Anonymous Guest access
Caching Settings
We will explore how we made use and configured these options in our 8.53 environment. The two requirements that drove the need to modify the web profile where showing public content on IH, and Caching Settings for System Consistency.
Guest Access
It's important to note that you can have multiple web profiles associated with an IH database. Its the web server that uses it, so if you have multiple web servers, each can have a different web profile loaded.
One push for Guest Access, was our HR recruitment module. You need to be authenticated into Peoplesoft to view the job postings, but you would have no affiliation with the system. Via web profiles, it is possible to have you authenticated as a guest then display components within PeopleSoft.
We used IH and a separate Web Server to do this, thus limiting the impact on the HCM system. You will need to ask your security team to design a GUEST account with the lowest possible level of permissions. If they have IB and Dynamic User Profile security (see Security Architecture ), they would just need to create this account in HCM, and it would broadcast to IH. The GUEST account would need to exist in both places.
Once the account has been created, try signing into it, and ensure it is working correctly. Ensure via IH you can browse the HR Recruitment component. Check Understanding the Portal Registry for help creating content references to remote content providers.
The final step would be to configure the web profile via IH:
- Main Menu - PeopleTools - Web Profile
- (if you are unsure which web server is using which web profile, you can check Web Profile History, and browse through them)
- Click Web Profile Configuration, and select the one being used.
- Click the Security Tab
- Check Allow Public Access, and set the User ID and Password Created and tested above.
There was one caveat to implementing this: if you are only are using one web profile, you might run into Workflow issues: whereby when a user clicks a worklist embedded in an email. the system might try to sign them into the system with the GUEST ID you created. They would get an error, as the GUEST ID doesn't have permission to the worklist item. When we experienced this issue, PeopleSoft didn't have a very good solution to this: our workaround was to keep the PROD web profile for authenticated access, and to create separate web profiles and Web Servers for each public access requirement: this way we could keep deep linking workflow (without having to modify any URLs / people code) and have public access.
Caching Settings
On our particular Ptools installation: 8.53.06, we noticed there were some inconsistencies with with paglets loading properly. Sometimes they would just spin, without loading any content. Sometimes if you logged in as one user, then logged in as another, the browser would still load the previous user's view.
I found the best way to ensure they loaded correctly in IH was to disable most caching in the Web Profile:
- Via Main Menu - Web Profile - Web Profile Configuration
- Load up your current web profile
- Click the Caching Tab
- We configured the attributes as follows:
- Changes to these settings require a web server reboot.
A main concern about this change would be an impact to performance. Having these set this way didn't have an impact on performance in our environment. The biggest hamper on performance, is having a lot of paglets load on your home screen. We found the benefit of having the system consistently load outweighing any minimal performance gains of caching these settings.
