It has been a while since I had the “WOW-effect” about a new application.

Most internet applications have been set-up with technologies that we find normal nowadays. Technologies like partial page refresh (AJAX), drag and drop layout, WEB 2.0 like wiki, communities etc.

But these rules do not seem not to apply to ERP systems. They are still robust, pretty user-unfriendly en most of all not appealing.

Well, Oracle seems to have done it.

Oracle introduced a new layout with Peoplesoft 9.1 in combination with Peopletools 8.50, with building blocks of today’s technologies.

In this blog we’ll continue where we left some time ago. The aim is to create a page containing the blocks which can be ordered by the user. First we create a new page containing some groupboxes with content. Every groupbox must be placed in a container, for we will switch groupboxes within these containers. To create a container, draw a frame around each individual groupbox and disable the frame border. To be able to address the groupboxes later, add a custom style class (added to the stylesheet), lets say ‘DRAGGABLE’ to each groupbox. Put a static html object at the bottom of your page in which we’ll put our javascript. So far for the server side.

Every PeopleSoft developer has read something about the new Oracle products incorporating web 2.0 functionality like personalized pages. But what if you’re not among the lucky developers that use those new, modern, up2date products? In this post I’d like to show how we can create web 2.0 functionality in older PeopleSoft versions step by step.

First a small introduction. At the moment I am a member of a team which is busy building Selfservice functionality for a very large oranisation. Development is done in PS HRMS 8.22. I was asked to think about a selfservice page with dynamicaly ordered content blocks. Still there? I mean that the page has several blocks containing content and the employee  must be able to organize these blocks himself.

So, what’s the plan? Let’s start by describing the big picture. We must create a page in app designer containing the blocks that shall contain the content. After that we’ll add some Javascript (client side script)  to make the blocks draggable. The order of the blocks must then be stored in the database. For this we’ll use Ajax and IScript. Almost there, hang on. The last thing to do is to make sure that if the page is reloaded / revisited we get the order of the blocks from the database with Ajax and IScript again and order the blocks.

The philosophy is that  the page is designed in app designer as always and will work without all the fancy web 2.0 stuff. We will only use the web 2.0 stuff to enhance the user experience.

In the next post we will set up a simple page with content blocks, and make these blocks draggable.

Hopefully see you then!

The recent launch of Oracle Sales Prospector, an Oracle CRM on Demand solution that seamlessly integrates with Social Networks such as LinkedIn and other Web 2.0 tools, proves that Social Media and 2.0 technologies are slowly being adopted by companies around the world.
Recently Logica’s CRM / Siebel team was invited to organize a workshop on Business-to-Business marketing for the Student Marketing Organization of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Marc Verkuijl, Siebel Teamlead, and myself, took some time to talk to 30 Business Administration and Marketing students on CRM, Marketing and the concept of Marketing 2.0, from a business-to-business perspective.
The primary objective of this workshop was to create awareness on Logica’s Siebel CRM offerings and career opportunities for recent graduates or students that are about to graduate. We ended up debating B2B marketing 2.0 with approximately 30 students.

A short video (10 minutes) on the B2B marketing event (in Dutch)

The slides used to introduce the concept of B2B marketing 2.0 and start a debate on whether Social Media add value in the B2B market.

As an attendant to the latest LOUD meeting, during the speeches we were confronted with 2 opposing statements. The first speaker stated we should go back to the roots of application development using the rich technology databases nowadays possess, like PL/SQL and triggers. The second speech was about the new development tool from Oracle, WebCenter and Web 2.0 which has all functionality in the application instead of the database.
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