Introduction

Here begins a very narrowly-focused blog describing one PeopleSoft administrator's use of PowerShell.

If you're here, you probably are looking for something quite specific, but I feel obliged to make some general introductory remarks. What is this? Who am I? What do I hope to accomplish here? Just what am I talking about, anyway?

PeopleSoft is a bit of an ambiguous term. It was the name of a company, and also the name of the product suite that they sold. The company is now owned by Oracle Corporation, which continues to sell, support, and develop the products. PeopleSoft made their bones back in the 1990s mostly with their HR/Payroll applications, and over the years added numerous other applications, like financials, distribution, manufacturing, and campus solutions. All of these are built on a proprietary development platform called PeopleTools, which started out as a client-server system. Several years ago PeopleTools migrated to a web-based design, known as PIA -- the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture. This blog will be mainly concerned with administration of the various servers that run a PeopleSoft application.

PowerShell is Microsoft's relatively new command-line shell and scripting language for Windows. It's been around since 2006. Windows has historically been a pointy-clicky sort of system, in stark contrast with Unix, which has a very long history of doing most things from the command line. As time goes on, there's a lot of blurring of that line, but the difference is still there. I work with both Windows and Unix, and I can't count the number of times I've said to myself "I wish Windows would do x" where x is some really simple Unix shell command. There's something to be said for the Windows GUI way of doing things -- you can often just point-and-click your way around and find what you're looking for. But what if you want that same thing to happen 100 times in a row, or every Monday at 4 a.m.? Command line to the rescue!

OK, now, who am I? I've been working with PeopleSoft since 1998. Since day one, I've used both Unix (specifically IBM's AIX) and Windows to run these applications. I've always had an Oracle database back-end running on Unix, and other associated servers on Windows. Back in the PS version 7.5 days, this included application servers and process schedulers (aka report servers), and since version 8, web servers as well.

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to PowerShell. I quite literally have not done a single useful thing with it yet. I've fiddled with it just long enough to see that it's very powerful, and if I can just learn it, it can become very useful in my daily work. I'm sure I'll often be doing things the hard way, so I encourage any PowerShell users out there to chime in with any advice you may have. And any PeopleSoft admins, as well -- if there's one thing I've learned in the last decade, it's that a decade of PeopleSoft admin experience isn't enough!