Overview: PeopleSoft Portal 9.1
I was doing some research the other day for a customer related to 9.1 features and content. While I am not a PeopleSoft Portal expert, I did gather up some valuable information from PeopleBooks and other sources. I thought some of these requirements may be relevant to our audience. So, the following content outlines some requirements and the associated functionality available in Portal 9.1 and Tools 8.5x. Enjoy.
Requirement: Positioning of Modules on a page
Description: Users are provided the ability to have one, two or three column portals customized to their view. They can also move pagelets around as needed. In addition, Navigation Collections provide you with a flexible tool for building alternative taxonomies of the contents stored in your portal registry. These alternative taxonomies, or groupings of links to portal content, can then be deployed to different users or groups of users, creating navigation that specifically addresses your users’ business needs. The links in Navigation Collections provide an alternate method of accessing content in the portal registry. A Navigation Collection is a published compilation of these links.
Requirement: Ability to remove read messages and alerts, storage and organization of corporate policies
Description: The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal helps you organize all your content-creation processes and their results. Content Management includes features to help you manage create and organize content, as well as manage crawling, approvals, versioning, multiple user access, and publication processes. The resulting content is ready and available for placement in various portal pagelets, including News Publications, Related Information, and Browsing Categorized Content. The portal’s Content Management and Publication system includes the following types of features: Managed Content: Users can organize content in folders, create content, and share content with other users. The system offers a check-in check-out function, version controls to safeguard editions of content, and a submission and approval process that culminates in content that is available for publishing to a wider portal audience. Content Categorization: This feature enables users to access web server and file server content, or content management entries through a detailed categorization hierarchy. The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal uses a crawler to automatically populate the hierarchy. News Publications: This feature enables users to organize approved content in multiple publications, which are viewable as pagelets on the portal. Content can be imported from Managed Content folders or created within the publication feature itself. New content goes through a submittal process, which can include author and editor revisions, and can be published to a pagelet and removed according to specific dates. Web Publishing: The content of any publication—including web magazines, employee handbooks, business procedures, newsletters, and customer surveys—can be maintained in its entirety in your PeopleSoft portal and dynamically deployed to your audience based on their roles within and outside your organization. Open Content Services: You can integrate third-party content-management system content into the portal. Content contributors, editors, approvers, and publishers can leverage the third-party content management facilities to create, edit, approve, and deploy content, and have the content metadata pushed to the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
Requirement: Present pertinent information to users when performing a specific task
Description: As part of standard PeopleTools 8.5x, the “related content feature” should be explored. Related content allows for additional internal and external content to be emedded in the PeopleSoft transaction page. This includes query and any external URL that can generate HTML. If documents are stored on a web site, they can be embedded as part of the business process. Also, see functionality description above.
Requirement: Compliance enforcement
Description: The Action Items feature enables users to create and track action items, as well as collaborate with other users using the feature. Action items are assignments or tasks that are assigned to people across groups and require some sort of activity, monitoring, or event to take place before they can be considered complete. Items can be tracked through summary homepage pagelets, through inquiry pages, as well as through email notification and calendar entries. These items are organized into groups called action item lists. An action item list is a set of action items. Action items appear in the list as a flat view, with no nested hierarchy. Security privileges for users and for roles are defined based on the list membership. The Action Items feature can be accessed through portals, sites, and workspaces.
Requirement: Content tracking
Description: Reaction to portal content can be monitored through the following actions: Giving users an opportunity to express their opinions. Tracking which pages user’s access. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal includes a Content Ratings feature to manage user feedback and an iTracker to track usage. The Content Ratings feature enables you to: Configure single-question polls. Assign questions to a menu item or a portal-hosted unregistered URL. Monitor user feedback. When users access a page that is being polled, the Content Ratings pagelet containing a link to the poll is displayed in the portal menu frame. When the user clicks the poll link, the Content Ratings question appears in a new browser window. A user can answer each Content Ratings question only once for any given menu item or URL. However, if the poll is deployed to many different content items, the user can answer it again for each different menu item. Content ratings administrators can associate multiple Content Ratings polls with any portal-hosted content, and the poll’s question can be effective-dated to change over time. The Content Ratings feature can also be used as a broader poll taker. For example, you can ask a range of questions of your users that are not necessarily tied to the content that they are viewing. In those circumstances, we recommend that you deploy a poll to one heavily trafficked menu item or portal-hosted URL. That way, results that you see on the Poll page and Results pages will be grouped properly for non-content related questions, as opposed to being spread out over multiple content items. Results are accessible to poll respondents on the Content Ratings page when navigating from the Content Ratings pagelet. They are also accessible on the more advanced results pages available to Content Ratings managers and administrators. Results pages display data by menu item or URL.
Requirement: Bookmarking
Description: Using My Links functionality in your PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal implementation provides your end users with easy access to their most frequently needed and accessed content by way of the My Links drop-down list box provided on the portal header. End users can establish links to access PeopleSoft transactions registered in the portal registry. My Links can also be established for non-PeopleSoft content such as external Web sites.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
