Federation University Australia deployed PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Program Enrollment to deliver the flexible functionality needed to cater to the needs of all of their students, in addition to taking the unique approach of upgrading to PeopleTools 8.55 and enabling the Fluid user interface in conjunction with their Campus Solutions 9.0 environment, deploying 21 Homepages and 127 Tiles for all staff and students, creating excitement and demand to accelerate their upgrade to Campus Solutions 9.2.
In 2014 Federation University Australia, a dual sector university with both Higher Education and TAFE students, decided to bring all their students into a single system. Higher Education students were already being managed through Campus Solutions 9.0 so a decision was made to bring TAFE aboard. Due to the specific and defined nature of TAFE enrolments, the university looked to new technologies being released by Oracle, namely Program Enrolment, to provide a clean and defined enrolment process for these new students. Federation University decided to be pilot implementers of Program Enrolment functionality and expanded the Academic Progress Tracker to be a one stop shop for all TAFE enrolments.
Over the next few years we watched Oracle release more innovations and looked at how we could utilise these to improve our business. With the release of PeopleTools 8.55 and the new Fluid Navigation we decided to embrace this change in preparation for our eventual move to Campus Solutions 9.2. In 2016 Federation University implemented vanilla fluid navigation to all staff and students. 21 Homepages and over 127 tiles were created as part of this project and are being utilised and managed successfully by the business today.
Without the utilisation of Program Enrolment we would never have been able to cater for the specific needs of the TAFE sector for which Campus Solutions is not specifically designed. The flexibility of this functionality and our innovative and creative configuration of it allowed us to support all our students in a single system. This has been so successful that we are now looking to incorporate our Higher Education students into this same area to allow us to provide a tailored and streamlined enrolment process to all our students.
The implementation of vanilla fluid navigation allowed us to give our users a sneak peek at the fluid technology that would be slowly fed out by Oracle into our soon to be upgraded 9.2 environment. We had a resoundingly positive response from staff and students. The only negative critique we received was that they wanted more! And this is our intention in 2018 with the upgrade of 9.2 and our intended release of a completely fluid Self Service environment. This environment will be a combination of the delivered fluid Self Service pages from Oracle and custom fluid pages for Federation University specific information. In fact, during this project we have also utilised new functionality such as Activity Guides, to enable us to retire previous customisations and deliver them in a vanilla fashion, this includes our Student Enrolment Checklist and our Application for Graduation. We have shown the business some mock ups and demonstrations from the new fluid 9.2 pages and they are all very excited that we are able to provide our students with the responsive design that they are asking for!