Again Oracle shows its commitment to continue investing in PeopleSoft. This time by changing the release model of PeopleSoft Applications Portal, formally known as PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, by adding Feature Packs. With these Feature Packs customers do not need to upgrade or re-implement PeopleSoft Applictions to be able to use the new features, as Feature Packs come as patches that can be applied to the current PeopleSoft application using the change assistent.

As promised Oracle is now supplying Oracle Fusion Applications on Windows. Most system administrators and installers will probably say, why is this important?

Bringing Oracle Fusion Applications to Windows makes the application more accessible to the ‘common man’. Let’s be honest, the majority of IT does have knowledge and access to Windows, a smaller part has knowledge of Linux and an ever smaller part has any experience with IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris, not even to mention the availability of these two operation systems for the common IT. Since Oracle Fusion Applications is made up of so many Oracle components, Oracle Fusion Applications has attracted the interest of not only the ERP community, but also the attention of other communities like DBA’s, Middleware/Integration specialists, etc and they all want to get a taste of the future.

In a previous post I mentioned a new feature of PeopleTools 8.52: Dashboard. With this feature you can create custom dashboards with pagletes that provide information about a certain business area. Oracle didn’t stop here and also added Interwindow Communication (IWC).

Interwindow communication is a frame-to-frame messaging mechanism that enables browser window objects—such as pages or pagelets—to be aware of and react to field-level data changes that occur in other window objects that share the same browser window. Interwindow communication enables you to publish field-level changes as they occur so that any subscribing page or pagelet becomes instantly aware of the change and then, can act on it in real-time. Administrators, subject matter experts or application developers configure page fields to respond to either changes in value or a mouse click. When the triggering event occurs, the application posts a string-formatted message. Because of partial pagelet refresh functionality, subscribing pagelets can then respond within the context of the data contained in the message. Interwindow communication supports component-based pagelets and noncomponent-based pagelets (iScript-based or other Pagelet Wizard pagelets).

On 28 October PeopleTools 8.52 is presented as generally available download via eDelivery. PeopleTools 8.52 is certified to upgrades for 8.9 and later applications. Release notes for PeopleTools 8.52 can be found here.

For a quick overview of this Tools release see previous post.

PeopleTools PeopleBooks is also available via this link.

The Attachment Framework is available within PeopleSoft for use with several vanilla parts. However, users usually want more places where attachments can be added to functionality. At this point technical people can be glad Application Packages are implemented into PeopleSoft these days, and moreover, that Oracle put the Attachment Framework into these objects.

As an example the usage of personal dossiers can be brought up. A breakdown of functional areas where all relevant documents of an employee can be placed in. Accessible for the employee and in some cases maybe for their manager or team secretary. In order to get something like this going I would need a record where the documents can be stored, a page where users can use this functionality and the Attachment Framework packages. A lot more functionality can be thought of to incorporate into something like this, but the basics are just this.