By now, most of us know it takes more resources to run a Fusion Applications environment, than any other ERP system. Creating a local sandbox, to acquire knowledge and experience of  Fusion Applications, is not done on local servers anymore.

Do not despair …

With the release of PeopleTools 8.52, you will be able to do all your PeopleSoft Business via the Ipad. Yes,  PeopleSoft applications is able to run in the Safari Browser on an iPad. However, some PeopleSoft applications operate better on iPads than others. PeopleSoft is not constrained by technology like Adobe Flex/Flash, therefore no problems there. For more information regarding the Ipad certification, click here.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) provides a familiar user interface to internet search users and gives secure access to all of your organization’s data sources—Web sites, file servers, content management systems, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, business intelligence systems, and databases.

Looks familiar?

That is indeed familiar, that’s Google with an Oracle logo… Oracle seems to have build a search engine and has made use of the familiarity of the Google GUI and behaviour to position this tool. Oracle is supplying SES as stand alone product and has integrated SES with it’s other products like Siebel, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite & PeopleSoft.

Where Google will search the internet based on supplied keywords, SES will search your Enterprise data based on keywords. Oracle has created an embedded framework in PeopleSoft to integrate and communicate with SES, called PeopleSoft Search FrameWork.

One of the new functionality in PeopleSoft 9.1 is Forms and Approval Builder. According to Oracle in a recently posted blog ‘Finally a paperless office with PeopleSoft Forms & Approval Builder’ the Forms and Approval Builder will help to make paper and e-mail based forms a thing of the past. After reading the blog, I was excited but also wondering what is this Forms and Approval Builder and is it really what it is said out to be?

Remember the last time you had to fill in a form? It first took you forever to find the form you needed. And once you filled in the information, you put the form on your managers desk, but you actually have no clue if he/she has signed it or if it is still lying there on the desk between all his/her papers. As well, you can’t find the copy of the last form you submitted so that you could check what you have previously requested.  Or your form is lost somewhere and you have no clue what the status is.   I believe this happens in many organisations. Even though self service and manager self service has become a standard in most companies, there are still some paper based forms that support certain business processes. One of the reasons these forms still exist is because the amount of requests are minimal a year, so why create a customized solution if the process doesn’t happen often?;  Or the business process happens often and the functionality still needs to be created; Or a business process  is only temporary. For all these reasons, PeopleSoft has created the Forms and Approval Builder.

Forms and Approval builder is a common definitions tool that helps organizations to replace paper forms with electronic forms that are

PeopleSoft Setup Manager has replaced the manual table loading sequence since PeopleSoft version 8.9. However, there are still some people reluctant to use it. For this reason, I will give a short recapitulation of what the setup manager is, how it works and why you should or shouldn’t use it.

What is the PeopleSoft Setup Manager?

The PeopleSoft Setup Manager is a tool for automating PeopleSoft application configuration. In other words, the Setup Manager helps you implement PeopleSoft modules by selecting configuration sets as a project and producing a step-by-step list of setup tasks that is specific to succesfully setup your PeopleSoft system.

How does the Setup Manager work?

The words one must remember when explaining the setup manager are implementation project and setup task list.