Sneak peek: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1
Last week I discussed the upcoming changes to PeopleTools 8.5. Today, I will give you a preview of the next product that is due to be released, which is PeopleSoft
Enterprise Portal 9.1. This will be a significant release for the portal because it will incorporate web 2.0 technologies and take advantage of the new UI enhancements I mentioned in the PeopleTools 8.5 post from last week.
In no particular order (other than the way my brain is serving up information), here are some of the portal enhancements worth noting:
Wikis
If you have been using the internet for any length of time, then you understand what a wiki is and how it works. If not, take a stroll over to Wikipedia, the gold standard of a wiki project done correctly. From a business perspective this will allow organizations to capture, manage and share their internal information much more easily. For any organization, there are certain pieces of functionality that are critical to make this type tool useful to the business. Included in the portal version of wikis are the following features:
- Enterprise-class security
- Integration with other PeopleSoft applications
- Creation of wikis in the context of business processes
- Integration into workspaces
RSS feed support
This will be a handy feature for user, as they will be able to be notified when information is updated in an area/topic of interest to them. Businesses can leverage this feature to keep their employees up to date with the latest news, such as company policy changes or new information critical to a business process. This is a built-in feature that doesn’t require you to do anything other than enable it. Very cool, especially for all the RSS junkies out there.
Blogs
The fact that you are reading this post suggests you know what a blog is. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 offers built-in blogging capability and will allow companies to leverage it for internal and external purposes. Some examples of how it can be utilized internally are for internal marketing, product development, training and internal company announcements. Specifically related to Enterprise Portal 9.1’s blogging engine are:
- Individual or team (multi-author) blogs
- Content tagging/categorization
- RSS publication
- Search
- Integration into workspaces
Related Discussion, Links and Tag Service
From where I sit, this is probably the best feature of the product. This feature will allow an organization to capture certain types of content and then link it together across applications. An example of how you could use it:
Let’s assume a buyer has created a blog post for a particular vendor stating that he is offering a special discount on a product for quantities over 100 units. This information could then be displayed on a purchase order transaction in progress using the ‘related content’ feature of PeopleTools 8.5. It’s all about interconnected, sharable information.
Workspaces
This is a concept that was introduced in Enterprise Portal 8.9, but 9.1 really invests itself in it and helps it come of age.
The 9.1 version takes advantage of the best features of the portal and builds a collaborative area for you to manage a business process. There is some good documentation and examples on how it could be optimized and used, but you must login to Metalink3 to access it. Check it out here (login required). (This link is an example of how workspaces could be used to optimize the period-end close process for financial applications.)
Finally, I would like to say that the improvements to the portal are significant and incorporate some of today’s best web technologies. I look forward to working with our customers to implement these solutions and see where we go with them; the possibilities, to coin a phrase, are endless.
If you want more information about Enterprise Portal portal 9.1, login to Metalink3 and search for “Release Value Proposition for PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1”.
Related content:
PeopleTools 8.5: A look inside
MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft Services
MiPro Consulting: PeopleSoft datasheets
PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits (whitepaper)
