Shelby Klingerman, Content Curator |

The new release of PeopleTools 8.57 was recently announced, and it is currently available to customers who are on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. PeopleTools 8.57 will be available for general download for on-premises environments in January 2019. There is no difference between the Cloud version and the on-premises version of the release.

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.

The Goal for the New PeopleTools 8.57 Release

David Bain and Matthew Haavisto also gave a presentation that provided 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 optimizing the User Interface.

Optimize the User Interface

PeopleSoft’s Fluid User Interface was designed to provide a rich, productive UI for users. Several features already exist in PeopleSoft that help users work more efficiently, like Activity Guides, Tiles, Notifications and Simplified Analytics. However, there are even more additional features in the release of PeopleTools 8.5.7 to help users work better and faster. The features in this new release include:

• Personalized Analytic Notifications to alert users when thresholds are reached
• Improved Branding Framework with a customer banner above the menu
• A new version of Elasticsearch and delivery of Kibana for real-time analytics and search metrics
• Multi-facet select search
• Unified display of related contents and simplified analytics
• Ability to add simplified analytics to the NavBar and Dashboards
• Improved personalization of tiles when on Homepage, NavBar or Favorites
• Fluid Grid improvements including Find, Download to Excel, and Sort

Thresholds and Personalized Analytic Notifications

While thresholds have been a part of PeopleSoft for some time now, PeopleTools 8.57 provides a standardized approach for using them across all applications. Notifications have also been introduced to go along with the thresholds. Users can now set thresholds in pivot grids and then get notified about them via email or alerts when the criteria are met. There will be only one Notification for all threshold violations in a single module, so users will not be overwhelmed with multiple alerts if several thresholds are met in a specific module. The beauty of Notifications is that users don’t have to be logged into PeopleSoft to get the alert.

With the Pivot Grid Threshold Framework, thresholds can be set to ranges (above or below the range, within the range, outside of the range) or distinct values (equal to, not equal to, greater than, less than). You can also select the Notification type (push alerts, email, both, or none) and create a Notification List based on users and roles.

There have also been changes to the Notification Window in 8.57. Now with Action View, users can act directly on the displayed item. Users can quickly move through a list of items and complete tasks.

Branding Framework

There is now a custom banner area built into the Framework. The Fluid header definition now includes a CompanyInfo banner. You can create a custom banner that can include enterprise images, logos, and links. To configure the CompanyInfo element, you must have these special roles: Secure Branding Administrator, Company Info Administrator, or PeopleTools SVG Administrator.

Search

PeopleTools 8.5.7 includes support for Elasticsearch version 6.1.2 and provides new Elasticsearch DPK. The Search Framework also adds index build metrics to enable customers to use data analysis and visualizations in Kibana. There are three delivered dashboards for Kibana in 8.5.7—system metrics, indexing metrics, and indexing summary. These dashboards are primarily for Administrators. In the future, new releases of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be adopted.

Some improvements that are included in the new release include:

• Faster restarts and recoveries
• Bootstrap validations on startup
• New Ingest Attachment plugin
• Less disk storage space for consumed attachments
• Improved search scalability

There is also a new multi-facet select feature in PeopleTools 8.57. This allows users to select multiple facets to filter their search results finely. As more facets are selected, the results are refreshed to display the refined set. Any selected facets appear as breadcrumbs, and users can remove filters from the breadcrumb or clear the selected checkboxes. You’ll need to enable the multi-facet selection feature through the following steps: Search Framework > Search Designer Activity Guide > Advanced Settings > Allow Multi-Select check box.

Unified Related Information Frame

With the Unified Related Information Frame, all related information and analytics will be displayed on a single pane. There will no longer be separate tabs for analytics and other types of information. This will make it easier for users to navigate, manage and personalize related information. End users can personalize related information and analytics, choose which related information or analytics they want to see, display the analytic as a tile or a link, and remove an analytic from the Related Information Frame. End users can now add simplified analytics, and other types of information can be added through the Related Information Framework, just like it was done before 8.57.

Personalization of Tiles

One of the nice features of Fluid is the ability to add any component or page as a tile. Now with 8.57, end users can customize the label when adding a tile. This feature can be used when adding to a Homepage, Dashboard, NavBar or Favorites.

Also, Tile Wizard can now use a PeopleSoft query or stored SQL as a data source. It works like the application class data source because users can choose between options to display one or two key performance indicators on the tile. You can display up to three live data areas, a trend image, and badge data.

Fluid Grid Enhancements

Now in PeopleTools 8.57, you can download Fluid grid data into Excel spreadsheets, save a personalized sort order, or search for data in the grid. If you have a grid with a large amount of information, this will help make certain values easier to find and organize.

Activity Guide

Activity Guides are very versatile and are great for Self Service or any process that would benefit from guidance, like something that is complex or contains infrequently performed activities. Activity Guides reduce user errors and improve precision, reduce or eliminate the need for training or documentation, and increase productivity.

PeopleTools 8.57 has brought some new features of Activity Guides that are currently only available in HCM. You can now override the label for the Submit button and configure the context data within Activity Guides to display either a fixed message, a popup message, or a modal message.

• Fixed: Up to three lines of context data
• Popup: One line that launches a popup window containing up to three lines
• Modal: One line that launches a modal window containing full page content

Accessibility Enhancements

There is a new type of data display within Fluid pages called section tabs. Section tabs can control which portion of the page data is currently displayed. Another enhancement in 8.57 is the pop-up menus that enable developers to create a new type of navigational control on Fluid pages. They display menu items that perform an action or navigation. There are two existing features, the Actions List and the Homepage Selector, that have been re-engineered to function as pop-up menus. Both the section tabs pop-up menus are also rendered, styled and tagged to standards that work with assistive technology.

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.