Understanding PeopleSoft Change Assistant

Oracle’s PeopleSoft Change Assistant is a standalone tool, provided with PeopleSoft PeopleTools, that enables you to assemble and organize the steps necessary to apply patches and fixes for maintenance updates as well as perform PeopleSoft upgrades. You use different modes of Change Assistant to carry out maintenance both for PeopleSoft applications using the PeopleSoft Update Manager, and those using the classic patching method.

To take advantage of all of the Change Assistant features, you must install on a Microsoft Windows-based operating system. On Linux, you can use a command-line version of Change Assistant, and run in Update Manager mode only.

When you run the setup script for the PeopleTools Client DPK, you can choose to install Change Assistant as part of the client installation. If you need to install, upgrade, or remove Change Assistant independently of the PeopleTools Client DPK deployment, use the instructions in this chapter.

See "Deploying the PeopleTools Client DPK."

For the current PeopleSoft PeopleTools release, the Change Assistant installation includes the following features:

You can run the setup.bat script located in PS_HOME\setup\PsCA to install, update, or remove Change Assistant.

The PS_HOME/setup/PsCA directory includes setup.bat and a sample response file, resp_file.txt. The PS_HOME/setup/PsCA folder is available in both the PeopleTools Client DPK deployment and PeopleTools DPK server deployments.

Note:

The PS_HOME\setup\PsCA directory includes scripts and files that are reserved for use by the software. You can ignore these files, including silentInstall.bat and CA-silentInstall-response-file.txt.
You must run from PS_HOME/setup/PsCA.

Do not copy the PsCA folder alone to another location and try to install.
You can specify the installation location on the command line, in response to the script prompts, or in a text file.

If you do not supply the installation location, the script prompts you for the necessary information. To upgrade or remove an existing installation, you run the script with no options, and the script prompts you for the necessary information.
You can install multiple instances of Change Assistant from the current release on one physical machine.

Note:

Multiple instances of Change Assistant can run in parallel on the same machine. However, when configuring Change Assistant, for example to set up update or upgrade jobs, you cannot run multiple instances against the same target database. That is, you cannot specify the same target database on different Change Assistant instances.

See PeopleTools: Change Assistant and Update Manager, “Running Multiple Instances of Change Assistant."
You must remove installations of Change Assistant from PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.55 or earlier before installing from the current release. Change Assistant from PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.63 cannot coexist with that from earlier releases.
You must install each Change Assistant instance in a separate installation location.
You can remove or upgrade each Change Assistant instance separately.
When you remove an installation instance, you have the option to save the existing configuration information in a group of files gathered in a zip archive. You can configure Change Assistant at a later time by importing the zip file.

For more information on using Change Assistant for updates and for software upgrades, see the PeopleSoft product documentation.