Quest Experience Week—our annual virtual conference—happened last week, and it was another great chance for our community to hear from the Oracle PeopleSoft team about new developments within PeopleSoft. Marc Weintraub, Vice President of Product Strategy for PeopleSoft, gave the keynote on PeopleSoft day, which focused on the product line update and Oracle’s ongoing investment strategy. Here are some things we learned during Marc’s presentation.

The Future is Now: Today’s PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft has modernized their application under consistent design principles: a simple, intuitive, mobile user experience, agile innovation of business functions and low cost, responsive development operations. Features of today’s PeopleSoft include: an intuitive mobile experience, actionable, embedded analytics, global search, alerts and notifications, flexibility with room for personalization, selective adoption of new features, no applications upgrade needed and deployment of PeopleSoft to the Cloud. Customer responses are positive, some saying the application is 70 percent cheaper to run; others say the new application has reduced customizations by 40 percent. And one of the best new features is the ability to run PeopleSoft using tablets and phones.

Strength of Our Community

PeopleSoft now has over 5,000 customers worldwide, over 3,000 of which use Selective Adoption. PeopleSoft now boasts a 72 percent adoption rate, with over 500 Fluid UI users. PeopleSoft customers are experiencing new feature adoption in as little as eight weeks and, with our new application features, PeopleSoft has seen over 100 deployments to Oracle Cloud.

Selective Adoption in Action: Investment in New Capabilities

The following are some examples Marc gave of PeopleSoft’s continuous innovation in action:

• Innovations in HR Self-Service—initial delivery in HCM PI 8; enhanced in 12 subsequent PI’s up to PI 22
• Innovations in Recruiting—initial delivery in HCM PI 18; enhanced in PI 19 and PI 22
• Innovations in Onboarding—initial delivery in HCM 23; future enhancements include Pre-Boarding
• Innovations in Expense Reporting—initial delivery in FSCM PI 19; enhanced in PI 22 and PI 24
• Innovations in Supplier Relations—initial delivery in FSCM PI 23; future enhancements include redesign PO Acknowledgement
• Innovations in Customer Collections—initial delivery in FSCM PI 24; future enhancements include one-click full balance pay
• Innovations in Cloud Deployment—initial delivery in CM PI 3; enhanced in PI 4 and PI 5

Speaking in sheer numbers, 900 new application features have been delivered via continuous innovation in action.

You are PeopleSoft

Maintaining the strength of the community is key to PeopleSoft’s long-term viability. All of the following are activities that support the PeopleSoft community: sharing customer success stories, recognizing customer innovation by submitting a nomination and communicating directly to customers or participating in discussions at COLLABORATE 18. Communication has been made effortless with the PeopleSoft Information Portal, the PeopleSoft YouTube Channel, the PeopleSoft twitter account, etc.

Ongoing Investment

Moving forward with the continual quarterly release of update images, PeopleSoft’s ongoing investment will center on keeping the foundational elements in place, delivering on functional enhancements, focusing on customer input on their needs and details on the “Planned Features and Enhancements” page. The only constant is change to the user experience: Fluid UI vs. Classic Plus. Changes with Classic Plus include: updates to grid controls, change in spacing and fonts, standardization of coloring, new layout of headers, new styling of tabs and new shading and coloring of buttons. Classic Plus is enabled by PeopleTools 8.56 with initial applications uptake delivered in Update Images HCM PI 24 and FSCM PI 26. Classic Plus is on by default, but controllable at global and component level. It is important to note the continued development of Fluid UI pages where appropriate.

PeopleTools and Cloud Manager Roadmap

PeopleTools

• Capabilities to help minimize customizations
• Enhancements to search framework and Elasticsearch
• Additional Fluid UI Features
• Further Streamlining of Lifecycle Management

Cloud Manager

• Expanded Cloud Deployment/Cloud Manager Capabilities
• Core PeopleTools Investments (App Designer, Security, Etc.)
• Cloud Manager Analytics and Notifications
• Resource Optimization including better Topology Definition
• Migration to Oracle Cloud of non-Linux Environments

Thanks to Marc Weintraub and the PeopleSoft team for their continued engagement with the Quest community. If you want to learn more about the PeopleSoft product line update and investment strategy, check out the presentation recording and slide deck from Marc’s presentation during Quest Experience Week. We look forward to learning more about PeopleSoft upgrades and technologies with you at our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18, April 22-26, 2018. Follow COLLABORATE 2018 updates on Twitter using the hashtag #C18LV.