Refreshing from Production

When refreshing from production, there are a few caveats that need to be considered. This is my attempt to create a checklist of areas within your PeopleSoft system you may want to review after a refresh from production into your test, development and other environments.

Integrations.

If you have any messaging to any 3rd party systems, will these messages still be sent? You may need to disable or point your nodes/routings to an appropriate non-production environment. You'll also need to change your gateway settings.

3rd Party Systems.

Does your system have any interfaces to 3rd party systems? What would happen if these were available in your non-production environments?

Communications.

Is it possible to send email messages from your non-production system? Will those go to real customers within your system? Better safe than sorry!

Security.

Roles and permissions will probably need to be changed for certain users (analysts, developers, testers, DBAs), while you might want to take security away from other users. For example, do you really want self-service users to be able to access a non-production system?

Authentication.

Do you want to continue using directory authentication in your non-production environments? Should this be turned off? What about two-tier access through tools such as Application Designer and Data Mover - can they be accessed or will users need to reset their PeopleSoft passwords?

Passwords.

You might want to reset system passwords (PeopleSoft accounts, database accounts, system accounts) so that users of the non-production system can do more without knowing production passwords. Or perhaps they need to know some of these passwords?

Database Links.

Do you have any database links? Do these need to be changed in non-production systems?

Web Profile.

You might want to change your timeout and cache settings.

Reporting Nodes.

You'll need to change your process scheduler reporting nodes to point to the appropriate reporting server for your non-production environment.

Scheduled Jobs.

Do you have any scheduled jobset definitions or recurrences running? Should they continue to run in your non-production environment?

Process Requests.

Do you want to keep existing process requests OR should you clear them out?

Tracing.

Are there any trace settings you want to turn on? Do you want to give your users more access to perform traces? Where will the output of these traces go?