Hee-hee. Mike Duffield and Jeff Pulver pretending to be Mac and PC.

I thought Workday would be Ubuntu though...

Links courtesy of Vinnie Mirchandani and Jeff Nolan.

Although we've got a bunch of in-process blog entries, it's been much too long since our last posting (especially since our last set of posts weren't really tips or techniques). Although we plan to fix that in the coming days, I thought it might make sense to talk about what we've been up to on the business side of the house (most of which has come out of recent activity meeting with customers).

Excel Add-in Extensions - Part 1
Since we initially created our nVision add-in and began selling and marketing it, we've learned a lot about the PeopleSoft customer base and some of the things that drive evaluating and purchasing software. This deserves its own blog entry, so suffice to say that we've taken these learnings into account with new releases of this product.

The first thing we did was to extend the product to eliminate the need to package up code on the server. Yes, that means that this product has "NO CODE ON THE SERVER". We thought that was pretty funny, considering PeopleSoft's mantra. The benefit of keeping all code in the add-in is that the people evaluating the product can try it without having to change anything in their PeopleSoft environment.

Because we had to add code to manage the interaction between PeopleSoft and excel, a side benefit is that we've also been able to address many common issues customers have to face with the PeopleSoft version, such as proliferation the Ren Server windows (when excel isn't hosted in the browser) and locking of the excel menus (when the spreadsheet is hosted in the browser). This was version 2.0 of the product.

Excel Add-in Extensions - Part 2
At Collaborate, we also met with a bunch of PeopleSoft customers who wanted better formatting for their queries (even something as simple as column widths is problematic). Funny enough, the infrastructure we just developed for "no code on the server" also allows us to solve some problems with Query and add some pretty cool enhancements, such as:

• Query Context: desribing the query (record names, field names, SQL)
• fixing number formatting
• fixing column witdth
• other formatting, such as putting in company logos, etc.
• subtotalling
• automatically adding auto-filters
• drilling from queries to other queries or pages

Therefore, we've held off distributing code snippets from Collaborate to add many of these features to our add-in (version 3 of the product). We expect to release it before the end of next week (less than 1 month from the release the prior release), so look for an announcement on that (if you want to try it out as soon as it's available, feel free to contact us at info@greysparling.com ).

Desktop Single Signon Extensions - Part 1
This one also falls under the category of doing 2 things at once. As many blog readers know, we have a desktop single signon product that takes their windows credentials, determines what their PeopleSoft userid is, and automatically signs them into the web application. This product has been receiving rave reviews (even from folks we worked with at PeopleSoft who were our biggest critics... they know who they are ;-)

Anyway, we had just finished beta-testing a new release that adds support for the client/server tools. This means that customers who deploy the windows tools (such as PS/Query, PS/nVision and app designer) can take advantage of this as well. However, due to considerations with PeopleTools, this version only worked when the initial authentication was done through the app server (we could get into a long discussion as to why we decided to do this, but we'll leave that for another blog entry as well).

Desktop Single Signon Extensions - Part 2
Anyway, we had one customer who wanted to use this as a way to demonstrate to their auditors that they have appropriate safeguards against passwords etc (since the network userid and password are the only point of failure from that perspective). Unfortunately, one cannot perform upgrade actions (such as moving code from development to test) with a 3-tier connection.

Therefore, again, we found ourselves completing one release and quickly turning around and developing the next one (true 2-tier desktop single signon). We're finally ready to release that (but were pretty busy doing this to meet a customer's schedule).

PeopleSoft Reviews
Finally, we've been very busy taking the PeopleSoft Experts Corner to customers for quick, high-value consulting engagements. We call them PeopleSoft Reviews, and consist of 2 days onsite, with prep work and a follow-on findings report. It's a great value for folks who want guidance with respect to:

• Their most pressing PeopleSoft issues
• Improving how they develop, administer, and support their PeopleSoft application
• Planning their next set of development initiatives

We had a bunch of these leading up to Collaborate (focusing on things from Performance tuning, Development practices, Security practices, and Reporting practices). Much of the value to customers for this type of engagement is a formal "findings report, " which is essentially a roadmap of recommendations targeted to the individual customer. Because of this, we've been very busy writing them and packaging up code snippets that support our recommendations.

We're in the process of finalizing our schedule for this summer, so if you're interested in having us come onsite to provide recommendations for you, feel free to contact us at info@greysparling.com Here's a brochure that describes some of the things we can do for you.

Labels: 2007, Events, Products