Tuesday, October 21, 2014

PeopleTools 8.54 Features: Dynamic Alert Sliding Windows

One of my first memories in the PeopleSoft world was from by training bootcamp when I joined PeopleSoft. The instructor was showing us the Process Monitor functionality in PeopleSoft 7.5, where the button used to refresh the list of scheduled processes was represented by fetching dog named Sparky shown to the right of this paragraph.

It actually surprised me that an application button had a name, but that was the PeopleSoft style. Anyway, the poor dog did not last too much. In year 2000, with the introduction of PeopleSoft 8, our beloved Sparky was replaced by a boring Refresh button.

PeopleTools 8.54 has pushed this functionality to the next generation, making it potentially redundant. One of the new features in this release is the ability to show the status of the process within the same page were it is scheduled. This is a major usability improvement, as the users do not need to navigate to Process Monitor to check the status of the process instance. True, in previous PeopleTools versions there was also the possibility of running the process with output to Window, which using REN Server would achieve a similar result. The main drawback of REN Server is that it opened a new page/tab even before the process was finished, making the navigation more complicated.

The new functionality is called Dynamic Alert Sliding Windows, which is still more boring than Sparky, but what matters is the functionality, not the name. These notifications are enabled in the Process Scheduler System Settings page:


In this page, the administrator chooses which Status are going to be displayed to the user when running a process. As you see, the functionality is quite easy to setup and a significant step forward in usability of batch process scheduling.

Note (Feb 6th 2015): There is a great blog post by Srinivas Reddy demonstrating this functionality from an user perspective. Here is the link: http://srinivasreddy18.blogspot.it/2015/02/peopletools-854-dynamic-alert-sliding.html




10 comments:

Unknown said...

Hopefully this is easier to setup than PSREN (which can be a pain in a heavily firewalled environment).

Unknown said...

It seems much easier. I'm preparing a post on how it works (this and new Push Notification Framework), but it seems simpler than REN Server. :)

Unknown said...

And most importantly, more flexible, as you can define ad-hoc notifications.

Srinivas Reddy said...

Hi Javier,

your blog is awesome and I posted a little video on working of Dynamic Alert Sliding Window and the configuration is pretty simple and straightforward.

http://srinivasreddy18.blogspot.com/2015/02/peopletools-854-dynamic-alert-sliding.html

Thanks
Srinivas

Unknown said...

Thanks Srinivas.

Your video demonstration is great. I will add it to my blog post as a link.

Prasanna said...

Hi Javier,
Nice post. I configured the notification windows settings in system settings and tried kicking a process but was unable to see the notifications. Also had the process scheduler bounced but was not able to find notifications. Is there something else we need to take care of?

Unknown said...

Hi Prasanna

Sorry for the delay. I've been through a lot of work...
There's a good document on My Oracle Support about some considerations to be taken into account regarding configuration to enable Dynamic Alert Sliding Windows in PeopleTools 8.54: 1953469.1. Please let me know if you still have issues, but following that document we were able to enable them in a couple of customers already.

Thanks

Anonymous said...

Que tal buenas tardes ! , para activar esas notificaciones o lo tengo que hacer para cada proceso

Unknown said...

buenas , la ruta de las notificaciones es la misma para 9.2, y si tengo que activarlos para cada proceso?

Unknown said...

Hola!

No, se activa a nivel general. Estas notificaciones están asociadas a la versión de PeopleTools, no la de aplicación. Dentro de 9.2 de aplicación, podrías tener 8.53, 8.54, 8.55 y 8.56. Si tienes 8.53, esta funcionalidad no está disponible. En caso contrario, es posible que la funcionalidad cambia un poco según la versión. Lo que yo describo en este artículo es la de 8.54.

Gracias