Speaking of PeopleTools 8.51, our friends over at Grey Sparling are hosting a webinar to explore the new goodness in PeopleTools 8.51.  Details from their invite:

Although the 8.51 release isn’t nearly as large as its predecessor, there are a lot of powerful new features that you will want to know about.  Two of the most exciting are:

• A new testing framework (you’ll hear a lot more about this at Oracle OpenWorld).
• A new way of navigating within PeopleSoft (called Smart Navigation).

The Grey Sparling developers have just finished downloading and creating demonstration environments for this release, and we have scheduled two webinars this coming week to give you an early look at what’s there and how to use it.

• Wednesday, September 15 at 10:00am Pacific (which is 1pm EST).  Click here to register (space is limited).
• Friday, September 17 at 1:00pm Pacific (which is 4:00pm EST).  Click here to register (space is limited).

If you’re at all interested in getting under the hood of PeopleTools 8.51, don’t miss these.

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More PeopleSoft posts.

As many in the PeopleSoft world may or may not know, Oracle is on the verge of releasing PeopleTools 8.5 this year.  This release is significant because of some of the advances that have been incorporated into it.  Many of the enhancements are going to greatly improve the end-user experience, and rumor has it that the new release will be backwards-compatible to all 8.4 PeopleSoft releases.  So if you are thinking of upgrading or were trying to come up with reasons to do so, I have put together the top six reasons you would want you to go for it.

1. AJAX – PeopleSoft will now benefit from Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technology, allowing the UI to perform partial page refreshes, which is, in a word, awesome.  Of all the things in this release, this has got to be the best thing since sliced bread.  This has been a long time coming.  Nice work, Oracle.
2. Menu Navigation – The 8.5 release will present a change in the Menu Navigation with a context sensitivity that allows the system to redraw only the appropriate hierarchy.  Again, very nice.
3. Grid Enhancements – Talk about cool: users will now be able to drag and drop the columns into the positions that are relevant to them. No more clicking the ‘Customize’ link and the little arrow GUI elements that were so irritating to most users.
4. Change Assistant – The improved performance of the file deployment process will make this tool what it should have been from the beginning.
5. Related Content – This will add an extra dimension to the system, but will require some work to get the full value from what this provides.  If you haven’t built up your BI systems yet, you may not be able to fully leverage the capabilities of this.  But we can help with this if you’ve been thinking of moving toward BI this year.  (It’s an incredibly hot topic among CIOs, and we hear it constantly from our clients.)
6. Secured server-based file directories – This will be of benefit to sys admins, as it will no longer be necessary to store your log and trace files in the root PS_HOME directory.  Instead, you will be able to map them to a place where the users who really need access to this information can get it.

There are many other enhancements as well, which you can find on the Oracle MetaLink3 website. Just search on ‘PeopleTools 8.5 release value proposition’ once you have logged in.

Pretty cool stuff.  Drop us a line in the comments if you have any questions, or track us down on Twitter.