Quest Experience Week—Quest’s annual, virtual conference—was another great chance for our community to hear from the Oracle PeopleSoft team about new developments within PeopleSoft. David Bain, Senior Director of Product Strategy for PeopleTools, gave an update on PeopleTools and presented the roadmap for upcoming features and developments.

In his presentation, David discussed PeopleTools Developer which is a simple configuration to create a custom WorkCenter using Navigation Collections, benefits of configuration not customization, user interface form factor, PeopleSoft Deployment Architecture and more. Also discussed was 8.56 and some of the initiatives PeopleSoft has been working on. Here are some highlights of things we learned during David’s presentation as well as some upcoming developments for the PeopleTools roadmap.

Highlights

PeopleTools has improved the user experience. There is a new navigation paradigm that optimizes the user’s interaction with the application. It now configures change rather than customize so the users, managers, analysts and IT all have input. PeopleTools is responsive UI that allows Mobile First design and development. Another key update is Classic and Fluid coexistence throughout.

The Classic Plus initiative means we are going to have a coexistence between Fluid and our Classic for a very long time. The migration from Classic to Classic Plus can be done gradually over time. The initiative is taking an existing Classic page and applying a new style sheet and back-end code and making that Classic page look like a Fluid page. It doesn’t behave like a Fluid page, but it has the same spacing, style, color, grid, shading, etc. Through update Images, there is an option in the system to turn on or off the display of Classic or Classic Plus. In order for a Classic component to render itself as Classic Plus, the Global Setting has to be on AND the Component Setting has to be on.

Also discussed is PeopleSoft’s move to Elasticsearch. This is the only search engine supported in 8.56 and it uses the existing PeopleSoft Search Framework. Elasticsearch is installed with PeopleTools DPKs and supported in PeopleTools 8.55.11.

Another large portion of the presentation focused on the PeopleSoft Cloud Manager. This will help you do the Lift and Shift, it will subscribe to updates and the lifecycle in the Cloud has been optimized. The PeopleSoft Cloud Manager Image 05 has made it easier to maintain Cloud Manager. It has better DBCS Support, restful service API, support for PeopleTools 8.56, automated PeopleTools 8.55 to 8.56 upgrades, real-time Environment status and applies PeopleTools patch at provision time.

PeopleTools features in 8.56 include PUM Image, Deployment Packages, Enterprise Components, Cloud Manager and Interaction HUB.

Highlights of 8.56 include:

• Small Form Factor Personalization
• Fluid Discussions
  • Lightweight simple collaboration
  • Context of process
• Contextual Dashboards – the content that is being displayed on the dashboard can be updated based upon something that happens on the dashboard.
• Updated Tile Wizard – making it easier to build Tiles
• Unified Navigation in PeopleTools – moved the Dashboard into PeopleTools, so Unified Navigation can be set up and configured without actually having to install the Interaction Hub
• Classic Plus
• Elasticsearch is the only supported search engine
• Event Mapping Improvement
  • Added new events, sequences and a search feature
  • Improved PUM Analytics
  • Change package features
    • Merge multiple installs on a single machine, optimized data mover scripts
  • PTF Enhancements

Roadmap

• User Interface
• Configuration over customization
  • More usability features
  • Unification of Classic Plus and Fluid
• Selective Adoption
  • Isolate customization
  • Simplify the change process
  • Better identify dependencies
• PeopleSoft in the Cloud
  • More options on the Cloud
  • Eliminations of VCDs
  • Optimize Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Thanks to David for his presentation during Quest Experience Week! If you want to learn more about the PeopleTools updates and roadmap, check out the recording and slide deck of David’s presentation. You can also join the PeopleSoft Strategy Team at our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18, where they will be presenting on the overall PeopleSoft roadmap as well as pillars within the PeopleSoft product.