Rich Manalang has a good post up about adding Live Search into the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. He's even got a little Flash movie of how it works and the code required to make it work. Very nice!

We probably need to do some Flash movies of some of the stuff that we write about here.

Labels: PeopleSoft

An article on Slashdot points to this news.com.au article in which Bill Gates is quoted as saying that the IRS has special computers for his tax returns because of the large numbers involved.

This reminded me of a story that I heard from the folks who worked in Microsoft's payroll department. Many moons ago Microsoft used PeopleSoft Payroll . They had opened a case with PeopleSoft saying that there was a bug in the tax handling logic for generating W-2 tax forms.

At the time (I don't know if this has changed now), the IRS only accepted up to 8 figures for reported income. So if you made $100 million in one year, you had to file more than one W-2 form with the IRS. PeopleSoft Payroll had no provision for generating multiple W-2 forms for one employee, so Microsoft had to "hire" Bill Gates into the system multiple times (Bill Gates, Bill Gates 2, Bill Gates 3, etc.) In their opinion, this was a bug in PeopleSoft Payroll and should be fixed. PeopleSoft (of course) viewed this as an enhancement request.

It's a moot point now since Microsoft tossed PeopleSoft out when they standardized on SAP for everything ERP. I wonder when they're going to get their ERP acquisitions to the point where they can eat their own dogfood? Probably still a little way off :-)

It's interesting to see the Slashdot comments though. A good chunk of them focused on how much money can be represented in a single 32bit number (my favorite comment "a geek knows that he's made it when he has a 64 bit fortune"). The technical precision is certainly a factor, although in this case it had more to do with business issues than technology.

Labels: PeopleSoft