Announcement

Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of PeopleTools 8.50.  This release is important to Oracle and PeopleSoft customers since it demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to the PeopleSoft product family and continuing to provide significant enhancements to these products.  The new PeopleTools features and capabilities have created more customer excitement than we have seen in years.  Since this release is available to customers running all of the recent PeopleSoft applications (eg. 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0) and is the foundation to the 9.1 applications, we are sure to see rapid and enthusiastic adoption of PeopleTools 8.50.

New In this Release:

It is not possible to list all of the new features in this post but here is a quick list of some of the new capabilities;

1. Improved User Experience:
   1. A Related Content framework that allows on-page integration of external content
   2. Improved menu and navigation
   3. Contemporary new styles
   4. Dynamic UI features, including partial page refresh, modal search windows, mouse-over pop-up windows and type-ahead filtered search
2. Improved Developer Productivity
   1. Enhanced Interactive PeopleCode Debugger
   2. AppClass Drilldown PeopleCode Editor
   3. Improved Integration Test Tools
3. Expanded Reporting and Query options
   1. Query as Feeds enabling users to retrieve PeopleSoft data via RSS
   2. Connected Query for joining or nesting multiple queries
   3. Centralized  reporting console
   4. Query Access Service which provides complete access to PeopleSoft queries via a standard web service interface
4. Infrastructure, LCM and Security enhancements
   1. Adoption of Java 6 on all server tiers
   2. Latest versions of WebLogic Server, WebSphere and Tuxedo
   3. Full support for 64-bit Linux and Windows
   4. Secure PS_Home
   5. Integration to Oracle Configuration Manager
   6. Support for Oracle TDE, Database Vault and Audit Vault
   7. FTPS and ADAM (AD LDS) support

Downloading

PeopleTools 8.50 is now available for download through Oracle Electronic Product Delivery (EPD) and the Oracle Store.  Check EPD for specific platform downloads, which are updated regularly.

Reference Material

 To review additional documentation for the 8.50 release, please visit My Oracle Support via this link or search for doc id = 847882.1 

The above doc includes all documents related to the 8.50 release:  release notes, install guide, cumulative overview, data sheets, links to the 8.50 PeopleBooks, technical certifications, etc.

Oracle just released the Value Proposition document for PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 & Tools 8.50 .  I am personally very thrilled about a lot of the features that are bundled with the new Portal & Tools set.  I am glad Oracle is keeping itself up to date with the Web 2.0 world.   

Here’s an excerpt from the Documentation. If you wish to download the entiredocument, you may do so by logging into Oracle’s Metalink site. 

PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 Enhancements

This section discusses the new Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 enhancements that Oracle intends to include in the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1. The enhancements fall into these areas:

•  Wiki
•  Feeds and publishing
•  Tagging
• Blogs
• Related Discussion, Links and Tag services

Wiki

Wikis are used for collaborative authoring. They typically consist of a page or collection of pages that enable anyone who has access to them to contribute or modify content, capturing the collective intelligence of your teams. Wikis in this context are used to create collaborative documents in Workspaces and to empower enterprise communities.

The wiki that is available as part of Collaborative Workspaces is not just another onventional wiki, however. Benefits include:

• Security for wiki managed at the enterprise level.
• Integration with other rich features that are part of workspaces: group calendars, action items, discussions, documents, feeds, tags, multiple language support
• Delivered integration with PeopleSoft applications
• Ability to create wikis in the context of business processes
• All structured and unstructured content is cohesive within the Enterprise Portal.

Feeds and Publishing

Feeds are an integral part of the Enterprise 2.0 experience. They are also known as RSS feeds and very frequently used in news sites. These enable users to subscribe to frequently updated content that is important to them. Portal content
providers (typically site managers or subject matter experts) publish a feed, which enables users to subscribe to it. This enables users to receive updates on the content that they most care about without having to visit the publishing
application.

Feeds reduce email overload by channeling selected (subscribed) information to feeds. In contrast, applications currently deliver all updates or alerts to the email box. Feeds can be read by users in email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, and a huge number of third party Feed reader clients like FeedDemon or Newsgator. This allows users to read the feeds from a variety of applications in a reader of their choice.

PeopleSoft Portal feeds are secured feeds, ensuring that users see data in the feeds for only those pieces of content that the application allows for their user context.

Often, when sites notify users of content updates, they include only summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal will provide feeds for the following modules:

• Workspaces including discussions, calendars, action items, and managed documents
• News publication and content folders
• Discussions
• Blogs

 
Feeds enable user participation in organizational or team activities without the user having to learn all the Enterprise Portal functionality.

PeopleTools 8.50 is planning to provide a full-featured Feeds Publishing framework, which can be used to build feeds on any Enterprise Portal module and/or 3rd party application, and manage/host these feeds via the Enterprise
Portal system.

Tagging

Tagging provides the means for Enterprise Portal and applications users to store, organize, search, and manage content bookmarks. It enables both publishers of content and consumers of that content to classify the material in a way that is meaningful to them. Tagging is also known as social Bookmarking in enterprise 2.0 world. Significantly, users are able to share their tags or bookmarks with other users, thus benefitting the user community from the shared information–in this case tags. This increases the probability of properly characterizing the
content and hence its discoverability and use. Tags are also a way to measure what particular topics are of relevance to the user community.

Tagging capability also provides for navigation to other content that is related through the same tags without the need to hard-code those connections.

Thus, tagging is both a means of classifying things and a way of creating ad hoc navigation paths among related items.

Transactional and informational content both benefit from social bookmarking.

The PeopleTools tagging framework provides:

• Framework capability to add tagging to any application
• PeopleSoft Portal
.. Reusable tagging widgets
• PeopleSoft business applications such as HCM
.. Related tag service
.. Web services to add and update tags, search tags, and tag clouds
• Non-PeopleSoft applications
.. Web services to add and update tags, search tags, and tag clouds

 
PeopleSoft Portal will be the central tag repository, for all cases. It will provide a tag browser and tag cloud capability for the user to discover content using tags.

Tagging is integrated into Portal Search and will enhance the ability to search PeopleSoft Portal content. Tags will be enabled out of the box on the following features of Enterprise Portal and Collaborative Workspaces:

• Discussions – Forums and topics
• Content – News publications, managed content, categorized content
• Workspaces – Workspace discussions and content
• Blogs

Blogs

As described in Wikipedia, a blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a site, maintained by an individual or group, with regular posts of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material. Individuals post articles on their blogs
to let a community of interested parties read about and comment on items and ideas expressed.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, and this is most common in an enterprise blog. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for eaders to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of the blog.

People often think of blogs as personal journals, but they can be used to great benefit in the enterprise world for business purposes. Corporate or enterprise blogs can be used either internally, to enhance communication and culture in a corporation, or externally, for marketing or public relations. External blogs can also be used to disseminate information to customers and user groups, suppliers, partners, and so on.

The Enterprise Portal blog:

• Enables individual or team blogs
• Lives in the Portal which stores structured and unstructured content together.
• Provides these features:
.. Rich text editing and image support
.. Multithreaded comments. that are moderated
.. Tagging
.. Feeds
.. Ability to search
.. Multiple language support
• Provides public or PeopleSoft role-based security
• Integrates with Workspaces and wikis

 
Related Discussion, Links and Tag Services

PeopleTools 8.50 is planning to provide an enterprise strength mashup capability called Related Content framework. This framework will allow hooking up external PeopleSoft or non-PeopleSoft application services to PeopleSoft application pages, in the context of the transactional data on these PeopleSoft application pages. The application services will be rendered in a tabbed frame at the bottom of the PeopleSoft application pages. Each application page will support linking to multiple services via tabs.  Enterprise Portal is leveraging this PeopleTools capability to provide customers three distinct services, which will allow customers to provide collaboration capability to users in the context of application pages, while working on the same application page.

Discussion Service

Using Discussion service, users can collaborate (for example, on a purchase requisition process page), to share critical data about specific vendor(s). In this example, the vendor name or ID could serve as the context of the discussions,
meaning that as the user navigates to other POs raised to a specific vendor all he discussions pertinent to the vendor will automatically be available. This iscussion data will also be available to users on this transaction, whenever they
choose to create a new requisition for this specific vendor. This type of service wll help buyers benefit from collective intelligence gathered on this vendor, in the context of the business process, where they need it the most.

Related Links Service

Using Related Links service, users will be able to associate any web resources to particular transactional data. This will also allow users to associate their Enterprise Portal collaborative content, like discussions and workspaces, to the
transactional data. The associated workspaces, will allow users to navigate back to the transactions that are linked to these workspaces. This provides a two way navigation mechanism between the linked workspaces and transaction data. In addition, the service will allow the user to view the discussions created using the related discussion service in the linked workspaces, effectively putting all collaborative content at the disposal of the user in a workspace. This empowers business process context-driven collaboration among users.

Related Tag Service

Using the Related Tag service, customers will enable users to bookmark transactional or business objects in a manner of the user’s choice, providing ease of access as well as sharing collaborative tags data for the object. For example, a
specific vendorID may be tagged by buyers to identify certain characteristics of the vendor. A benefits clerk, may tag certain employees’ benefits record to bookmark these for easy access later.

Enhancements That Are Common toMultiple Applications

This section discusses new enhancements that are common to multiple applications. PeopleSoft continues to deliver enterprise-wide features and frameworks that enhance your ownership experience and help you run your business more efficiently and profitably. With the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1, PeopleSoft delivers:

• Application Integration Framework
• Approval Framework
• Desktop Integration
• Events and Warnings
• Upgrade Framework

 
Application Integration Framework

Application Integration Framework extends PeopleSoft Integration Broker functionality to provide a standard way to represent, classify, store, query, publish, acquire, and invoke data that maps element names, structures, and
values between PeopleSoft Messages and external system messages. Two important features of Application Integration Framework include; the Domain Value Mapping (Static Cross-references) and Dynamic Cross-referencing. These two mappings enable PeopleSoft Values to be mapped to other applications. Also, there are various APIs being provided as part of this framework to access the Domain Value Mappings and Dynamic Cross-references, such as PeopleCode APIs, XSLT Extensions Functions and also WebService calls. These APIs can be used in supplement with PeopleSoft Integration Broker to send and receive messages with other PeopleSoft systems or third-party systems. If the message structure differs between systems, transformation programs are used to transform the incoming or outgoing message to a message format that the PeopleSoft system understands.

The primary purpose of Application Integration Framework is to create integrations with other Oracle Applications using the Application Integration Architecture without requiring an application upgrade. The framework is generic
enough that is could be used for PeopleSoft integrations with any external system or with other PeopleSoft systems.

Approval Framework

Approval Framework is a user configurable tool that utilizes Pure Internet Architecture and PeopleTools Workflow to create dynamic approval processes that fit the needs of each organization. Approval Framework replaces Virtual
Approver and puts most configuration control in the hands of the business analyst.

In the PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 release, Approval Framework focused on Flexibility, Configurability and Control.

These enhancements help to streamline configuration tasks and provide additional details and functionality for approvers.

• Flexibility: Three areas were the main focus: Notification, Timeout and User Lists.
• Additional configuration options:
.. The administration monitor has added a layer of configurability that allows
actions to be enabled/disabled for each Transaction Registry.
.. The configuration page controls both the Search and the Actions page of
the Monitor Approvals.
.. The information displayed on the page can now be specified. In prior
releases, only the transaction keys were displayed.
• Control: Two new features are meant to provide control to the user:
.. The first one is a new User Monitor. It is intended to be a “one-stop shop”
for the user to review transactions that he either initiated or is a
designated approver on.
.. The other new area of control is in reporting. Approval Framework has
provided an audit report that provides details on Approval Transactions.

 
Desktop Integration

Desktop Integration is a completely new feature providing seamless integration between your organization’s ability to schedule and track appointments, meetings, tasks, and corresponding documentation.

The Desktop Integration framework allows PeopleSoft applications to extend functionality into the Microsoft Office 2007 suite. Providing the ability to launch Microsoft Outlook from a PeopleSoft web page and pass the application data to Outlook (Calendar or email). A two-way communication is established between the PeopleSoft application and Microsoft Outlook, with Outlook pulling the information from and pushing updates to the PeopleSoft application. Oracle delivers this functionality as part of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Components that are available with all PeopleSoft application.
Powerful integration scenarios include; interview scheduling, or creating a shared address book that is kept up to date with changes as they are added to PeopleSoft.

Events and Warnings

Events and Notifications is a framework that enables you to define, implement and run business logic for business events. The Notification Dashboard is a central location to view information related to notifications, warnings and errors that occur within many batch or online processes throughout the system. You can receive notifications using email, worklist or XML messages when an event occurs. PeopleSoft Query can be used in combination with the Events and Notifications Framework feature to generate alert messages based on data within one or more PeopleSoft tables.

The Events and Warnings framework was created to combine existing Event functionality from HCM and Events, Warning, and Notifications in SCM to be a common framework that could generate multiple kinds of notifications, required a very light API to implement and had a minimal set of required registry data. This combined framework is now available in all PeopleSoft Applications.

Upgrade Framework

The Upgrade Data Conversion Analyzer is a new Application Engine (AE) program. For a given upgrade path, the Analyzer gathers a list of AE Sections required for data conversion and stores these in a new repository. Each SQL
statement (including SQL Statements within PeopleCode) is then analyzed to derive a list of tables that are manipulated or queried during the execution of the SQL. Once all the SQL is analyzed, the information is used to derive section
dependency information which is then saved in the repository.

The Upgrade Data Conversion Runtime is a new Application Engine program. The Runtime uses the information generated by the Upgrade Data Conversion Analyzer to improve the execution of the data conversion. Optimization is
achieved through increased parallelism at runtime. Execution timing data is written to the repository, and can be used for analysis and further optimization of subsequent runtimes.”

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In the coming months I hope to keep updating this blog with any updates I get find on the new release of Tools 8.5 along with Enterprise Portal 9.1 , so stay tuned.

Host: Andy Gutmans, Co-founder and VP, Zend
Length: 00:03:02

It’s one of the biggest buzzwords out there, but what exactly does it mean? Andy Gutmans of Zend defines Web 2.0 and explains how it’s changing the face of the Internet.

Web 2.0″ in just under 5 minutes.

From Mike’s website: “My videos explore mediated culture, seeking to merge the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology.

Currently we are analyzing anonymity and pseudonymity on YouTube, throughout the web, and in the “real world” throughout all times and all places. You can check our progress at http://mediatedcultures.net/”