Playtime with PeopleSoft 9.1
What do small children and PeopleSoft analysts have in common? Both have an overwhelming need to play. This analyst got a much appreciated opportunity to play with PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 (…and PeopleTools 8.50) courtesy of the folks at the CIRCUIT conference held last week (November 18-20) in Washington D.C.
A freely accessible standalone version of HCM9.1/8.50 (sans the web 2.0 connection to PeopleSoft Portal 9.1) was provided to all conference participants. Thank you to Brij Image and Titan Technology Partners for supporting the “playtime” environment. I did not have my arm twisted. No pound of flesh was requested. I simply sat down at the workstation and proceeded to take a closer look. Here are my impressions:
- The return of the breadcrumbs. In prior releases navigation was facilitated through the classic use of breadcrumb links. Now those links are back but in a modern and improved way. As you move your mouse over the links more and more of the navigation is revealed in a cascading waterfall of menu items.
- It keeps the ball in front of you. My baseball coach used to yell at me repeatedly. Keep the ball in front of you. Don’t lose sight of that ball. Now, a PeopleSoft 9.1 user can initiate searches (Now, what was that pesky jobcode value?) without ever losing sight of the page on which he or she is working. In fact, the type forward feature will automatically present a list of values from the which the user can chose, all without leaving the original page. This is a big improvement.
- Bite-sized features and functions The new and improved Succession Planning module shows off nicely PS 9.1’s new dashboard capabilities. The main Succession Management 360 degree page consists of an organizational chart in the left hand frame and sub-page “pagelets” in the right hand frame. Each of these bite-sized pagelets can be refreshed separately.
- Different but familiar. For all the significant differences in the new release the core pages of the HCM application look very much the same. Current users will recognize easily the content and purpose of just about all the delivered pages. Training needs will be minimal.
Please stay tuned for the next posting in my series – PeopleSoft 9.1: Practical Improvements.
PeopleSoft 9.1: Install PT8.50 get Web 2.0 for free
The new PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50 releases have officially blasted off. Perhaps, you have seen a demo presentation or even installed and examined PT8.50 at your site. If so, I hope you are as impressed as I am in the amount of work Oracle has invested in the new releases. The sortable, searchable cascading menus are quite nice but actually I find the Web 2.0collaborative workspaces and related content services the most compelling new features. If you would like to see these new Web 2.0 features in action Oracle provides an excellent online demo: PeopleSoft Workspace and PT8.50.
How can you bring these new Web 2.0 features to your organization? What are the licensing requirements? Oracle addresses these questions and little bit more in it’s “New Web 2.0” data sheet .
“Customers licensing the PeopleTools 8.50 release will also be granted a limited use license to the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 in order to take advantage of PeopleSoft’s Web 2.0/Collaborative functionality.”
Perchance, the first thing you may notice is that these new capabilities are not imbedded in the PeopleTools portion of your application. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 must be implemented in order to support wikis, blogs, related discussions, tags, related links, and other Web 2.0 functionality.
“You must install and configure a PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal database to host the data for these services. However a separate PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal license is not required…”
A key question is: What does it take to implement the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and connect it to your HCM, ELM, CRM or other PeopleSoft application? At a past client I had the opportunity to implement a portal database and create an HCM connection. In an upcoming post I will describe my experiences and attempt to relate those experiences to the new Enterprise Portal release.
Please stay tuned for the next posting in my series – PeopleSoft 9.1: Practical Improvements.
PeopleSoft – PeopleTools 8.50 Install & Upgrade
Gasparotto Nicolas, author of the On the PeopleSoft Road blog, installed PeopleTools 8.50 a few days after the official release. Significant details including pictures are imbedded in his posting “Peopletools 8.50 : a first look”.
Gasparotto made a choice that many others may also make. There is an installation step that calls for the creation of a new database. In his case there was not sufficient available disk space nor sufficient time to create an entirely new environment. Instead, an existing 9.0 environment was upgraded to PeopleTools 8.50. PeopleTools upgrade scripts are available on My Oracle Support under the title “Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 Upgrade.”
As time passes I will be gathering more first-hand experiences and posting the results. Each day I will be extensively searching the internet for new information. You can help. If you are installing, upgrading, testing or implementing a new Oracle PeopleSoft product please contact feel free to use this site to divulge your discoveries.