This is the next in a series of posts spotlighting some of our creative partners.  IntraSee , Inc. specializes in portal design and deployment, and providing practical solutions for implementing an Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  They help PeopleSoft customers understand their essential requirements and guide them to a successful user-centric technology strategy with implementations that meet the needs of business.

IntraSee has been successful with an impressive array of PeopleSoft customers from large commercial enterprises, to government agencies and major universities.  Their projects cover a wide range of businesses.  One of their customers' designs recently won an award from the International Association of Human Resources Information Management.  See a presentation with examples here.

IntraSee's approach is to deliver designs that require little or no customizations, but rather, are done as configurations or low-maintenance bolt-ons to PeopleSoft systems. They recognize that content and portals are essential to supporting modern business ecosystems.

Visit IntraSee's web site for more information on the company and their work.  You can also see an interview with IntraSee President Andrew Bedize about their partnership with Oracle.  

Last week, Oracle hosted the annual Customer Advisory Board meetings for various PeopleSoft applications, including the PeopleTools CAB.  The three day event at the Oracle headquarters brought together over 90 customers, with over 170 representatives taking part.  This was the largest CAB event PeopleSoft has had to date.  The focus of the event was to share our vision for PeopleSoft, and gain valuable input from our customer base on our direction and focus areas. 

The customer feedback we received for the event was extremely positive, matching the sentiment on our side.  The information our CAB members provided was excellent; it will help ensure that we focus on the areas that matter most to our customers.   I’d like to thank all the customers that took the time out of their schedules to hear where we’re looking to go in the future, and provide guidance on how we can best assist our customer base on remaining successful in the marketplace.

As the first of an occasional series where we showcase some of our more creative consulting partners, Succeed, based in the UK, has produced this video showing the use of open source tools with PeopleSoft. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezNsEtbRw6I (note this opens in a new window)
Succeed is one of the feeds on the Google reader feed on this PeopleTools blog page, but you can go directly to their blog here:

http://blog.succeed.co.uk/

You can see the Google feeds in the right hand navigation panel, scroll to see "Bookmarks" 

I was speaking with a customer a few days ago about PeopleSoft Web Services.  The customer created a web service but when they went to deploy it, they had so many problems configuring ws-security, they pulled the service.  They spent several days trying to get it working but never got it working so they've put it on hold until they have time to work through the issues.

Having gone through the process of configuring ws-security myself, I understand the complexity.  There is no magic 'easy' button to push.  If you are not familiar with all the moving parts like policies, certificates, public and private keys, credential stores, and so on, it can be a daunting task.  PeopleBooks documentation is good but does not offer a step-by-step example to follow.  Fear not, for those that want more help, there is a place to go.

PeopleSoft released a Mobile Inventory Management application over a year ago.  It is a mobile app built with Oracle Fusion Application Development Framework (ADF) that accesses PeopleSoft content through standard web services.  Part of the installation of this app is configuring ws-security for the web services used in the application. 

Appendix A of the PeopleSoft FSCM91 Mobile Inventory Management Installation Guide is called Configuring WS-Security for Mobile Inventory Management.  It is a step-by-step guide to configure ws-security between a server running Oracle Web Server Management (OWSM) and PeopleSoft Integration Broker.  Your environment might be different, but the steps will be similar, and on the PeopleSoft side, Integration Broker will remain a constant.

You can find the installation guide on Oracle Suport.  Sign in to https://support.us.oracle.com and search for document 1290972.1.  Read through Appendix A for more details about how to set up ws-security with PeopleSoft web services.

Those of you that know me will be aware that I’m very ‘pro cloud’. We (Succeed) run many PeopleSoft instances there, and some other things besides. We develop, monitor and automate in there also. That doesn’t mean that I’m blind to its flaws though.

This was brought home to me by the recent outage in Microsoft’s Azure platform. For those that didn’t hear, Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) went down on 29th February and many people lost access until well into the next day. This isn’t a service we use (we’re with Amazon – by far and away the market leader) but it’s certainly a warning shot. AWS itself had problems in one of its regions not so long ago too. Losing access is one thing, but losing data is quite another. Although I’m not aware of any instances of this happening yet it’s only a matter of time (and a company with the wealth of experience of MS still struggling with leap years shows that the cloud is a brave new world and still has some maturing to do).

Overall our experience has been overwhelmingly positive – and of course outages are still possible on-premise too – just don’t think that because you’ve moved to an enterprise size cloud provider (or even one of the smaller, newer ‘niche’ providers) that you’re immune from things going awry.

About a week ago I posted a video over on the Succeed Blog of a session I gave at the UKOUG PeopleSoft Conference.

If you read this blog and haven’t yet added the Succeed blog into your feed reader I suggest you do so as there’ll be an increasing amount of content there, both from myself and my colleagues.

Besides this blog, there are lots of public sources for information on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools, particularly in social media.  YouTube contains some great video feature overviews, webcasts, and interviews.  PeopleSoft's pages on Facebook and Twitter give you fresh and current information on all sorts of topics related to PeopleSoft.  You can also interact and collaborate directly with PeopleSoft employees and other customers.  These sites are not limited to PeopleTools, but cover a broad range of PeopleSoft applications and technology.

PeopleSoft on Facebook

PeopleSoft on Twitter

PeopleSoft on YouTube

Customers often ask us, "what's next for the PeopleSoft product line?"    We are happy to answer that there is a lot happening,  because we are working on many exciting things for PeopleSoft products.  For examples of some of this, check out our recent releases of Feature Packs for HCM and Financial/SCM.  We are also posting examples of cool new features in our Video Feature Overviews.  We want to get as much of this information to our customers as possible, so not long ago we published a multi-year roadmap that went well beyond a typical Statement of Direction for the next planned release.  It included both functional and technical directions for all PeopleSoft products over multiple years.  A number of the features highlighted in this original road map document have now been delivered with the culmination of 9.1 Feature Pack 2 and PeopleTools 8.52.  We've now included additional updates for PeopleSoft 9.2 and beyond.

This document is available on My Oracle Support for all Oracle customers with a valid MOS login:

PeopleSoft Long Term Investment Plan and Roadmap

There’s a new App on the PeopleSoft App Store!

It enables you to quickly set-up a new user’s PIA homepage by cloning from an existing user. Using this utility you can easily boost everyone’s productivity by giving them one-click access to important areas on their homepage, without the need to create complex matrices of optional/required pagelets.

See a screenshot and more details here.

 

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The PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 Multi-Language Maintenance Pack 1 media component has been added to the PSFT Portal Solutions 9.1 Translations Media Pack.  This is available now on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.  Requests for physical shipment will be processed on a build-to-order basis.

It was pointed out to me today that some of the links in my BlogRoll were quite out of date. I’ve pruned some of the blogs and added some in that I’d either criminally omitted or are newer.

In comes Graham Smith’s blog, Jiju Vengal’s Blog, Oracle’s own PeopleTools blog and – of course – the new Succeed Consultancy blog.

If you’ve not checked any of them out yet and added them to your feed reader I encourage you to do so!

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The red paper contains information on the following essential topics:

• Branding
• Creating a Portal header definition
• Customizing the Homepage Tab layout
• Customizing Pagelet Layout and Behavior
• How to build rich pagelets using Pagelet Wizard
  
• Creating Navigation Collection-Based Accordion Style Pagelets
• Creating News Publication Based Slide Show Pagelets
• Creating HTML Pagelets with Rich Content
• Navigation Collections (several topics)

The paper also cover application integration with Portal:

• Configuring Unified Navigation
• Consuming Content Provider Pagelets
  

In addition to the Portal, the new workcenter framework is also covered, as are Collaborative Workspaces.

• Customizing the WorkCenter Layout
• Customizing the Workspace Branding Theme

There is great detail provided in this paper, and should prove useful to anyone deploying PeopleSoft's Applications Portal.

Note: This document is available on My Oracle Support for all Oracle customers with a valid MOS login:

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The red paper contains information on the following essential topics:

• Branding
• Creating a Portal header definition
• Customizing the Homepage Tab layout
• Customizing Pagelet Layout and Behavior
• How to build rich pagelets using Pagelet Wizard
  
• Creating Navigation Collection-Based Accordion Style Pagelets
• Creating News Publication Based Slide Show Pagelets
• Creating HTML Pagelets with Rich Content
• Navigation Collections (several topics)

The paper also cover application integration with Portal:

• Configuring Unified Navigation
• Consuming Content Provider Pagelets
  

In addition to the Portal, the new workcenter framework is also covered, as are Collaborative Workspaces.

• Customizing the WorkCenter Layout
• Customizing the Workspace Branding Theme

There is great detail provided in this paper, and should prove useful to anyone deploying PeopleSoft's Applications Portal.

It’s been a long time coming, but the PeopleSoft App Store is finally ready to see the light of day.

The intention is for users to be able to browse a central repository for PeopleSoft apps. There’s plenty of precedent for this type of site with the Android Marketplace or Apple AppStore on mobile platforms, and the Salesforce AppExchange or SAPs App Store (which was even longer coming than this site!). Top blogger Jiju has spoken about this also, although the concept is broadly similar his ideas are very different.

I’ve put a few small-ish ‘apps’ live already, and the intention is to add many more apps and improve the site as time goes on (I’m aping the Facebook “Done is better than perfect” philosophy).

Have a look and let me know what you think.

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Oracle/PeopleSoft is happy to announce the first feature pack release of the PeopleSoft Applications Portal. This is the first release in the new continuous release model, which we believe will enable us to make new functionality and features available to customers faster. We also expect that the new features will be easier to uptake in more fine-grained packages. The release continues Oracle’s commitment to protecting and extending the value of PeopleSoft applications. It provides valuable enhancements that improve the productivity of end users, as well as improvements to help reduce the total cost of ownership. While the feature pack contains many enhancements, in this post we'll highlight the major enhancements, including the following:

• Unified and seamless navigation
• Content management
• Collaboration
• User Experience/PeopleTools uptake

In addition, there are some collaborative capabilities that are provided by the Applications Portal that will also be enhanced. These enhancements will extend beyond the use of the portal.

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The English and Multi-Language CD recuts for the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 Feature Pack 1 enhancements are now available on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (OSDC).  Physical CD shipments will be ready by January 30, 2012. Documentation updates are also complete and available on OSDC and My Oracle Support.

The recertified upgrade scripts are posted to My Oracle Support here:

PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 8.9 to 9.1 Feature Pack 1 Upgrade

PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.0 to 9.1 Feature Pack 1 Upgrade

The Feature Pack recut CD is intended for organizations that are implementing PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 newly, or are upgrading from an earlier release.  Feature pack enhancements and maintenance through PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 Maintenance Pack 1, and PeopleSoft Portal Solutions Bundle #6 are included in these recuts.

New Release Model

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Instead of large Portal releases that occur every two or three years, Oracle-PeopleSoft is moving the Applications Portal to a new release model based on Feature Packs. Feature Packs are a new delivery mechanism supplementing the existing delivery mechanisms of bundles and maintenance packs.

Feature Packs will consist of a roll-up of new features and updates, and in addition, at the delivery of Feature Packs, Oracle will include the roll-up of capabilities and updates previously delivered in bundles and maintenance packs as well as re-certify upgrades and integrations.

Unified Navigation

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Setting up the PeopleSoft Applications Portal for use with other PeopleSoft applications has been a manual process prior to Feature Pack 1 (FP1). For example, using Applications Portal to access PeopleSoft HCM and other application pages, an administrator sets up the node and registry entries for each CREF and assigns the security information manually. To automate this process in Applications Portal, we are providing a Workcenter specifically supporting Unified Navigation. The Workcenter will guide administrators through the process, and bring all the necessary pages together to streamline the process.  The Unified Navigation framework federates all PeopleSoft application nodes in one place so everything can be managed from Applications Portal. Unified Navigation supports systems using PeopleTools 8.50 and above.

Content Management

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Content management is an important part of Applications Portal, and the following new features make it more useful and powerful:

• Configurable WorkCenter for delivering and managing content
• Securable portal content by business data
• Update Content usage tracking

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Collaboration

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A few new features are included to facilitate collaboration and other Enterprise 2.0 activities. This includes improvements to Related Attachments and the calendar.

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User Experience--PeopleTools Uptake

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Some of the enhancements that are extending the value of the PeopleSoft applications to customers include the following:

• Authorization as a Service
• Guidance on branding and creating a rich self-service user experience
• Global Search

Additional and detailed information is available in my.oracle.support:

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Oracle/PeopleSoft is happy to announce the first feature pack release of the PeopleSoft Applications Portal. This is the first release in the new continuous release model, which we believe will enable us to make new functionality and features available to customers faster. We also expect that the new features will be easier to uptake in more fine-grained packages. The release continues Oracle’s commitment to protecting and extending the value of PeopleSoft applications. It provides valuable enhancements that improve the productivity of end users, as well as improvements to help reduce the total cost of ownership. While the feature pack contains many enhancements, in this post we'll highlight the major enhancements, including the following:

• Unified and seamless navigation
• Content management
• Collaboration
• User Experience/PeopleTools uptake

In addition, there are some collaborative capabilities that are provided by the Applications Portal that will also be enhanced. These enhancements will extend beyond the use of the portal.

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The English and Multi-Language CD recuts for the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 Feature Pack 1 enhancements are now available on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (OSDC).  Physical CD shipments will be ready by January 30, 2012. Documentation updates are also complete and available on OSDC and My Oracle Support.

The recertified upgrade scripts are posted to My Oracle Support here:

PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 8.9 to 9.1 Feature Pack 1 Upgrade

PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.0 to 9.1 Feature Pack 1 Upgrade

The Feature Pack recut CD is intended for organizations that are implementing PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 newly, or are upgrading from an earlier release.  Feature pack enhancements and maintenance through PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1 Maintenance Pack 1, and PeopleSoft Portal Solutions Bundle #6 are included in these recuts.

New Release Model

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Instead of large Portal releases that occur every two or three years, Oracle-PeopleSoft is moving the Applications Portal to a new release model based on Feature Packs. Feature Packs are a new delivery mechanism supplementing the existing delivery mechanisms of bundles and maintenance packs.

Feature Packs will consist of a roll-up of new features and updates, and in addition, at the delivery of Feature Packs, Oracle will include the roll-up of capabilities and updates previously delivered in bundles and maintenance packs as well as re-certify upgrades and integrations.

Unified Navigation

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Setting up the PeopleSoft Applications Portal for use with other PeopleSoft applications has been a manual process prior to Feature Pack 1 (FP1). For example, using Applications Portal to access PeopleSoft HCM and other application pages, an administrator sets up the node and registry entries for each CREF and assigns the security information manually. To automate this process in Applications Portal, we are providing a Workcenter specifically supporting Unified Navigation. The Workcenter will guide administrators through the process, and bring all the necessary pages together to streamline the process.  The Unified Navigation framework federates all PeopleSoft application nodes in one place so everything can be managed from Applications Portal. Unified Navigation supports systems using PeopleTools 8.50 and above.

Content Management

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Content management is an important part of Applications Portal, and the following new features make it more useful and powerful:

• Configurable WorkCenter for delivering and managing content
• Securable portal content by business data
• Update Content usage tracking

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Collaboration

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A few new features are included to facilitate collaboration and other Enterprise 2.0 activities. This includes improvements to Related Attachments and the calendar.

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User Experience--PeopleTools Uptake

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Some of the enhancements that are extending the value of the PeopleSoft applications to customers include the following:

• Authorization as a Service
• Guidance on branding and creating a rich self-service user experience
• Global Search

Additional and detailed information is available in my.oracle.support:

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