PeopleSoft is for Oracle to start delivering new PeopleSoft releases and maintenance packs this way. I've been chewing on Jeff Robbins' ear on this topic for a little while, so this just provides some new fuel for me :-)

Update : Oracle is now making PeopleSoft applications available as well.

Labels: 2008, Oracle, Sysadmin, Upgrade, Virtualization

Steve Chan has a link to an iSeminar from Cliff Godwin with some real meat about details on how the technical upgrade to Fusion is planned to work.

The screenshot from the presentation on Steve's website nearly made me spit out my drink though. The actual title of the tool is called "Upgrade Assistant for Fusion". One of the bullet points says "Leveraging the best ideas from PeopleSoft Change Assistant".

Don't get me wrong; the PeopleSoft Upgrade Assistant (which became Change Assistant after it learned how to deal with maintenance as well as upgrades) is a whole heck of a lot better than some of the old manual processes in PeopleSoft upgrades, but most PeopleSoft customers aren't huge fans of Change Assistant. Change Assistant has been around for awhile now¹, so a lot of folks have forgotten how much of an improvement that it really was.

In fact, when we first started Grey Sparling, we considered doing product packaging as Change Assistant Change Packages (A "Change Package" is essentially just a .zip file that obeys Change Assistant's structural conventions about what files/directories are in it; similar to the Java .jar file format), but we got a lot of pushback. Customers told us that they didn't use Change Assistant for anything beyond just standard PeopleSoft maintenance, and therefore didn't have it up and running in demo and test environments, which is typically where people install our evaluation versions.

What Change Assistant Needs

What does Change Assistant really need, even before Fusion? Two things.

One is to beef up the logic for dealing with large volumes of patches and fixes. There's one bug in particular that rears it's head regularly where there will be pauses of several minutes between each file being copied. I've seen this in action at customer sites and it came up as a question during one of the OpenWorld sessions as well. It's not a slow file copy; each file gets copied quickly. It's more like some sort of "don't swamp the network" logic swung the pendulum too far on the conservative side. People really hate this.

The other is a bit more focus on using Change Assistant as part of the regular customization process. Application Designer actually has support for PeopleSoft customers to create their own Change Packages when doing custom development, but it's not well documented or supported. This forces customers to require other procedures in place for moving customizations around (since even to this day, there are almost zero PeopleSoft shops that don't have any customizations). Since customers end up dealing with this, learning (and understanding; see item 1) Change Assistant is viewed as an extra cost.

In keeping with that second item of better integration with customer development processes, we here at Grey Sparling will have some Change Assistant integration for our version control product. Since we're already dealing with all of the pieces of a Change Package anyways (App Designer projects, SQRs, Crystals, etc.), it makes sense to go ahead and add knowledge of what a Change Package is to the product so that you can version your PeopleSoft Change Packages just like anything else and have that more deeply integrated into your development processes.

1) The number one hit on Google for "Change Assistant" is a link to the original Change Assistant Flash demo from back in early 2004. If you watch the actual demo and pay close attention you can actually see one of the demo environments labeled APOGONOS.

Andrew "Pogs" Pogonoski was the original product manager for a bunch of the work that went on to actually have PeopleSoft be able to deal with all of the Customer Connection integration and hosting the Web Services that provide Change Assistant with it's data. All of the actual demo that you see in the movie is him working away.

It's safe to say that without Pogs' diligence at the large amount of cat herding involved that Change Assistant never would have gotten off of the ground.

Labels: 2008, Fusion, Sysadmin, Upgrade, VersionControl