Monday, December 15, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Helpful SAP Links
http://www.sapsecurityonline.com/ - good for basis, abap and HR folks. In general all other areas can also be read.
http://www.configuration-workgroup.com
http://www.easymarketplace.de/online-pdfs.php - although an older version, provides all sap documentation online.
http://solutionbrowser.erp.sap.fmpmedia.com - provides wonderful functionality details by each release.
http://www.sapfans.com - good forum and knowledge repository
http://www.erpgenie.com/sapfunc/index.htm - good knowledgebase on SAP functional and technical content.
http://www.sap-img.com/index.htm - outdated, but has some good knowledge content for beginners
Ofcourse - http://help.sap.com - should always be a bookmark for every SAP Consultant.
Send Anything to the Report Repository
| Send Anything to the Report Repository | |
| Written by Brent Martin | |
| Friday, 12 September 2008 | |
| Have you ever had a report that wasn't generated in PeopleSoft but you wanted to put it in the report repository so that your PeopleSoft users could see it with their other reports? Or have you ever wanted a single SQR to generate multiple reports, with different security for each? Well, in PeopleTools 8.4x or later it's as easy as using the delivered POSTRPT_DMN. POSTRPT_DMN is an app enging program that watches for XML files in a particular directory. If it finds one, it will parse the XML parameters to determine the directory where the report file(s) are stored, the report's security, title, and other important info. Then it'll use the PostReport PeopleCode class object to post the report to the report repository. So there are two steps to setting making this work: 1) Configuring the POSTRPT_DMN and set it to run on a regular basis; and 2) Stage your report on the process scheduler server and create the XML file in the directory that POSTRPT_DMN is watching. Here's how it's done: Configuring POSTRPT_DMNFirst, set up your process scheduler environment to specify which directory you want POSTRPT_DMN to monitor. Assuming you don't want to customize the process, you'll need to set the PS_FILEDIR environment variable to be the high level directory where you want to watch for XML files. If you like the default directory of $PS_HOME/appserv/prcs/ As delivered, POSTRPT_DMN looks for files under $PS_FILEDIR/reports. So make sure you create this directory, and plan to put your XML files there. Next, you'll want to set up Process Scheduler to run the POSTRPT_DMN program as a PSDAEMON process every 5 minutes. The steps are: 1. Go to PeopleTools, Process Scheduler, Daemon Group. Before the daemon process will be activated, you need to bounce the Process Scheduler. Now, every 5 minutes, a POSTRPT_DMN Daemon will wake up and look for new XML files. If it finds one, it’ll publish the files to the report repository based on the file’s parameters. Then it will delete the temporary directory you created, and replace the contents of your XML file with the word “Done”. If something goes wrong the files will remain unchanged and the daemon will try again in 5 minutes. If you're wondering if the daemon process is really working, you can go to Process Monitor on the Servers tab. Click Details next to the server that should be running it. Then click the Message Log. If it's working you should see heartbeat messages and POSTRPT_DMN messages. You can also look at the log file in the $PS_HOME/appserv/prcs/ Staging Report FilesNow let's give our new Daemon process something to do. First, create a directory to contain the reports that our XML control file will point to in the next step. Then put one or more reports into that directory. Obviously it doesn't matter how reports get into the directory, they could be created via SQR or FTP'd from another application. Then create an XML control file containing the necessary XML flags. An example is below. Technically the filename doesn’t matter just so it ends in .xml (lower case), but to make it logical I usually name it the same as the directory created in the previous step, except I add the xml extension. Put it in $PS_FILEDIR/reports
Make sure PRCSNAME is a valid process name defined in PeopleSoft. PRCSTYPE needs to be a valid process type as well. CONTENT_DESCR can be anything (not sure about special characters like single quotes or XML delimiters). Report Path should be the full path to the directory you created in the first step. DISTID can either be a valid user ID, or a valid role – specify which in DISTIDTYPE field. This will represent which users can see the report in Report Manager. Feel free to include as many AUTHORIZED_LIST tags as you need. Troubleshooting
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Monday, September 15, 2008
Peoplesoft Advisor Webcasts September 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Peoplesoft Advisor Webcasts September 2008
PSChange Impact Analyzer (PSCIA) is a powerful Tool that shows the far reaching effects that even one small change to a PeopleSoft object can have. PSCIA is designed to help developers and designers assess these effects before they make their changes, thereby providing everyone downstream - QA, Documentation, and most of all our Customers- with a better product experience.
Date: September 18, 16:00h CET, 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll
Working Effectively With Support
Learn how to save time and work effectively with Oracle PeopleSoft Support. Obtain details on leveraging your support investment and customer best practices. Understand support terminology, tools, and the escalation process.
Date: September 11, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll
Change Assistant
Change Assistant for PeopleSoft Enterprise can enable you to assemble and organize the steps necessary to apply patches and fixes for your PeopleTools maintenance updates. Change Assistant also helps automate the application of change packages to ensure your systems have the latest maintenance software, and can do so with dramatic improvements compared with manual processes.
Date: September 16, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll
Setup Manager
Setup Manager is a tool that helps you implement PeopleSoft applications by using a project and predefined tasks to produce a setup task list that is specific to your implementation project.
Date: September 17, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Why buy when you can rent?

Why buy when you can rent?
How Outsourcing Can Change Your Company For the Better
Why buy when you can rent? Peter Drucker gave his blessing in a 1995 interview when he predicted that "in 10 to 15 years organizations may be outsourcing all work that is 'support' rather than revenue producing. Drucker's prediction reached early fruition in the corporate information-technology (IT) function.
Don't think, however, that outsourcing solutions are limited to IT projects. Corporations gain tremendous benefit from outsourcing bth new and old ERP projects. Three months after implementation a SAP R/3 system at a major California corporation the company was "Confronted by unacceptable system performance and the loss of key IT personnel." They made the decision to outsource. The director of information technology said, "We probably would have saved quite a bit if we had outsourced right at the beginning."
The rationale offered by the providers like CrossWay Group is compelling. A company can solve all of the problems of running an application. Outsourcing your staffing needs targets high software ownership and maintenance costs; simplifies and/or eliminates the traditional difficulties in implementation; and avoids the problems of hiring and retaining IT staff to run the applications.
But potential exists beyond a mere cost-cutting measure. Outsourcing can be a strategic, competitive move. For example, outsourcing the ERP function offers a faster time to solution and removes a major distraction from a company's core competence. Access to these services also can help companies initiate electronic-business strategies in a shorter time frame with less capital expense.
The service already is up and running at Sebastiani Vineyards Inc., Sonoma, Calif. "By outsourcing our ERP technical environment through EDS and benefiting from the use of SAP R/3, we can direct our time and energy toward improving our core business processes," says Jeff Perkins, director of information services
The above info in an insert from an article that was written by John Teresko. To see the enitre article, click here.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Why Outsourcing Might Be Smart
08.20.08
Why Outsourcing a Might Be Smart
This headline, sent to me by a colleague, appeared in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Should You Outsource Your Company Blog?" Like most questions addressed in communications, marketing and other similar fields, the answer is -- Maybe. It depends.
1. If the company doesn't have a communications or a marketing department, maybe you should.
2. If the company doesn't have an executive spokesperson with the time, maybe you should.
3. If the company's Legal and/or HR departments need to approve outgoing comments, maybe you should, but only if those departments get out of the way. Otherwise, don't do a blog.
Or maybe not. And here are the arguments, as I understand them, against outsourcing the company blog. The point of blogging is:
1. Having an authentic voice.
2. Giving customers a personal connection to the company.
3. Ghostwriters do neither.
Well, pardon me, but who do you think writes executive speeches, letters from the CEO, and all those personal words to shareholders one finds in the Annual Report, and web site content, and most of the pithy executive quotes found in newspapers? Guys and gals such as me. I also write and manage several company blogs, who are my clients. As the period on the sentence, none of those things are done without interviewing executives and employees, studying the company and its customers, and, finally, getting approval from the company spokesperson for everything I write.
Would it be better if someone from the company wrote the blog? Maybe, maybe not. When work is outsourced, the consultants often have more influence over the executives and more freedom from message management. And if we're fired, we haven't lost our jobs, just a job. We don't have the pressure of saying what we think the company wants to hear, at least many of us don't. More important, key inhouse staff are focusing on their other jobs and responsibilities, while gaining the outsider points of view and expertise, which are then translated into blog posts.
So, there you have it. One consultant's take on outsourcing blogging. Not right. Not wrong. It just depends.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Big Update
Filed under: Performance, Tuning — Jonathan Lewis @ 8:34 pm UTC Jul 28,2008
A recent post on the OTN forum asked:
I was wondering is there any fast method for updating 8 million records out of 10 million table? For eg :
I am having a customer table of 10m records and columns are cust_id, cust_num and cust_name.
i need to update 8m records out of 10m customer table as follows.
update customer set cust_id=46 where cust_id=75;
The above statement will update 8m records. And cust_id is indexed.
If you read the replies to this post you will see that there are a number of variations on a theme that might be appropriate. Ultimately your final choice comes down to a trade-off between the size of the maintenance window, your desire to avoid complexity, and where your most serious bottlenecks are.
Option 1: Just update the column - probably very slow with lots of undo and redo, and with a massive impact on other processes because of their need to work hard to achieve read-consistency. But this is possibly the ONLY guaranteed correct update if you aren’t allowed to block access to the table for the duration. Given the particular nature of this update, you might want to rebuild (online) or coalesce the critical index afterwards
Option 2: Drop the index on cust_id, update the column, then rebuild the index. You need to be a little careful that you do rebuild the index; and any other sessions code may run into serious problems while the index is out of place - so this solution (like all those that follow) is really an “offline” solution. This is likely to save you a lot of undo and redo (from updating the index - an index update requires roughly double the resources of a table update) and could save you quite a lot of random reads and writes as the index is updated. This is quite clean and simple, and could be pretty quick - especially if you have enough resources to do things like parallel updates and multiple concurrent index rebuilds.
Option 3: Do a CTAS (create table as select) with a decode to change the value of the cust_id as you make the copy. This could be a messy job if the table is in the middle of a number of referential integrity constraints. You also have the expense of rebuilding all the indexes after you’ve created the table - but you could do everything nologging (so long as you remember to do a backup of the relevant tablespaces afterwards). After the CTAS, you have to run through a series of renames (and / or drops). So this needs some care. Even in the simplest case (i.e. no referential integrity to worry about) you have the added expense of all the tablescans to create new indexes - though the impact of this could, perhaps, be minimised if you can build all the indexes at the same time.
Option 4: Create an empty copy of the table with its indexes in place, and run an insert with the /*+ append */ hint, possibly with the nologging option. The benefit of this is that Oracle optimises the index update when using /*+ append */. Instead of updating the index row by row as the data arrives, it accumulates all the key entries, then when the table is loaded, sorts each set of index entries in turn and does a type of array update into the index. This adds to the demand for memory, but minimises undo, redo, random I/O and index leaf block splits. (Oracle does this without the /*+ append */ hint for bitmap indexes - it is only b-tree indexes that require you to use the hint to enable this optimisation). The hint also eliminates undo for the table; and nologging can be used to eliminate redo for the table - but again, if you load the table using nologging then you need to backup the tablespace afterwards. Finally, of course, you don’t have to scan the table once for each index that you rebuild - all the data for all the indexes is accumulated (in memory) as the table is populated.
So you’ve got lots of choices - and if you’ve got a full size development or test system, you can even test the different strategies to see which one works best for your environment, your data, and your set of indexes.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Oracle releases PeopleSoft Enterprise 9
Posted on ZDNet News: Jun 26, 2006 4:01:00 AM
Oracle on Monday announced the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, making good on its promise to continue supporting and enhancing PeopleSoft products.
PeopleSoft 9, a series of three application modules, marks one of Oracle's three major 2006 initiatives following its acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and a host of smaller software makers. Oracle aims to reassure PeopleSoft users who were concerned that the software giant would force them to switch to Oracle's own set of applications.
Oracle also announced the formation of a dedicated, centralized PeopleSoft team with the appointment of a PeopleSoft Enterprise general manager, Doris Wong. An 11-year PeopleSoft veteran who arrived at Oracle via the acquisition, Wong plans to lead the strategic direction and development of current and future PeopleSoft products.
"We will help PeopleSoft customers protect their investment in PeopleSoft," Wong said. "This applies not only to future releases but also in giving them a choice when they want to move to Fusion or stay with PeopleSoft."
Fusion is a major initiative by Oracle to integrate technology from the myriad software vendors the company has acquired--including PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel--and develop a new software applications suite.
PeopleSoft 9 is being introduced in phases. The release of Learning Management 9.0 marks the first phase. This module will focus on offering certification and regulatory compliance support.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management, the next module scheduled for release, is expected to debut later this summer or early fall. Financial and human capital management components are also set to be released by the end of the year.
"There are three themes with PeopleSoft release 9, and they'll be the same themes you'll see in future releases," Wong said.
PeopleSoft 9 can tie into Oracle's Fusion Middleware, providing a way for users to become more familiar with Fusion, once the applications suite begins to roll out in phases next year. Oracle's latest release of PeopleSoft software also aims to offer greater functionality than previously available and is expected reduce the cost of owning the software.
"PeopleSoft users can say, 'I will upgrade to the next release because I'm not ready to migrate to Fusion,'" Wong said. "When they move, it will be their decision."
Oracle, in a move to reduce the prospect of PeopleSoft software customers bolting to a rival, introduced its "Applications Unlimited" program, which calls for ongoing PeopleSoft product development rather than just support services.
Oracle is offering lifetime support for its current generation of products, but the software maker is also encouraging users to "retire" custom-built applications that may not work with its Fusion technology.
Oracle may also find that it is making it comfortable enough for PeopleSoft users to continue using their software rather than migrating to the Fusion suite.
Wong, however, noted that "as technology changes and evolves, companies look at their (own) technology and make changes accordingly."
Monday, July 7, 2008
ERP Experts Answer Your Top 3
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