Friday, October 31, 2008

How to avoid passwords expiring in PeopleSoft

One of the more often customer requirements regarding security is to implement password expiration. PeopleSoft provides this functionality using the Password Controls component under:

PeopleTools > Security > Password Configuration > Password Controls

This component provides the alternative to enable or disable password expiration controls for all users. Now, what happens if we want a certain user's password to never expire?

There are plenty of situations where we might want this to happen, for instance:
  • The password for the user set in the Process Scheduler or Application Server configuration should not expire or otherwise the system may not work.
  • Same happens with if a user is set as a Guest in a Web Profile.
  • Also, you may want to disable password expiration for PTWEBSERVER, the user set by default to let the Web Server recover Web Profiles from PeopleSoft environment.
Unfortunately, PeopleSoft does not provide the ability of disabling password expiration for a given user. Good news are that it is quite easy to do by setting the last password change date to a future date using the following SQL sentence:

update PSOPRDEFN
set LASTPSWDCHANGE = '2050-01-01'
where OPRID in ('SOLICITANTE', 'PS', 'PTWEBSERVER')