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Latest in PeopleTools 8.5?

Here are the recap of what improvements Oracle are including in their next release.

Big Focus on User Experience
PeopleSoft has always been a good few steps ahead of Oracle’s E-Business Suite from the look and feel viewpoint.
We’re starting to see screenshots showing that Oracle have incorporated some of their advances in Fusion, and it looks like PeopleSoft is moving forwards too.

Some of the improvements will also be backwards compatible – so you can have a v8.4 App running Tools 8.50 and get ~50% of the improvements.

The new menu mentioned above can be seen below. The sidebar is gone and we now have drop-downs from a top menu (click for bigger).

It’s difficult to guess how useable it’ll be, but if it frees up some extra space on screen then it’ll be welcome.
The biggest winner sounds like the partial page refresh. Any prompt – instead of triggering an entire page refresh
– will pop up a modal window and using AJAX will issue a partial page refresh.
Much less data going over the wire, and hopefully improved performance.
The auto-complete/type ahead also applies to lookup prompts. As you type PeopleSoft checks what you’re typing against the available values.
The recent visits menu will save time by negating the need to trawl through the menus for the components we all use the most often.

Lots of SOA and Web Services Improvements
It’s difficult to get a grasp of exactly what they’ve improved here without hearing the spiel that went with the slides,
but we will be able to expose App Engines and Queries as Web Services (in addition to App Packages and CIs).

Reporting
In addition to the expected hype of XMLP/BIP and OBIEE there is mention of ‘BI in Context’. It seems they’re moving towards embedding reporting in pages.

BI Context
In addition to this we’re going to be able to use Connected Queries. This is where a Query can call another ‘child query’,
and they can be nested down n-levels. Useful for XMLP …
Also, Hyperion Essbase will allow clients to export data to Excel, manipulate it, and then load it back into PeopleSoft again.

Enterprise 2.0
Introduction of some Web 2.0 functionality. Lots of talk about collaboration, integration, tagging and wikis.
The screenshot below shows some of this, including RSS, a discussion list,
calendaring, voting and a document repository.

It sounds as though this functionality may be named PeopleSoft Workspace and either be licensed
individually or reside within Enterprise Portal, so clients which haven’t licensed this may miss out.

Platforms
Unusually for an ‘even numbered release’ there are some 3rd party upgrades included.
(The even numbered releases normally contain functionality improvements, the odd numbered ones 3rd Party upgrades.)
I guess it’s been nearly 2 years since Tools 8.49 so they’re rolling it into one.
For OSes there are some 64-bit servers included (Windows and Linux), and – amongst other things – 32bit Linux and Windows 2000 are dropped.
For Databases in comes Oracle 11g and SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2000 is dropped.
Tuxedo gets an upgrade to 10.1, and WebLogic up to 10.
Unsurprisingly – after the announcement saying that Fusion will use WebLogic – Oracle App Server is dropped.

So when is it out?
The answer to this is that no-one wants to say. It was originally slated for 2008, but the latest I heard was the first half of ‘09.

All of the above has been gleaned and consolidated from the following sources:
Brent Martin’s PeopleSoft Corner
Blogging about Oracle Apps
The OOW presentations from the PeopleTools blog

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