In Like A Lion Out Like A Panda?

March really presented another extremely interesting month of weather for us.  Running in shorts, Biking in heavy gear, and flipflops to toques, you just don’t know what to do.

The good news is we got lots of running in, a little biking, and a lot of great service work.  The most exciting of which was the Curl For Kids Big Brothers Big Sisters event this month.  As we mentioned last month The Smart Panda – OurOnline.company is the title sponsor for Big Brothers Big Sisters St Thomas Elgin this year, and this was the first event where we had our flyers!  Our curling team “Hockey Night in Panada” went out and tried our best, unfortunately we struggled to find our groove, but we had no problem having some fun!  In the end the event raised over 15,000 dollars for Big Brothers Big Sisters so they can run their amazing mentorship programs!  We are truly honoured to be able to partner with such a great organization.

The St Thomas Railway City Rotary Club and The Smart Panda were serving up some hot delicious food at Inn-Out-of-the-Cold this past month.  There is a huge need for support in our community as there are too many people that are struggling to get by, the last time we were out we served a record number of meals for the program.  I challenge everybody out there to just do something to help, it could be a simple gesture of cleaning out the closet and putting some unworn clothing in a bag and donating it, to spending some time helping out a program, to giving a couple of dollars instead of having another coffee, it all makes a difference.

Until Next Month……

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

April has arrived, did anybody see March?  Another crazy busy month in the books, we have more upgrades on the books, more systems being hosted and a surprising number of maintenance projects going.

I am absolutely amazed at how many organizations feel that they must go it alone to do maintenance and upgrade work.  The time wasted as they read through the endless documents, work through all the kinks, and reapply patches because of mistakes, is truly stunning.  So for example a PeopleSoft Upgrade Maintenance Cycle takes the Panda about 40 hours to implement on average, and I have seen clients take months to implement the same package. When asked why they don’t ask for help – the answer is consultants are expensive.

A couple of years ago, I was at the accountant’s office with all my spreadsheets that I had spent countless hours working on, proud of my accomplishment in my hands.  I handed over my papers, and instantly they found issues. So, they redid my books in a day. Instead of saying I was stupid, my accountant said – you are a computer consultant, we are accountants, going forward you do the consulting and we will do the accounting.  Yes their bill is expensive, but compared to me trying to do it, it’s comically inexpensive.

Are you focused on what you do well?

Windows Network Drive Mapping:

Every once and awhile you will be working away and with all the new protections in windows, you will have to run something as administrator. This is fine however, occassional that program you are running will require that you access a network drive. However, sometimes, you may not be able to access that network drive because of the privileges.  If the network drive is mapped as you the user, the administrator will not see the mapped drive that you have.

A nice and quick way to solve this problem is to map a network drive as the administrator.  To do this run the command line program (cmd) as administrator, which will give you the nice old fashion “DOS” window.  From here simply execute the command:

net use

This will list all the network drives that are mapped for the administrative user.  If you don’t see the drive you want add it:

net use {drive-letter} {unc-path}

so if you wanted the drive \\myserver\myshare to be mapped to the z: drive enter:

net use z: \\myserver\myshare

If you want to get fancy, you can add credentials and persistence with the following command:

net use {drive-letter} {unc-path} /user {user-name} {password} /P:Yes

Oracle: Password Policy

Well working with a new PeopleSoft Oracle Database, I went to create a new connect id user on the database with a relatively straight forward password and the database angry told me – NO. It said that the password policy required specific elements to be included with the password.  As most people know the system administrator password and connect id password associated with the Oracle Database need to be 8 characters long and should only contact alpha and numeric characters.  Seriously do not try to make it long or shorter and never put special characters in the password.  Over the years I have been mesmerized by the number of times this password has caused me grief.

So if there is a complex password policy set on the default profile you can turn it off by issuing the following command within sqlplus:

ALTER PROFILE "DEFAULT" LIMIT PASSWORD_VERIFY_FUNCTION NULL;

To determine what the profile is, you can issue the following statement:

select profile from DBA_USERS where username = '<username>';

Good To Know:

There are many elements in the profile that can cause issues one of them is the password expiry option.  Often not a good plan to have you main database account to stop functioning because of a password expiration, because Murphy’s Law says it will expire the day your DBA is on vacation and they will NOT pick the phone up that day.

Click here to go article:  Oracle Database User – Password Expiry

Entity Relationship Diagrams

PeopleSoft Enterprise uses entity-relationship models in the design of the various applications. Entity relations diagrams (ERD’s) capture the relationships between, details of, and constraints imposed on the data defined in these models. ERD’s provide a visual representation of the database scheme to aid customers in the understanding and customization to the PeopleSoft Enterprise application.  These diagrams use to fairly difficult to get but now you can get them relatively easily through MOS Document Id: 1051533.1.

The new ERD’s actually are integrated with the application and after applying them to the environment and doing a couple security items you will find a new menu item: ‘Data Models’.  The older models have a structure that allows you to select various areas and then it will open up a PDF document that shows you the relationship.

It should be noted that not every relationship is available via the delivered ERDs, but for the most part it is an excellent starting point for people new to PeopleSoft to get orientated to the PeopleSoft Application Data Structure.

A quick shot out to my friend Duncan at PeopleSoft Tipster for his post years ago on the same topic: PeopleSoft Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs)

ERDs are available for:

HCM:   9.2 Note: 1559851.1, 9.1 Note: 968850.1, 9.0 Note: 979328.1, 8.9 Note: 981781.1, 8.8 Note: 989720.1

ELM:    9.2 Note: 1566244.1, 9.1 Note: 989317.1, 9.0 Note: 989318.1, 8.8 Note: 1050817.1

CS:       9.0/8.9 Note: 1053084.1

CRM:   9.2 Note: 2072285.1, 9.1 Note: 986733.1, 9.0 Note: 978853.1, 8.9 Note: 981780.1

FMS:    9.2 Note: 1547382.1, 9.1 Note: 1074856.1, 9.0 Note: 961655.1, 8.9 Note: 979359.1, 8.8 Note: 989673.1

SCM/SRM:   9.2 Note: 1547384.1, 9.1  Note: 1074949.1, 9.0 Note: 975752.1, 8.9 Note: 981711.1, 8.8 Note: 989690.1

EPM:   9.1/9.0/8.9 Note: 985535.1

Portal:  9.1 Note:1061022.1, 8.9 Note: 988728.1