Oracle has added another great feature to PeopleTools 8.52:

Dashboards

A dashboard is an overview consisting of pagelets containing information about a certain subject. Until now you were able to add pagelets to your home screen or workcenters. Because you only have one PeopleSoft home page, you are limited in the number of pagelets you can add to get a clear view of what is happening in your business or which actions you need to take. Workcenters did add some additional productivity, but you are limited to add pagelets only to one frame of the browser.

At Oracle Open World, Oracle Public Cloud was announced. Oracle is providing the ability the run Oracle Fusion Applications (and other services)  straight from the Cloud without the need to acquire tons of hardware and without the need of having resources (people) with extended knowledge of all different components of the Oracle stack to run and maintain your application or platform.

PSQuery is an online PeopleTools functionality heavily used by business analysts and key users to gain information from the PeopleSoft application without the need of development or database SQL knowledge. The biggest con of PSQuery is that you end up with one static list of data, which is usually exported to Excel for further enhancement and analysis.

From PeopleTools 8.50, you now have the ability to create more in-depth analyses and productivity using drilling URLs.

When you build a query using Query Manager, you can define drilling URLs that are associated with this query using the expression option. These settings are saved into the database, along with prompt, criteria, and so on, as part of the metadata for this query. When you execute this query through Query Manager or Query Viewer, the query results page shows results as links, which you can click to be redirected to a different page in a new browser. You can create URLs for:

• Other PSQuery, for more in-depth information about a subject, actual drilldown functionality
• PIA Component, direct link to components where the keys for the search page of the component are extracted from the selected columns in the query
• External URL, non PeopleSoft URLs, for example Vendor sites
• Attachment URL, direct link to an attachment that is stored in the database or file system
• Free Format URL, any type of URL you want to construct, can be used for example to deep link to other non-PeopleSoft applications

So how does one create a drilling URL?

In a previous blog, I tried to answer the question, is the Forms and Approval Builder really what it is said out to be? With a quick overview of the functionality, I could not.  Therefore, today I am going in depth and have set out to answer the question: is the Forms and Approval Builder easy to use from a business analyst perspective?

A short recap: the Forms and Approval Builder allows a Business Analyst and/or developer to build and configure an electronic form and specify the approval process they need to follow. For a short demo of Forms and Approval Builder, please view the Oracle PeopleSoft You Tube channel.

As a business analyst, is the Forms and Approval Builder easy to use?

I would say yes, the form design wizard is absolutely intuitive and easy to use. However, there are a few guidelines a business analyst needs to know before designing a form. These guidelines have been written in the order of the steps a business analyst would use to create a form. For a short overview, please read the conclusion.

The guidelines are:

As Fusion Applications is now been available for some months the requirements to install Oracle proposes to Fusion Applications are becoming more clear. They are much heavier than the hardware requirements for PeopleSoft or E-Business Suite. Also, the knowledge of other modules such as Identity Management and Enterprise Manager is required. Actually, for a proper installation of Fusion Applications a multidisciplinary team is needed. This is fundamentally different from PeopleSoft, where a senior system administrator was able to install a PeopleSoft environment on his own. We have experienced this our self and our experiences correspond with fellow systems integrators.