What’s New in PeopleTools 8.62 for Campus Solutions!
A RECONNECT Session with JSMpros
PeopleTools 8.62 is more than a technical upgrade for Campus Solutions. It introduces a new, flexible framework for landing pages, dynamic sections, and embedded Insights that can reshape how students, faculty, advisors, and back-office teams experience PeopleSoft.
In this RECONNECT Spotlight Session, long-time PeopleSoft expert Jim Marion of JSMpros broke down what 8.62 delivers today, how HCM is already using it, and what Campus Solutions schools can do right now to get ready.
Embedded Insights: Analytics Where the Work Happens
One of the most exciting 8.62 features Jim highlighted is embedded Insights, which provide the ability to pull OpenSearch dashboards (formerly Kibana) directly into Campus Solutions pages.
With 8.62 you can:
- Embed Insights into Campus Solutions or other PeopleSoft components
- Have those visualizations respond to changes in the component buffer
- Turn passive reports into live, context-aware decision aids
Jim encouraged attendees to think beyond generic reporting pages:
- For back-office teams: processing volumes, queues, or exceptions directly on work centers
- For advisors: risk indicators or academic performance snapshots alongside advisee pages
- For student services: account status, holds, or to-dos visible right where staff are resolving issues
The key message from JSMpros: Insights shouldn’t live in a separate analytics silo. PeopleTools 8.62 lets you embed analytics in the flow of work.
Landing Pages, Homepages, Dashboards: What’s the Difference?
If the new terminology feels confusing, Jim simplifies it: A landing page is a homepage with extra features turned on.
In PeopleTools 8.62 a landing page is just a fluid homepage with section assignments and new attributes. Sections can group tiles into logical bands like Quick Access or Suggested Actions, and those sections can be dynamic, populated by loader application classes. The same framework also applies to dashboards, which can now be styled to look like landing pages.
From an admin perspective, you create landing pages the same way you’ve always created homepages:
- Go to PeopleTools > Portal > Structure and Content > Fluid Structure and Content > Fluid Homepages
- Add a new fluid homepage
- Assign tile content
- Use Section Assignments to define and organize sections
- Optionally attach loader classes and style sheets
The big change isn’t a brand-new object, rather, it’s that PeopleTools now gives you more structure, more control, and more dynamic options on top of the homepages you already know.
Learning from HCM: A Model for Campus Solutions
Because Campus Solutions doesn’t yet deliver a full 8.62-style landing page, Jim looked to HCM PUM 53 for inspiration—specifically the My Home landing page.
From that example, he drew patterns Campus Solutions teams can reuse:
Welcome area
HCM shows a welcome message, name, and photo. Visually nice, but Jim questioned how much value a large self-photo adds for students, especially if you don’t have images for all user types. If you build something similar, use that real estate for meaningful information or calls to action, not just decoration.
Suggested Actions ribbon
This is where the 8.62 framework shines. Instead of one generic “Tasks” tile, HCM surfaces concrete items like approvals, to-dos, and holds as individual tiles in a suggestions band.
Translating that to Campus Solutions, suggested actions might include:
- “You have a registration hold”
- “It’s time to enroll for next term”
- “You have an unpaid balance”
- “You have a new advisor note”
Because the suggestions section is driven by a loader class, it can change day-to-day based on the student’s data.
Quick Access section
HCM’s Quick Access surfaces the most-used tasks. In Campus Solutions, this might include:
- Manage Classes
- Academic Records
- Financial Aid
- Student Financials / Make a Payment
Jim’s guidance: Quick Access should be task-based and role-aware, not just a random collection of tiles.
Role-based links and work areas
HCM also uses sections like My Work to group links by role. For Campus Solutions, Jim suggested sections for:
- Students
- Advisors
- Faculty
- Back-office staff
The same landing page shell can serve multiple personas, with sections and tiles controlled by security.
Recently visited & favorites
In HCM, these are implemented as dynamic sections using loader classes. The same approach works in Campus Solutions, giving users familiar “recent” and “favorites” experiences on the landing page rather than buried in navigation.
Building a Campus Solutions Landing Page
Jim then demonstrated building a Campus Solutions landing page using the delivered framework:
- Create a new fluid homepage (for example, an RECONNECT demo page)
- Mark it as required so users see it on login
- Add tiles such as Manage Classes, Academic Records, Financial Aid, Profile, etc.
- Use Section Assignments to group them into a Quick Access section
- Add additional sections later for suggestions, my advisees, favorite queries, and more
PeopleTools enforces one rule: you can’t define sections unless the homepage has at least one tile assigned. Once tiles exist, you’re free to assign some or all of them to sections, and unassigned tiles appear above the sections.
From there, Jim showed how JSMpros prototypes add dynamic sections for:
- My Favorite Queries – a section that reads the user’s favorite queries and builds tiles/links on the fly
- My Advisees – a section that lists advisees as links for advisors
- Suggested Actions – tiles for charges due, tasks, or key deadlines based on current data
If no data exists (no favorite queries, no advisees, no balance due), the loader returns no tiles, and the entire section disappears. That behavior keeps landing pages clean and automatically personalized.
Styling, Responsiveness, and Performance
Jim also touched on some practical UX considerations with landing pages in 8.62:
- CSS & media queries – Landing pages use CSS grid layouts and media queries, so you can change icon sizes, spacing, or alignment based on viewport width. That’s ideal for making pages touch-friendly on smaller screens.
- Reuse Oracle CSS where possible – PeopleTools-delivered classes (often with prefixes like PSC_) are documented and designed to work with the framework. JSMpros recommends using those first and adding only minimal custom styles for layout tweaks.
- Touch-friendly design – Narrow rows of plain links may be hard to tap on small devices. Sections can instead be styled as larger buttons or block elements for better usability.
On performance, Jim acknowledged the natural concern about dynamic content—but his findings were positive. In his testing, landing pages with dynamic sections actually loaded faster than some older pages like Manager Self Service, thanks to improved caching and runtime behavior in PeopleTools 8.62.
Looking Ahead – and Where JSMpros Fits In
Jim closed by briefly pointing to additional opportunities, like:
- Operational dashboards that behave like dashboards but look and feel like landing pages
- Timeline charts to visualize student academic careers or course histories
- Future use of GraphQL and the Application Services Framework to modernize data access
Underpinning all of this is the kind of deep PeopleTools expertise that JSMpros brings to the community. Jim highlighted that:
- JSMpros offers exclusive PeopleTools training, created completely in-house
- Classes are delivered live from a professional studio and recorded for on-demand access
- Subscriptions give organizations a scalable way to get developers and analysts up to speed on fluid, Integration Broker, Application Classes, Approval Workflow, and more
If your team is planning a PeopleTools 8.62 upgrade or wants to modernize Campus Solutions with landing pages, embedded Insights, and dynamic sections, partnering with JSMpros can dramatically shorten the learning curve.