Since the Oracle acquisition, the most noticeable change in PeopleTools – to business users anyway – has been the sign-in page.  But that’s changing with the coming release of PeopleTools 8.5 in 2009.  According to Paco Aubrejuan, power is shifting to end users who want to do their jobs their own way.  Business owners want application functionality to be complete, not just for the business process but for how their industry implements that business process.  And IT managers want help addressing internal stakeholders’ needs more quickly and at a lower cost.

To meet the End User’s Web 2.0 needs, PeopleTools 8.5 is delivering an Ajax-enabled experience that is backward compatible to Applications as old as 8.4.  The look and feel is much different, but still very intuitive.  The most striking difference is that the menu navigation on the left is gone, transformed to more of a “windows task bar” style of a menu across the top of the page.  It was removed to free up screen space that Tools 8.5 and the 9.1 apps are hungry for.  But navigating the menu has never been easier.  Ajax-enabled in this case means menus expand quickly, allowing you to navigate the various folders intuitively.  And actually navigating through multiple folders to a page doesn’t have to be done so much now that the Favorites folder includes a “Recently Used” feature.

Remember back when PeopleSoft was a Windows app and search dialog boxes actually popped open a new “modal” window? That way you could see the context of the original page while you did your lookup.  Well, PeopleTools 8.5 has more of a modal window look-and-feel without popping up a whole new browser window.  And that new modal window has type ahead functionality which will certainly save time.

Grids are very cool now.  Sorry, you still can’t copy/paste Excel data into them like you could back when PeopleTools was a Windows program, but they’re certainly getting an upgrade.  You can zoom them, resize them, drag, drop and lock columns.  And the best part is that PeopleTools remembers your preferences as a Personalization so that the next time you go back to a grid you’ll see it the way you want.

There’s a new frame at the bottom of the screen when you’re in a component.  This frame can contain just about anything you can hit via a URL.  There’s very nice for mashups between other Oracle BI apploicatins to deliver Analytics at the point of transactions, or for non-Oracle applications.  The sky’s the limit.

And one of my favorites, RSS is now backed into PeopleTools.  So you can get your Worklist in an RSS Feed in Outlook, your browser, your iPhone – wherever it’s most convenient for you to work.  But RSS doesn’t stop at the worklist:  Just about any PeopleSoft data source including queries is RSS enabled.
Speaking of working where it’s most convenient for you – The PeopleSoft development team has put together an Expense Reporting application for the iPhone that has strong interaction with PeopleTools 8.5.  And for you accountants that like to spend most of your time in Excel, the Hyperion add-in now allows you to extract data to Excel, manipulate it, and (if I understood correctly) load data back to PeopleSoft.  If you know and love nVision, don’t worry it’s not going anywhere.  I didn’t hear any news about enhancements for it though.

The humble PeopleSoft Query is getting an upgrade in 8.5 as well.  There’s now a mechanism called “Connected Query” that allows you to connect 2 or more queries in parent/child relationships.  These connected queries are schedulable, and can provide XML output which can be fed to XML Publisher for flexible reporting.

And now Queries are accessible through a web service.  BI Publisher is a Fusion application that can take advantage of queries as a service, but I’ll bet it’ll go further in the enterprise than that.  For instance, if you have a query that lists new hires, you could expose it as a web service and all of those provisioning applications could discover the query, fields and prompts and be pulling their own new hire list in no time.  Writing SQR’s to flat files is so 90’s.

And the 9.1 applications will take advantage of the new PeopleTools 8.5 platform.  Enterprise Portal 9.1 will have Wiki’s, blogs, tagging, rss feeds, etc.  Collaborative Workspaces are certainly a Portal feature, but if you don’t own Enterprise Portal you can add them to your ERP Application of choice for a “nominal” fee.

Also promised were Change Assistant Performance Improvements, metalink integration (sorry, customer connection will be disappearing), transparent data encryption & data vault integration, credit card encryption, JNDI support for LDAP, and many other things.

The PeopleTools roadmap presentation is at http://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/ if you’d like to know the details.

Comments (4)

... : Roy : http://www.pswisdom.com Thanks so much for your take on the new PeopleTools. I have liked so far what I've seen of 8.5 and 9.1. Today Oracle seems to be allocating sufficient resources in the PS product line to make noticeable progress. How long do you think Oracle will keep making this investment? Find Roy at: PS wisdom: http://www.pswisdom.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/royjoslin October 07, 2008 RE: Sufficient resources : Brent Martin Sufficient for what? To continue attracting talent? To keep PeopleSoft competitive? Sorry, my attitude is pretty poor when it comes to the amount of investment Oracle is making in the PS product, at least compared to how much customers are paying in support and where the product would likely be if it were still competing with Oracle and SAP. How long has it been since PeopleTools got anything new besides behind-the-scenes hooks into Fusion Middleware products? 2004 maybe? What new features will the 9.1 release have to make it worth the wait? I think Oracle will keep their mediocre release schedule as part of Applications Unlimited until enough PeopleSoft customers upgrade to a different product line and they can do it without the user groups screaming. Gazing into my crystal ball, I'd say that's still 7-8 years away. But I predict EBS functionality (even the HR product) will be as good or superior to PeopleSoft's well before then. How that'll affect new PeopleSoft sales & implementations in the 4-6 year timeframe is anybody's guess. October 08, 2008 BI reporting in 8.50? : Garry : http://www.peoplesoftfaq.com I heard there will be BI reporting on PeopleSoft pages. What is the architecture on this reporting piece? June 01, 2009 RE: BI Reporting in 8.50 : Brent Martin You're thinking about the new "Related Content" framework. Here's what I pulled out of the RVP (Release Value Proposition) document: The related content framework is a new feature that enables customers to provide combine of PeopleSoft transaction pages with collaborative, analytical and informational content. A related content frame can appear at the bottom of any PeopleSoft application page. It will allow you to easily display additional content to assist users in completing a business transaction without leaving PeopleSoft applications. Some important aspects of Related Content: * Configurable by functional business users (does not require development or IT intervention) * Displays related content relevant to the specific transactional page * Available in a tools-only upgrade, works with earlier application versions * Can display information from other areas within the PeopleSoft application or from external systems. These are examples of the use of related content: * Graphical analytics from external sources (for example, a data warehouse) can be displayed. * Integrating to PeopleSoft Collaborative Portal Services allows collaboration for the specific business process. The same services appear (and can be used) in both the Related Content frame and Portal Collaborative Workspaces. BTW, there's a great PeopleTools 8.50 demo at http://download-llnw.oracle.com/otndocs/peoplesoft/peopletools/peoplesoft_workspace_and_pt850.swf June 02, 2009

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