PeopleSoft And Business Objects

general discussion
1

[Cindy moved this from Off-topic to General Discussion]

Hi,

I wondered how many of us out there are working with Business Objects
and PeopleSoft. I have seen alot of postings on this site that make me think there is quite a few of us out there as we seem to have the same problems, for example ‘How To Create The Infamous Employee Movements Report’ which I have just done and how to handle effective dating and effective dating date range reporting, plus many other issues.

I think it would be worthwhile for all of us out there using BO and Psoft to be aware of who is also using Psoft, so we can exchange ideas / solutions etc to the specific psoft data issues we come across .

Anyway its only idea. I could be wrong there might not be many of us BO / Psoft people if so I will shut up and not mention it again :yesnod:

Rich :uk: (BOB member since 2002-10-04)

2

no experience but very interested as we are converting to Peoplesoft. Deployment date is July 2004. And the ERP team has not the first table . . . :roll_eyes:

thank you for starting this post and I hope you get a lot of responses. If you find other relevant posts, you could put the links on this one to consolidate things.

scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)

3

I worked at AT&T for about 3 years. We were the IT support for the HR systems and used PeopleSoft with BO. We didn’t do any reporting off the PeopleSoft transactional tables. We didn’t even report off copies of them in the DW. All our reporting tables had the data denormalized. We had movement tables in the DW that just held movements with the before and after info.

Maybe one of my AT&T friends will chime in. :yesnod:

Cindy Clayton :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-11)

4

Have done some work on Peoplesoft.

I agree there are a few tricks you have to know such as effective dates.

We are currently working with one of our partners for a Solution on Peoplesoft.

The way it works: The product will read the Peoplesoft configuration and build some useful and consistent “Reporting Views”.

If you upgrade or change anything to your Configuration just run the product again and it will rebuild the “views” for you.

The views are by the way business specific to answer some specific business questions. You can then use them with BO your ETL or any other tool.

Let you know once we have done more testing.

Klaus

ClaireB :de: (BOB member since 2002-08-09)

5

Klaus,

that sounds great. I started doing BO and Peoplesoft about 7 months ago and when I started the role my predessor had made quite a hash job of the universes and everyone had ad-hoc reporting access :wah: .

I have the following universes,

  1. Global Report (covers most standard Psoft data and allows the users
    to histroical report upto any date).

  2. Global Range Reporting (as above but allows historical reporting in
    a user defined date range).

  3. Benefits Report (covers employee benefits)

  4. Compensation Detail / Summary : (allows historical comp, bonus
    reporting)

  5. Training : (as sounds)

  6. Recruitment tracking

Of the reporting products Peoplesoft seems to be most highly intergrated with Crystal Reports, does anyone have experience of this ?

Rich :uk: (BOB member since 2002-10-04)

6

At my last job they used Reportscripts (Bo 4.1) to create dialogue boxes to prompt the user to select an “effective date” strategy (current, current+historical,future, or all). These were called by Universe row restrictions. These scripts would append the appropriate where clause to the sql limiting the effective date as per the users request.
My job (the fun part) was to convert these scripts to a VBA macro add-in to work with their BO v5 upgrade.

Gort (BOB member since 2002-12-30)

7

Rich,

Don’t know about the Crystal Part. But whatever the “integrated solution” is when you upgrade your application. People tend to forget that there are reports running of that Database.

One customer we recently talked said we had a successful upgrade of our ERP Solution it only took 150 day’s to migrate all the reports.

Well I don’t know how they measure success but with the solution I talked about. You upgrade the application, run the script, and all the "reporting tables are rebuilt to still show you the same relevant information even if you changed the data structure or business rules. Estimate upgrade and testing 3 day’s.

Thinks of it as a “universe on steroids” gets the business logic from the application and builds the infrastructure for you.

But Peoplesoft is not that bad one you know the tricks that go with it.

ClaireB :de: (BOB member since 2002-08-09)

8

Has anyone used the rapid deployment templates (RDT) for PeopleSoft?
I have documentation for version 7.5 - but I believe we are PS 8.
I was told that these RDTs were provided by BO at no charge. How good is the RDT and how much tweaking can I expect to do? And of course, we are doing PS in DB2 instead of Oracle, so I get to put that spin on everything.

scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)

9

So Scott! I’ll trade you a bit of info on extranet Zabo for my comments on the PeopleSoft RDT :mrsbob: :wink: . Seriously, I used it QUITE a while back and we talked about it a bit at the time. I found issues with the RDTs that may well have been resolved by now…

Cindy Clayton :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-11)

10

Scott,

RDT as OK as long as you have the same system configuration as the site on which was developped the RDT.

Assume that it will be a got example to tell you where to look for information.

From experience this it the way they are most usefull. But start from a clean universe and include from the RDT what you need.

You will have to convert some of the functions as well but nothing dramatic.

ClaireB :de: (BOB member since 2002-08-09)

11

I found the RDT quite good but only as something to reference and use for ideas. In the end I thought it was better to start my universes from scratch and pick bits from the RDTs.

One RDT I would avoid is the Peoplesoft Benefits RDT, in terms of my user reporting requirements this RDT was so far off the mark it was funny.

I think to summarise the RDTs provide a starting point, if you need something up in a couple of hours use them, however for a long term solution you are better off creating your own universes and using the RDTs as reference material.

Rich :uk: (BOB member since 2002-10-04)

12

thanks guys - as I expected, the RDTs are useful as a guide for setting up a peoplesoft universe. I guess they don’t come on the BO CD anymore, least not version 5. Trying to find it on the BO website - and man, they sure do have a slow website.

scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)

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They are on the tech support site under Products.

Steve Krandel :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

14

duh! tech support, not BO site - got it!
and all that surfing on the BO sites taught me to use IE 6 and not Netscape 4.7 which “hangs” often and I have to kill netscape.exe in task manager or it will run that process forever

scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)

15

I built all of the RDT for Peoplesoft. The are several options for handling the effective date. You could make use of a dynamic prompt for varied filtering. You can create conditions for each type of filter, or a hybrid.

OLTP (BOB member since 2002-09-20)

16

Did you really build the RDT or are you pulling my leg :rotf:

Interestingly I have been informed by Business Objects themselves that they are actually as we speak implementing Peoplesoft throughout the organisation, I wonder if the knowledge the gain doing this will mean more Peoplesoft RDTs.

At the moment Peoplesoft seems to be most intergrated with Crystal Reports over any other reporting products, may be with BO using Peoplesoft themselves now this will change.

Im actually having to attend a week long course next week on ‘Crystal Reports’ for Peoplesoft great ! :wah:

Rich :uk: (BOB member since 2002-10-04)

17

Yes, I built all the RDTs.

OLTP (BOB member since 2002-09-20)

18

Embrace the chance to learn something new :yesnod:

Andreas :de: (BOB member since 2002-06-20)

19

I will vouch for him. I can say 100% certainty that he did write the RDTs. In fact, he wrote RDTs for Oracle, Lawson, Peoplesoft, SAP, Siebel,… He wrote all of them.

Steve Krandel :us: (BOB member since 2002-06-25)

20

and the RDT Guy may just have opened himself up for a bunch of RDT questions - :wink:

and I finally realized why he calls himself THE RDT GUY
and not THERD T GUY as I was reading - :rotf:

been playing with PS 8, thank you
we don’t have a database yet but the ERP folks sure did love seeing the schemas and all. I created pdf for them to see.

scott copeland (BOB member since 2002-08-15)