An article from David Bain, Senior Director of PeopleTools Product Management at Oracle explains the decision to release PeopleTools in Cloud first, citing the most significant reason as building awareness of the benefits of running PeopleSoft applications in Oracle Cloud. For more information about why PeopleTools 8.57 was released in the Cloud before on-premise, check out the full article from Oracle.

David Bain and Matthew Haavisto also gave a presentation that gave an overview of what new features to expect in the new release of PeopleTools 8.57. The pair explained that the goal for PeopleTools 8.57 is to allow customers to continue to improve their system and processes through:

• Optimizing the User Interface to make users more productive
• Isolating customizations to make applying changes easier
• Migrating to the Oracle Cloud to lower capital expenditures
• Automating lifecycle processes to make adoption of new features easier
• Preparing to adopt new technology

To help break it down, let’s focus on Lifecycle Management.

Lifecycle Management

There are several features within PeopleSoft that help with Lifecycle Management such as PeopleSoft Update Manager, Change Assistant, PeopleSoft Test Framework, and Application Data Sets. The new release of PeopleTools 8.57 includes enhancements to these features that will help make LCM even easier.

PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM)

There are several components of new Analytics in the latest release. With 8.57, users will now be able to:

• Quickly view and select language bugs
• Have insight into when maintenance was applied
• Categorize bugs into sections based on the number of dependencies
• Have insight into the size of the change they’re applying
• Categorize bugs into sections based on customization impacts

PeopleSoft CFO Tool

Another new feature for PUM in 8.57 is the Cumulative Feature Overview (CFO) Integration. This allows users to export the maintenance applied, import into the CFO and create a Change Package from CFO. The CFO tool will show users the difference between two Images, so it is a helpful tool to know exactly what new features you’re getting in a new Image.

Search Options

There have also been changes to the Update Package Wizard in 8.57. There are new “Standard Searches” provided in addition to “All Updates Not Applied.” This will show users all unapplied changes for installed products, critical updates that have not been applied, tax updates that have not been applied, true requisites not applied, and all updates not applied. There is also a new option to re-use previously defined package searches, and they can be migrated to new PUM Images.

Change Assistant

Instead of working in PUM, another option is to work directly from Change Assistant. Once you’ve set up your source target, you can work from Change Assistant instead of making selections in PUM. This ultimately removes an extra step from the process.

Command Line Automation

You can also automate your Command Line for Change Assistant and the update process, so the extract and apply steps within Change Assistant are automated from start to finish. You can complete Command Line Automation to define the Change Package definition, create a Change Package, apply change (manual steps can be overridden), and test changes with PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF). The more you can isolate customizations and automate, the easier it will be to maintain your PeopleSoft system.

Lifecycle Management Tools

There are several additional new LCM tools in 8.57, including:

• Better support for Application Patches (PRPs)
• PeopleSoft Test Framework—user/role security on PTF Folder Structure
• Ability to capture Last Update UID and DateTime to track changes on all ADS Managed Objects
• Ability to “Save As” ADS Definitions and Delete Root records
• Visual merge group identifier

Learn More

For more information about what you can do with the new features in PeopleTools 8.57, check out the full presentation: PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.57 Overview.