When I tell people I do web/social media marketing work, that basically I’m a full-on web nerd, they look at me funny.  Like, “Oh, how long have you been unemployed?” funny.  After we get past that initial awkwardness, they invariably ask two things: (1) Can social media help my business? And (2) What is your computer hardware/software setup like?

For this Friday post, I will tackle both questions.

For (1): yes.

For (2), I will answer in the format of The Setup’s interviews, because I can read that stuff all day and have found some excellent software from them.  Here goes.

What hardware are you using?

In the office, I use a super-gonzo Dell Precision laptop running Windows 7 Professional connected to three 24″ monitors.  Multiple monitors are the single best thing you can add to your setup next to a jetpack to improve productivity, and I would be far, far slower without them.  If you don’t have multiple monitors but can afford them/are allowed to by your IT team, you’re cheating yourself.

At home, I use a pretty banged-up early 2008 MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM that’s connected to a 2002 HP 2335 LCD monitor.  I use Apple’s wired keyboard because I have to have a number pad for data crunching, and I have a filthy — disgusting, really — Logitech wireless mouse whose model number I can’t remember because it was made before the dawn of language.

I have a first-gen iPad that I use for everything except longform content creation.  It’s awesome, if a bit heavy and sharp-edged.  Still, it has replaced a laptop for 90% of my tasks when my son isn’t stealing it to play Dungeon Raid.

Right next to my iPad you’ll almost always find my iPhone 4, which I take with me everywhere.  Literally, everywhere.  Well, except the shower and the gym, but aside from those caveats, everywhere.  I’m not sure if I own it or it owns me.  I suspect the latter.

And what software?

Being a web dork means having a romantic relationship with your browser, and I am an unrepentant Chrome devotee.  It runs on both my work and home laptops.

For longform writing, I get all weird: I will use Ommwriter, WriteRoom, BBEdit, Sublime Text or even the WordPress editor.  It depends on my current propensity to get distracted.  For a pure, clean blogging on the Mac, I couldn’t live without MarsEdit.  On Windows, Windows Live Writer 2011 is pretty solid, if a bit slow (thanks .NET!).

For mail, I am a gigantic Gmail nerd.  Gmail might be the best implementation of email in the world.  And by might I mean is.  At work, I have to tolerate Outlook, which is really starting to feel like something wet, angry and smelly that crawled onto my computer from the late 1990s.  Because it is.

For keeping the soul-crushing silence at bay and the voices in my head arguing amongst themselves instead of with me, I fire up iTunes or Rdio.  Lately, a lot has been Rdio.

For keeping track of stuff, I use Notational Velocity on my Mac and SimpleNote on the web and iPhone/iPad.  I would probably keel over dead within a half hour without Dropbox.  Whenever I have a thought that doesn’t fall apart like a soggy box after a few seconds of critique, it goes into one of these apps for later curation.

For photography, I use a Nikon D90, Canon S90, or my iPhone 4 (don’t laugh — it’s the most popular camera on Flickr).  For post work, I use iPhoto, Photoshop CS5 and occasionally Acorn, which is a terrific OSX application that does, for me, 90% of what I use Photoshop for.  On my iPhone, I am a huge Instagram evangelist, along with Camera+ and Photogene.

For social media stuff, I use Tweetdeck on Windows (still wish it was a web app though) and the official Twitter client on my Mac.  I have an entire monitor devoted to Facebook, blogs and Google+ sessions running in Chrome.

What would be your dream setup?

My MacBook Pro is getting long in the tooth, and the screen does a weird flicker thing against certain gray backgrounds, so I’ve been thinking about a replacement.  I’m torn between two masters: portability and power.  The idea of a new 27″ quad-core iMac is very appealing because of the screen real estate and power, but it’s a desktop and who buys those anymore?  On the other hand, I’m waiting for Apple to stop being so jerky and release the new MacBook Airs with the Sandy Bridge architecture so maybe that will be enough power and I can nerd out in lightweight, sealed, portable style.  (That option might actually steal time from the iPad.)

Oh, and I’d like software that does what I think, no questions asked.  That’d be cool.  Also, Google search box for my brain because, yeah, it’s come to that.

Shut up about your dumb nerd stuff.  Do you have any links?

Yes, yes I do.

This man won $3.4 million — and then went back to work as a janitor.  The world needs more people like this.

Here’s a site that provides the best introductory books for myriad topics.  Tons of browsing pleasure here, folks.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

—Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, in 1.0 Is The Loneliest Number

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More quotes here.

Great NYT feature column by Ashlee Vance about the battles Microsoft has to fight in the name of counter-piracy.

Donal Keating, a physicist who leads Microsoft’s forensics work, has turned the lab into an anti-piracy playpen full of microscopes and other equipment used to analyze software disks. Flat-screen monitors show data about counterfeit sales, and evidence bags almost overflow with nearly flawless Windows and Office fakes. Mr. Keating serves as the CD manufacturing whiz on what amounts to Microsoft’s version of the A-Team, clad in business-casual attire.

As John Gruber notes, so much of these efforts revolve around physical media: CDs, holographic stickers, DVDs.  I wonder how much of this is attributable to Microsoft’s enterprise footprint?  In my experience, enterprises want physical media, whereas most consumers are happy with an online install.

Ask yourself: when’s the last time you really used physical media to install software?

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More nerdery posts.

First, I’d like to thank all our readers for their steady readership.  Last month we had the biggest traffic month (in terms of unique visitors and pageviews) we’ve had since starting this blog back in 2008, and we’re flattered you keep coming back for more.  Hopefully, we can keep this pattern going.  We appreciate you coming along for the ride.

Here’s the past week summed up in tidy links, all of which were deemed interesting by yours truly and not at all objectively measured or ranked within any credible system whatsoever.

For the first time, the TSA meets resistance.

Microsoft changes strategy with Silverlight, acknowledging “…HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”  The days of  proprietary Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks are quickly coming to an end.  See also: Adobe’s own Flash to HTML5 conversion tool.

The #1 most crazy idea Steve Ballmer has ever heard.

MapCrunch: teleport instantly to a Google Street View location somewhere in the world.  More fascinating than I just made it sound.  Seriously.

Blekko: live slashtag search.  (Say what? you ask.  It’s all about a new way to tag information on the web.  Read about slashtags here.)

The NYTimes’s Christoph Niemann nails another one, this time very entertainingly showing us that daily human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.

The hand pause.  In the words of Jim Coudal: “What hands do whilst waiting for devices to catch up with their intent.”  Simple and accurate observation.

Finally, Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie pens a long (3,500 word) missive on the state of the company and the industry – as he departs for greener pastures.  Maybe it’s just me, but this writing is about as opaque as it gets and serves almost no one.  Perhaps this is/was part of Microsoft’s messaging problems to the consumer markets.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

One thing’s for sure: Oracle’s Larry Ellison is putting his money where his mouth is.  A few weeks ago, Ellison came out and publicly lambasted HP and its board for firing CEO Mark Hurd, calling the move a ‘grave mistake’.

Yesterday, Oracle announced its appointment of Mark Hurd as co-President, serving alongside President Safra Catz.

At HP, Hurd more than tripled profit by cutting costs and expanding beyond the company’s core business of computers and printers. He oversaw an acquisition spree of more than $20 billion, letting the company branch out into services, networking equipment and smartphones. Oracle, which also has bulked up through takeovers, would draw on Hurd’s background blending software and hardware as it expands into server sales.

Here comes Oracle’s for-real hardware push.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

Ben Worthen, reporting for the WSJ:

“The three things that are certain in life are death, taxes, and Oracle’s fourth quarter,” says Peter Goldmacher, an analyst at Cowen and Co.

This year was no exception. For the period ended May 31, Oracle said total revenue rose 39% from the year-earlier period to $9.51 billion. Software license revenue, a closely-watched metric that indicates new sales, climbed 14%, besting the company’s own forecast.

(Via Jim)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More PeopleSoft posts.

We have posted multiple posts on the new PeopleTools 8.5 release (here’s our most popular; here’s our shameless plug), in addition to several posts on the  value of Oracle OBIEE and BI apps.  However, today’s post will talk about PeopleTools 8.5: for customers who have both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE, there is some additional value to upgrading to PeopleTools 8.5.

With PeopleTools 8.5 there are some new integration capabilities which may offer significant value and bring your organization closer to the ideal state of embedding business intelligence into the business process.

From the PeopleTools 8.5 release notes:

OBIEE to PeopleSoft URL Integration

Developers and OBIEE administrators can enable navigation from OBIEE Answers or Dashboards to the PeopleSoft transaction page without hard coding the PeopleSoft URL during OBIEE setup and configuration. PeopleTools exposes a component API as a standard Web Service that can be consumed by OBIEE at design time. In addition, the web service can expose the key structure information when appended to the URL as a query string. Including the key information enables the system to identify a specific transaction row within a PeopleSoft table.

After successfully defining and embedding the action links to specific PeopleSoft table columns (DeptID and SETID), when the user clicks on the action links for a given row of data (DeptID = 10000 and SetID = SHARE) the bind parameters of the PeopleSoft Component URL are mapped to their actual runtime values. The user is then directly navigated to the PeopleSoft Department component, which displays transaction details specific to the row of data in the OBIEE Answers of Dashboards.

This is a wonderful feature allowing direct navigation from OBIEE to the original transaction details.

Another worthwhile bit:

OBIEE Report Integration

PeopleTools enables you to integrate OBIEE reports with PeopleSoft applications. To enable OBIEE report integration, PeopleTools includes the Analytics servlet, an Oracle BI Presentation service plug-in and part of Oracle BI Web Component. This servlet communicates to the Oracle BI Presentation server and acts as a client which forwards the request made from PeopleSoft to the listening Oracle BI Presentation service. The OBIEE server provides the HTML markup to be displayed in its entirety in the PeopleSoft user interface.

After configuring and deploying the Analytics servlet, you must define the analytics server in the PeopleSoft application. Once the PeopleSoft application recognizes the analytics server, you can retrieve, access, and view OBIEE report details as your security permits. In this implementation, you must configure and store the OBIEE administrator credentials in the PeopleSoft application. The PeopleSoft application uses these credentials to login to the OBIEE server, impersonate a real user, and establish a session.

You can configure OBIEE reports as pagelets, embedded pagelets, and as transaction pages. As part of OBIEE integration, Pagelet Wizard supports the use of OBIEE reports as the data source for any of the supported output types. Embeddable pagelets can be used to create Related Content services for the OBIEE reports. Using the related content framework, these OBIEE report type of related content services can be used with application transaction pages in a context sensitive manner. The context is provided by the page fields on the transactional page, and is used to render OBIEE reports, based on these page field values.

Another terrific feature that allows users to execute OBIEE reports based upon the context of the transaction page they are on. This allows BI to become part of the business transaction process and not an afterthought. These new features should really open up BI capabilities for those customers owning both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE.

Questions about this?  Simply email me.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

• It’s All About the ROI: the Value of Oracle BI Apps for PeopleSoft (Part III)
• The Value of Oracle BI Apps For PeopleSoft (Part II)
• The Value of Oracle BI Apps For PeopleSoft
• The Value of (Real) Integration Between Business Intelligence and MS Office
• Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering: Digging Deeper
• Why Excel Is Not an Enterprise BI Solution
• Art Meets Science: Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering
• Living Together: Oracle BI and PeopleSoft
• Back to basics: Why choose an enterprise Business Intelligence tool, anyway?
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part I
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part II
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part I)
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part II)

Related whitepapers (PDF):

• MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

• MiPro Consulting: Oracle BI Services
• MiPro Consulting: SAP Business Objects Services
• MiPro Consulting: Resources

Quick update: Oracle has now officially released PeopleSoft Portal 9.1. This is a highly-anticipated release due to the app’s adoption of Web 2.0 features and tight integration into the core PeopleSoft products.  In addition, PeopleSoft Portal 9.1 includes collaborative workspaces and very strong (and very smart) tagging capabilities. I previously blogged about some of the details of Enterprise Portal 9.1, and you can check that story out here if you missed it the first time.

Questions?  Let us know in the comments.

Something I find many folks don’t know, at least on one level or another: most of today’s business intelligence (BI) solutions have been designed and built with integration into Microsoft Office in mind. Arguably, Excel is the main medium to which most BI information is exported (or in some cases, it can be the BI tool unto itself), so it’s logical that these integrations are essential to any strategic BI platform. Really, no longer is a full integration with Microsoft Office a differentiator – it should be required functionality.

However, even though MS Office integration is now fairly prevalent in most of the main BI solutions, this technology still tends not to be taken advantage of in the ways it was intended. There is much unrealized potential related to this integration and most of it is the result of a lack of training or education.

MS Office integration is bisynchronous, meaning you can initiate BI from the appropriate Office product or you can export from a dedicated BI tool to an Office product. In too many cases (and this truly saddens the hardcore BI wonk in me), the two-way integration for end users simply means there is a nice little button in their Office task bar that they can click to get access to the BI solution and run a report.  Put another way, instead of starting in BI and exporting to Excel, the user starts in Office and accesses BI via a basic GUI integration. In this scenario there really isn’t much difference between the two and the advantages of this integration are essentially lost; it’s good for marketing feature bullet lists and not much else.

But there’s so much more to be had.  Let’s take a moment and explore a basic example that would harness more depth of this type of integration.

Let’s say you have to generate monthly presentations for your management team and you use the same PowerPoint template every month. However, each month your data changes and you have to update the numbers within your PPT.  This means you have to run your reports, manipulate them and get the data you need, each and every month.   You then must manually update the PPT with the new monthly data.

Depending on how extensive the reports are and how many slides you have and how much manipulation you have to conduct, this could take a significant number of hours to accomplish – all for something that’s pretty rote and programmatic.  Not only that, but while you’re doing such a task, you just know that this sort of work is exactly what integration and automation were designed to handle.

Well, what if your PPT were automatically integrated with your relevant BI reports that could, in turn, instantly populate the month’s data for your PPT? In this scenario, since only the data changes (not the content or format), you could simply use the integration with MS Office and automatically refresh the BI reports, saving you significant hours of time in preparing your presentation. Additionally, since this avoids the “manual” part of updating, you reduce the potential to introduce errors. The presentation stays the same, you refresh your important reports from your BI tool and the integration with Office does the rest.  Easy.

Is this the most powerful feature on Earth?  Not even close.  But it is often overlooked and downright underutilized.  Typically, once I show clients how they can trim a considerable chunk of time from their workflow with this integration, they wonder how they ever lived without it.

As with many things in enterprise technology, the gods live in the details.  From simplicity comes power.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

• Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering: Digging Deeper
• Why Excel Is Not an Enterprise BI Solution
• Art Meets Science: Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering
• Living Together: Oracle BI and PeopleSoft
• Back to basics: Why choose an enterprise Business Intelligence tool, anyway?
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part I
• Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part II
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part I)
• Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part II)

Related whitepapers (PDF):

• MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

• MiPro Consulting: Oracle BI Services
• MiPro Consulting: SAP Business Objects Services
• MiPro Consulting: Resources

Now that Oracle has announced the general availability of PeopleSoft HRMS 9.1, I would like to take some time over my next three blog posts to discuss some of the mainline enhancements that are relevant to PeopleSoft shops.  This is a widely-anticipated release, and there’s some powerful stuff in the 9.1 version.

Before we get too deep, I would like to outline the organization of the HCM product line so that PeopleSoft customers are aware of the various products that make up the suite of products.  Simply stated, Oracle has grouped the products into three core suites:

• Foundation Applications – Core HCM, Global Extensions and Workforce Management
• Service Delivery Applications – Self Service, Help Desk and HR Portal
• Strategic Applications – Integrated Talent Management

Let us begin by identifying the point products that make up each suite.

Foundation Applications – Core HCM, Global Extensions and Workforce Management

Is comprised of:

• Human Resources
• Payroll for North America
• Global Payroll Core
• Global Extensions for HR and Payroll
• Absence Management
• Time and Labor
• Pension Administration
• Oracle Workforce Scheduling

Service Delivery Applications – Self Service, Help Desk and HR Portal

Is comprised of:

• Employee and Manager Self Service
• PeopleSoft Portal 9.1 – Enabling Employee 2.0
• PeopleSoft HelpDesk for HR
• PeopleSoft Workforce Communications 9.1

Strategic Applications – Integrated Talent Management

Is comprised of:

• Profile Manager
• Recruiting Solutions
• ePerformance
• Enterprise Learning Management (ELM)
• Plan Careers
• Plan Successions
• eCompensation
• eCompensation Manager Desktop

This Week’s Focus: Enhancements That HCM 9.1 Provides for the Foundation Applications

At a high level, the primary focus of HCM 9.1 as it relates to the Foundation Applications has been on improving the applications to handle today’s realities by ensuring that PeopleSoft HCM meets the needs of organizations and their global footprints. With HCM 9.1, Oracle has increased the number of countries that are supported out of the box and built a single system of record for all employee information.  It’s literally a unified foundation, and it’s been requested by many existing PeopleSoft customers.

Some key enhancements are identified below.

Payroll for North America

The following items have been improved/added to the Payroll for North America technology:

• Additional Contract Pay Options
• Increased Retro-Pay flexibility
• Real-time Budget Checking
• Improved Chartfield Integration

Military Rank Change

Increasing the capabilities originally introduced in PeopleSoft 9.0, Oracle has again delivered a key piece of functionality in the area of managing service members of any military organization. Some key changes include improvements to templates and the workflows to manage rank changes intelligently.

Smart Hires

This core HR functionality expands on the Smart Hires process introduced in HR 9.0.  The details of this expansion are out-of-scope for this blog post, but suffice to say that the overall fit-and-finish of this functionality has been considerably polished.

Global HR Enhancements

Increased support for various countries:

• HR for China
• HR for the UK
• Global Payroll for Argentina
• Global Payroll for China
• Global Payroll for France
• Global Payroll for Thailand

Integration with Oracle Workforce Scheduling (OWS)

As many of this blog’s readers might know, Oracle Workforce Scheduling is a solution for forecasting the demand for labor and scheduling to meet customer service and cost objectives. OWS can be run as a standalone application, but has been integrated into the PeopleSoft HR applications to enable organizations to make better use of each application’s strengths and leverage worldwide best practices.

This post is meant to be a high-level overview of how Oracle has arranged the 9.1 applications into strategic product suites.  In my next two posts, we’ll ratchet up the focus on particular parts of the 9.1 HRMS release.  In the meantime, if you’d like more information on the improvements introduced in 9.1, please contact me and I can walk you through them.  We get many, many requests about PeopleSoft 9.1, and now that we’re seeing products go GA, I expect inquiries to ramp up as organizations consider upgrades or new implementations.

Of course, you may also access the content using Oracle’s “My Oracle Support” to download the release notes by searching for the “HCM 9.1 Documentation Home Page” using their search tool .

Next up: part 2 of this series, which will be focused on the improvements to the HCM Service Delivery Applications.  Hang around.

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Previously by David Brunet:

Oracle’s New Continuous Delivery Model for Campus Solutions
A New Settlement Method for PeopleSoft Payables
PeopleTools 8.5 Now Available
What Drives Clients to PeopleSoft Real Estate Management (REM)
Quantifying the Value of Integration With PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Real Life Example
Quick Look: PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft ‘Edge of the Enterprise’ Applications: eSupplier Connection & eSettlements
PeopleSoft Financials: Source-to-Settle 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft IT Asset Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Real Estate Management: A Deeper Look
An Introduction to PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management
Sneak Peek: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1
PeopleTools 8.5: A Look Inside

Related whitepapers (PDF):

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits

Related web content:

MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft Services
MiPro Consulting: Resources