In October 2023, the Quest PeopleSoft community joined together for RECONNECT Dive Deep – an annual virtual conference designed to provide users with in-depth PeopleSoft content, including a PeopleTools update.

If you missed the 2023 conference and are considering attending in 2024, this overview of the PeopleTools Update & Roadmap session shared by Sasank Vemana, Director of PeopleTools Strategy at Oracle, will give you a taste of what to expect at RECONNECT Dive Deep 2024.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’ll learn if you attend the event.

To begin the presentation, Sasank shared the foundation of PeopleSoft product development: Every new feature must either increase value, reduce costs, or accomplish both at once.

For 2023, PeopleSoft investments that increased value included:

• Modern User Interface
• Search Framework
• Insights
• Guided Learning
• Conversation Interfaces

New tools that reduced costs included:

• PUM Automation
• Automatic Merge
• Always Patched PUM
• PeopleSoft on Autonomous database
• PeopleSoft DPKs

And investment areas that both increased value and reduced costs included:

• PeopleSoft on OCI
• Cloud Manager
• Isolating Customization
• Data Science Integration
• Real-time Indexing

Sasank explained how these PeopleSoft updates can improve a user’s system.

PeopleSoft UX

For PeopleSoft UX, Sasank shared that users should look forward to improvements in Redwood design, search, and insights.

Redwood is Oracle’s next generation design system that delivers state-of-the-art, consistent, consumer-grade applications. Redwood is focused on the entire user experience, not just the user interface.

PeopleTools 8.60 – Redwood and UI Improvements

The following PeopleTools 8.60 UI improvements were discussed in the session:

• Quick Access Bar always available
• Contextual header
• Always available global search
• New Redwood theme
• Contextual actions and more

Redwood Branding Themes

Additionally, the Redwood branding themes feature the following:

• Allows color scheme changes using variables in stylesheets
• Works on all supported browsers
• Easier to create and manage Themes
• CSS variables are optional
• Variables utilized in Fluid and Classic
• Minimizes maintenance impact

Advancing the Fluid UX Journey

For the Fluid UX journey, Sasank explained that users are now equipped to streamline navigation (homepages, tiles, related content and actions, search), harmonize fluid and classic (Classic Plus, WorkCenters, activity guides, and nav collections), and prioritize implementation (self-service, deploy delivered fluid, review classic de-support list, and build your own).

Improving the Search Experience

In the roadmap, Sasank also shared that the Search Experience has been elevated via efficient navigation with intuitive type ahead and weighted suggestions based on common searches made within your own environment. This is especially helpful for new employees who will learn from their coworkers’ searches. More advancements include real-time indexing and configurable search with PeopleTools 8.60.

To see configurable search in action, scroll to timestamp 27:40 of this demo.

Value of PeopleSoft Insights

Additionally, in the PeopleTools Update Sasank elaborated on the value of PeopleSoft Insights, which has now delivered over 400 visualizations, giving users an intuitive way to find and explore data. Users can click into the data to review specific transactions. It’s a low cost, high value feature within the search framework.

Roadmap for PeopleSoft Insights

In the future, PeopleSoft Insights will be embedded in WorkCenters and Fluid Pages so you can pass contextual data from those pages.

Search Engine Update

Additionally, Sasank detailed in the session that due to licensing changes introduced by Elastic, Elasticsearch 7.10.0 and Kibana 7.10.0 will be the last version delivered by Oracle PeopleSoft. PeopleTools will move to OpenSearch (OS) and OpenSearch Dashboards (OSD). (OS and OSD were forked from Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and Kibana 7.10.2 in 2021 and now operate as an Apache 2.0 licensed and separate open-source project.) This is available starting with PeopleTools 8.60.07 and 8.59.21 patches.

Operationally, this is effectively the same code line, and you won’t need to do any re-indexing. This is purely an administrative patching exercise.

Search Engine Success Story

Sasank also shared that improving your search engine is easy and valuable. He shared what Community Healthcare System had to say about their move to OpenSearch:

“With the transition from Kibana to OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards, the change was seamless and transparent for our end users. The absence of index rebuilding saved us valuable time.”

Extending PeopleSoft Applications

PeopleSoft provides out-of-the-box integration applications with a conversational interface, Oracle Guided Learning, and Oracle Data Science.

The conversational interface is called PeopleSoft Intelligent Chat Assistant from Oracle (PICASO), which you will need to tune to your own environment.

PICASO

PICASO is one assistant for all of PeopleSoft.  It has a unified conversational experience and allows users to access all skills from almost any page.  It is role-based, cluster-enabled and has multiple skills.

PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Architecture

The PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration also includes:

• Web Client UI
• Build-in authorization with OAuth support
• Configuration pages for easy setup
• Server libraries for easy access
• Application Service Framework (ASF) lightweight RESTful services
• Delivered skills

Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, Loyola University Chicago, and Seneca Polytechnic are already seeing success with the chatbot. Start utilizing this feature today and join the list of success stories!

Oracle Guided Learning

Sasank also shared the latest updates on Oracle Guided Learning.  He detailed that most people despise reading manuals or sitting in training rooms for hours on end. Now, users can cure the boredom and increase retention with Oracle Guided Learning.

Oracle Guided Learning provides in-application user guidance to accelerate Oracle adoption. Real-time guides offer interactive, step-by-step lessons that work great as reminders for infrequent users or for anyone completing a complex task in your system.

As a modern alternative to legacy training manuals, users get to train and learn as they do work—instead of sitting through dedicated training days. Plus, analytics within Oracle Guided Learning keep you informed on which guides are used and which transactions require guides.

This can be used across all PeopleSoft applications, and it’s the same experience across Oracle Cloud applications.

Managing PeopleSoft with PAU (PUM Automated Updates)

The PeopleTools Update & Roadmap session also explained that PAU (PUM Automated Updates) is a huge value-add that keeps your PUM Images current all the time.

PAU can do the following for users:

1. Automatically downloads PeopleSoft Release Patchsets (PRPs) from My Oracle Support (MOS)
2. Automatically applies PRPs to the current PUM Update image
3. Automatically downloads next PeopleSoft Update Image when available from MOS
4. Retrieves, backups, and restores PUM Update Image configuration and repositories (metadata) from one image (N) to the next (N+1)

This saves valuable hours of work for admins and easily syncs up metadata between PUMs.

PeopleSoft on OCI

Sasank also detailed the latest on PeopleSoft on OCI.  He stated that Oracle apps run better on Oracle Cloud. With support from a single vendor, PeopleSoft on OCI unlocks lower costs and improves performance for your infrastructure as a service. It also enables users to leverage database cloud services and Exadata cloud services, offering high performance and high availability. Lastly, using automation for PeopleSoft on OCI supports provisioning, cloning and lifecycle management; reduces costs and risk; and increases agility. This is available exclusively on OCI.

Users can achieve the following benefits and cost savings with PeopleSoft on OCI:

• 38-44% lower TCO than on-premises and competing clouds
• 20-30% improved performance backed by SLAs
• Migration in weeks and deployment in hours
• Full automation of application and tools lifecycle management

Want More PeopleTools Updates?

Sasank shared that if users would like to help steer the direction of future updates, the PeopleSoft team would love for you to share your thoughts in any of these communities: Customer Advisory Boards, Quest SIGs, Focus Groups, Support Community Forums, or the Ideas Lab. Customer feedback powers product development, so if you have a request, make it known.

In addition to the PeopleTools Update & Roadmap, RECONNECT features in-depth education sessions from Oracle, PeopleSoft partners, and PeopleSoft customers.  You can check out the Top Ten Sessions from RECONNECT 2023 or view all of the sessions from the event in the Quest RECONNECT Dive Deep 2023 Event Hub.

Of course, the best way to stay up to date on PeopleTools and all things PeopleSoft is to be a part of RECONNECT Dive Deep – Virtual 2024, which is October 28^th – 31^st, 2024.  At this event, look for more PeopleTools updates and enhancements from the Oracle product team, PeopleSoft partners and customers.  This four-day event will include over 120 PeopleSoft education and networking sessions.  Attendees can expect to walk away with the knowledge to optimize PeopleSoft for their organization.  Register for the event by October 14th, 2024, to receive an Early Bird Registration discount!

You can watch a full recording of the entire RECONNECT 2023 PeopleTools Update & Roadmap here.