Oracle SES Installation & Configuration

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is a product integrated with PeopleSoft uses PeopleSoft Search Framework to integrate and communicate with PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft Application Version 9.2 onwards, configuring the PeopleSoft Search Framework and Oracle SES is required as Verity is no longer supported from PeopleSoft application versions 9.2.

Prerequisites  - Configure Loopback Adaptor & Disable IPv6:

To check if the Microsoft Loopback Adapter is installed on your computer:  Open a command window and enter - ipconfig /all

If the loopback adapter is installed, its settings are displayed as below.

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

        Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :

        Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Loopback Adapter

        Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 02-00-4C-4F-4F-50

        Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No

        IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.123.123

        Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0

        Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 

By default, the IPv6 protocol is enabled on Windows Server 2008. Under some circumstances, this may lead to the failure in starting up the WebLogic Server middle tier. Hence it is suggested to disable certain IPv6 components, except the IPv6 loopback interface, on Windows Server 2008.

SES Installation:

Right-click setup.exe in the ses_11_1_2_2_0_windows64 folder of the extracted files, and then click Run as administrator. The Installation Details page appears as below.

Enter a Search Server Name, Password, Port (Default port: 7777), Administrative password (Password needs to be 8 char with 1 letter and 1 number, and no special chars)

The installer will now install Web logic Server as the web server hosting SES and Oracle Database 11g EE to store the search indexes. After the installer finishes you will be presented with the summary screen containing three URL’s.

• SES end user search page (the one that looks like Google)
• SES admin console
• Web logic admin console

At the completion of the install you get a window that displays some URL’s copy them off to keep.To get URL àIn cmd window, navigate to SES_HOME, give ‘searchctl.bat status’ command.

Web Logic Administration Console URL:  http://AMAZONA-K7L3KNU:7777/console

SES Configuration

Start the SES admin console and login with the password you supplied during SES installation http://AMAZONA-K7L3KNU:7777/search/admin/index.jsp

Username: eqsys (default)                          Password: < Administrative password>

Choose tab Global Settings and then click on Federation Trusted Entities.

This Entity Name and password are configured for inbound connections to SES and will be configured on the PeopleSoft side.

Enter an Entity name and provide a password. This does not need to be the password you supplied during installation of SES, but note this password; you will need to supply it in PeopleSoft later on.

The Identity Plug-in and Authentication Attribute options are left blank for this configuration.

Click Add and go back on the Global Settings tab, choose the link Identity Management Setup.

Select Plug-in PeopleSoft from the list and click on the Activate button.

The plug-in that you activate is responsible for all authentication and validation activity in Oracle SES.

On the next screen enter the PeopleSoft Integration Broker endpoint and userid and password of the default local node.

The User ID and Password here is a PeopleSoft user that has the ‘Search Framework Administrator’ role or permissions lists assigned.

Click Finish and go back to the Global Setting tab choose the link Query Configuration.

Change the timeout settings as shown above from the default values.

Add AUTO_CHARSET_DETECTION to $ORACLE_HOME/search/data/config/crawler.dat to enable Character set auto detection.  This is important to properly handle Unicode files and pages that may be indexed.  So I added the following lines to the end of the crawler.dat file

# enable automatic character set detection
AUTO_CHARSET_DETECTION

IB setup for Search Framework

1. You need to have setup your Integration Gateway and load the connectors
2. You should define your Gateway Default App Server and PeopleSoft Nodes in the Gateway Setup properties.
3. On the Advanced Properties Page for the Gateway Setup you should define a secureFileKeystorePasswd
4. You Local Node should be active and when if you ping it, it should come back with Success
5. PUBSUB processes should be running on your application server domain
6. Verify that your Service Configuration is correct.

• Navigate to PeopleTools ->  Integration Broker ->  Configuration ->  Service Configuration
• Click Setup Target Locations

• Confirm the Web Services Target Location references the correct URL for your system.

7.             Configure Content RI and Portal URI text specified on the portal tab for the default Local Node you are working with. 

This is required, and you may get an error building your search index without it. 

You should also verify that the Service Operations needed for SES integration exist in your system. ADMINSERVICE and ORACLESEARCHSERVICE should both exist as Services.

  

Setting up PeopleSoft for Integration with SES

First thing you need to do, is to assign the Search Framework roles (Search Administrator, Search Developer, Search Server) to the user that is assigned to the default locale node.

Verify that required permission lists (PTPT3100, PTPT3200, and PTPT3300) are present on role PeopleSoft User.

Now navigate to Main menu –> PeopleTools –> Search FrameWork –> Administration –> Search Instance and create a Search Instance.

• Enter the SES server and port
• Enter the SES admin password you supplied during installation of SES (eqsys/welcome1)
• Enter the Federation Trusted Entity and the password you created earlier in SES (PS/PS)
• Enter the call back URL (endpoint of Integration Broker) and the userid and password of the default locale node

Verifying PeopleSoft and SES Connectivity

Now navigate to Main menu –> PeopleTools –> Search FrameWork –> Utilities –> Diagnostics

Click Step 1: Ping Test.  This should also work if your previous tests worked.  Once the Ping Test comes back it should make Step 2: Deploy an active link. You should be able to continue through to Step 4: Search and everything should work.

Create & Deploy Search Indexes

Now you have successfully completed the installation and configuration of the integration between SES and PeopleSoft.  You now have to ‘create search collections in PeopleSoft ‘and ‘feed these collections to SES’.  PeopleSoft Search Framework uses PSQuery and Connected Query as search collections.

Some search collections have already been supplied with the Feature Pack (Eg: HCM 9.1 FP2). If not you will have to create a Query and create a Search Index with the Query as input and then choose which Query fields should be indexed as keywords.

Search definitions are created and maintained in PeopleSoft.   Once the definition is deployed, we run the Application Engine PTSF_GENFEED via the Schedule Search Index page.  This AE will create a special SES feed in PeopleSoft and schedule the SES crawler to crawl the feed.

Navigate to Main menu –> PeopleTools –> Search FrameWork –> Administration –> Deploy/Delete Object.  Scroll to the bottom of the list of Search Definitions and select PTPORTALREGISTRY and click deploy.  Once successfully deployed the Deploy Status column will say Deployed. Next we build the index data (the feed) and tell SES to crawl the data.  In order to do this we run the Schedule Search Index job as previously mentioned.

Navigate to PeopleTools –> Search Framework –> Administration –> Schedule Search Index. Create a run control for each search index you want to publish to SES. Select PTPORTALREGISTRY as the search definition and select Full index for the Indexing type.  If you use the lookup it will only return deployed search definitions.  I left Language Option on Base Language as I only have one language available.  Click Run.

You can then schedule this and check process monitor to verify it completed successfully. This is to keep SES and PeopleSoft in sync. Once the job is completed, login to SES and go to the Sources tab of the Home tab.  You should see your search source, and then click the schedules tab; you should see that the index build was schedule for a one time run.

In the 9.2 applications certain functions won’t work until you’ve deployed the Search Definition and built the Index. It will throw an error like below screenshot.

Enable Global Search & Keyword Component Search

Now you have seeded SES with PeopleSoft data. You now need to enable the search feature in PeopleSoft. This can be done on two places.

To enable Global Search navigate to Main menu –> PeopleTools –> Portal –> General Settings and check Display global search in header. This will enable the embedded search in the portal banner. Make sure users have search indexes assigned through permission lists; otherwise they will not be able to run searches. 

This is a new tab in the Permission lists page in People Tools 8.52.

To enable Keyword search on Component Search pages, open the search index by navigating to PeopleTools –> Search FrameWork –> Designer –> Search Definition and on the last tab select the components where you want to add the Keyword search. This will change your search page with a new tab enabling Keyword Search.

I have replicated this post @ http://www.citagus.com/citagus/blog/oracle-ses-installation-configuration/

Custom Message Setup on PeopleSoft Signon Page

Whenever a maintenance activity is scheduled, we use to publish message in the sign on page to intimate the users rather than sending mails. I remember every time an activity is scheduled, the login page HTML file (signin.html) residing in web server needs to be edited, which requires a minimal knowledge of HTML scripting. Moreover web server bounce is required to get the changes reflected in front end.

Guys using People tools 8.51 and later don’t need to worry about this, as there is a new feature with tools release 8.51 onwards where we have an option to configure display message via PIA itself and it does not require any code changes. In a single stretch you can create list of messages and you can set the time frame to display that specific message. 

Navigate to People Tools > Utilities > Administration > Shutdown Msg (PT 8.53),

Click on the plus button to create new message and View/Edit hyper link to edit the existing message. 

Once you click the plus button, you will find a space to post your message and also you can find an option to specify when and how long the message should be displayed. 

I have replicated this post @ http://www.citagus.com/citagus/blog/custom-message-setup-on-peoplesoft-signon-page/