Sunday, April 17, 2011

Random Idea: Using Wikis for project documentation

Disclaimer: The idea being detailed below is not new and I am sure is in practice in a number of organizations, but documenting it as I am yet to come across companies that have used this.

I strongly feel that it would be great to adopt wikis as the primary medium of project documentation, especially when it comes to support/maintenance projects. The features and convenience offered by a wiki product is much more and superior to the conventional practice of using word processing documents as the documentation media and a content management site like sharepoint as the central documentation repository. The major advantages of using a wiki are:
1. Easier access (or discovery) to documentation as a wiki is web based and no need for users to remember folder navigations and file names.
2. Easier editing and maintenance.
3. Pages can be logically linked to each other - this is the biggest advantage that I see. The major drawback I experience with traditional documentation is that one document does not link to another and it doesn't provide a continuous reading experience. In a wiki, linking of interconnected documents/pages is possible and this will lead to a far improved user experience.
4. Tagging would be possible in wikis.
5. Wikis are much 'lighter' than traditional documents and would take up much lesser storage space.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Q&A: Creating default payable time for exception time reporters

Q: "I have some question on the setup of the exception time handling. Our req is to default the hours for all salaried employees and only report their vacation and sick days. We used the WorkGroup and setup a schedule and defaulted the hours. And ran the time admin process..Is there something we are missing. can you please throw some light"

A: "You are missing a rule in your rule program to default all hours to a particular TRC. When you setup Exception time reporters and assign an Elapsed schedule to them (or to the workgroup), Time Admin will generate the hours, but there will be no TRC attached to it. Unless there is a TRC for the rows in IPT1, Time Admin will not generate payable time.
Use the delivered Default Hours rule template to create a rule to default all hours without a TRC to a particular TRC and add this rule to the rule program of the workgroup"

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

DMS script to export T&L rules

 Time and Labor rules can be moved from one environment to the other using DMS scripts. Oracle support site has a complete DMS script listed for the same purpose. For quick reference I am documenting here the list of scripts that I commonly run to migrate rules. Do remember to append necessary 'WHERE' conditions for each statement.

EXPORT TL_RULE_DEFN  
EXPORT TL_RULE_STEPS
EXPORT TL_RULE_CONDS
EXPORT TL_TMPLT_RULE
EXPORT TL_TMPLT_RULE2 
EXPORT TL_SQL_BINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_INSERT
EXPORT TL_SQL_JOIN
EXPORT TL_SQL_JOINFLDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_OBJECT
EXPORT TL_SQL_SEL_FLDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_TABLES
EXPORT TL_SQL_UPDATE
EXPORT TL_SQL_UPDBINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_WHERE
EXPORT TL_SQL_WHRBINDS
EXPORT TL_SQL_EXPRESSN
EXPORT TL_RULE_PGM
EXPORT TL_RULE_PGM_DTL

Note: In version 9.1 PeopleSoft has come up with a utility to export and import rules between environments. Using that will eliminate the need to remember and manually execute the above mentioned DMS scripts