This preface discusses:
About PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
Using this PeopleBook.
Related PeopleBooks.
PeopleBooks and the PeopleSoft Online Library.
This section discusses:
PeopleSoft Portal Solutions product family.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal feature overview.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and PeopleTools.
This section discusses the products that are part of the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions product family:
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
PeopleSoft Community Portal.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Internal Controls Enforcer.
Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is a world-class portal solution with many robust content and collaborative features. The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is ideal for customers wishing to deploy an unlimited number of communities across enterprise that focus on PeopleSoft application business processes.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 contains a rich set of Web 2.0 features. For instance, collaborative workspaces and related content services can be keyed to PeopleSoft application transactions providing contextually relevant collaboration.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 provides these important new features:
Blogs.
Feed publishing.
Related content services—specifically, the Related Discussion service, the Related Links service, and the Related Tags service.
Tagging (also known as social bookmarking).
Wiki content.
These new features add to the existing features already present in PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal:
Action items
Collaborative workspaces
Community calendars
Context Manager
Discussion forums
Document management
Polls and surveys
Resource Finder
Searches and saved searches
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal Feature Overview.
Oracle's PeopleSoft Community Portal joins PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal as an option for creating a portal experience using the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions product family.
PeopleSoft Community Portal has the same collaborative features and functions as PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. However, with PeopleSoft Community Portal, you are limited to creating and managing a maximum of three sites. With PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, you can create and manage an unlimited number of sites.
See PeopleSoft Community Portal.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Internal Controls Enforcer
Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Internal Controls Enforcer is designed to automate and enforce internal controls required under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Using the product's monitoring and diagnostic capabilities, you can reduce the cost of complying with the new regulations and the risk of unforeseen changes in internal controls. PeopleSoft Enterprise Internal Controls Enforcer will work in conjunction with other PeopleSoft corporate governance solutions to make the entire compliance process repeatable and auditable, allowing you to focus on running your business.
In addition, the product enables you to continuously track and monitor controls, and, optionally, certify their effectiveness at interim times throughout the year to support certifications that are required for Section 302 of Sarbanes-Oxley.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Internal Controls Enforcer 9.1 PeopleBook.
Two key characteristics distinguish PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal as a rich Web 2.0 platform:
First, PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is a traditional portal framework that can be used for aggregating and managing content.
Second, its collaborative capabilities make PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal a functional application that complements the features found in PeopleSoft applications.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is built on the same architecture and with the same tools as PeopleSoft applications. This provides native integration and single sign-on with PeopleSoft applications. Because PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is built on the PeopleTools platform, these core characteristics are also available in your portal implementations:
Branding.
Common toolset across all PeopleSoft applications.
Database, application server, and web server independence.
Feed Publishing Framework.
Related Content Framework.
Rich text editor.
Role-based security and access management.
Single sign-on.
SOA support through Integration Broker.
Combined with pre-built application content delivered as PeopleSoft application portal packs, these features make configuration and deployment of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal for a PeopleSoft-rich environment much easier than with other portals.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal provides numerous collaboration and Web 2.0 features such as blogs, content management, discussion forums feeds, tagging, collaborative workspaces and others. Each of these features is discussed briefly in this section.
Miscellaneous to-do’s and issues are frequently assigned during project status meetings and in workspaces. Successful resolution of these detailed action items is critical to meeting broader business objectives. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal provides an action items feature that helps project leaders track open action items assigned to various team members as well as capture their resolution for a given project.
Blogs (or weblogs) are a familiar and useful means for authoring and broadcasting information for an individual or team. Blogs are also participatory in that they allow for commentary and feedback from the audience. In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, blogs are integrated with other features such as feeds, notifications, search, tagging, and workspaces.
A WYSIWYG interface allows branding administrators to define and deploy header and footer elements for the portal. Because branding is integrated with site management as well as collaborative workspaces, subject matter experts can override these branding elements locally, making it easier for non-portal experts to create compelling sub-communities within the portal.
In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, calendars allow communities to manage events within portals, sites, and workspaces. Individual communities or workgroups can maintain their own distinct calendars. Users can subscribe to any or each of the calendars to which they have access and display the results as a unified calendar on their homepage or within a workspace.
A collaborative workspace is a virtual team room. Workspaces can be created to facilitate the completion of any project that requires a team to work collaboratively to accomplish its goals. Some collaborative projects focus on temporary issues that require short, intense collaborative sessions, such as closing a sales deal or an open problem incident. Other projects may be ongoing, such as coordinating the work for a department.
In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, collaborative workspaces incorporate the product's other collaborative features including action items, blogs, calendars, discussions, documents, feeds, polls, search, tagging, and wikis. In addition, workspaces can be contextually linked to PeopleSoft application pages to provide robust collaboration in the context of transactions and business processes.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal's content management system enables you to organize all your content creation processes. The content management system helps you to manage, create, and organize content, through approval, version management, and publication features. The resulting content is ready and available for browsing by users and for reuse in portal pagelets, news publications, related information, and workspaces. Content migration allows you to author content in a staging database and then migrate the finalized content to a production database.
In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, Context Manager appears as a frame on the right side of the page displaying pagelets that are loaded with appropriate information based on the target page or transaction. Context Manager is the framework within which features—such as, related information, related contacts, related resources, related discussions, related workspaces, related links, and content ratings—operate. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal also delivers related content services to provide PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal features on any PeopleSoft application pages.
Discussion forums provide a platform that groups can use to discuss topics of interest. Participants can post discussion topics, such as issues, suggestions, or questions, and receive replies and feedback. In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, discussion forums are integrated with other features such as action items, alerts, documents, feeds, notifications, search, tagging, and workspaces. Standalone forums within a portal or site can be managed as moderated or unmoderated.
Feed Publishing and Consumption
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal leverages the PeopleTools Feed Publishing Framework to deliver feeds for several features including blogs, discussion forums, news publications, and workspaces. You can use the framework to publish secure or public feeds. These feeds make it easy for people to subscribe to information that interests them, rather than logging into the application that delivers this information. PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal also provides pagelets and features that facilitate the discovery and consumption of internal and external feeds.
My Links functionality provides an easy way for to bookmark your most frequently needed and accessed content. My Links serves as a collection of bookmarks to specific PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal pages, to PeopleSoft transactions, and to non-PeopleSoft content such as external websites.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal provides polls as a simple way to gather opinions and comments from portal users using a pagelet that is displayed on the portal or site homepage, in a workspace, or attached to a menu item. While polls cover a single question only, surveys allow you to create and distribute questionnaires and evaluate the responses.
The PeopleTools Related Content Framework provides the tools for subject matter experts or portal administrators to contextually link application pages with collaborative content provided as related content services. PeopleTools provides the service definitions for three PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal related content services:
Related Discussion service
Related Links service
Related Tags service
These related content services provide features of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal that can be added to PeopleSoft application pages through the framework. While the service definitions are provided in PeopleTools, an installed PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal database is required to provide the services and to store the related data.
Resource Finder is a highly flexible repository that you can configure to receive data loads containing information about any organizational resource, along with links that relate these resources to each other. These resources are typically things like customers, suppliers, employees, departments, locations, companies, and business units, but can also be easily expanded to include things like products and projects, for example.
In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, searches can be executed from the portal header, from within specific features, and via saved searches. From the portal header and the search page, searches can be scoped or limited to specific types of content. Because tags are integrated into search indexes, search results improved based on user tagging. Integration with Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search (SES) exposes PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal content to external systems via web services.
Tags, also known as social bookmarks, provide the means for users to store, organize, search, and manage content bookmarks in PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. Tagging increases the probability of properly characterizing the content and hence its discovery and use. In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, tagging is integrated directly with other content types including blogs, collaborative workspaces, content management system items, and discussion forums. In addition, the tagging framework is available through the Related Tags service and to non-PeopleSoft applications as a web service.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal supports integration with:
Calendar servers: Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007.
Email servers: IMAP, Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007, or POP.
Instant messaging domains: GTalk, Sametime, XMPP, or Yahoo.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES).
Wikis support the collaborative authoring needs of portal users. In PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, wikis are available in collaborative workspaces, which means that the security controls of workspaces apply to wikis. Wikis incorporate the easy to use rich text editor and other features to provide a collaborative authoring environment.
The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal user interface relies on these features and others from PeopleTools:
AJAX features such as modal dialog boxes, drop-down menu navigation, and partial page and pagelet refreshes.
Branding updates incorporating the SWAN style sheet.
Menu bread crumbs.
Pagelet drag-and-drop.
Pagelet Wizard pagelets with help and search.
To understand the functionality of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, Oracle recommends that you familiarize yourself with PeopleTools, focusing especially on the PeopleBooks and chapters that are devoted to portal functionality. Because PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal builds upon the basic internet architecture that is delivered with PeopleTools, this information gives you an excellent foundation of knowledge upon which the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal suite of PeopleBooks builds.
PeopleTools portal technology is built on top of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and enables you to easily access and administer multiple content providers, including PeopleSoft databases such as Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise HRMS or Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM, as well as non-PeopleSoft content. It enables you to combine content from these multiple sources and deliver the result to users in a unified, simple-to-use interface.
The main elements of the PeopleTools portal technology are a portal servlet and an application server. These two elements work together to provide common portal processing features such as page assembly, search ability, content management, navigation, and homepage personalization.
PeopleTools PeopleBooks cover the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and PeopleTools portal technology in detail.
See Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: PeopleTools Portal Technology.
This section discusses:
About this book.
Common elements used in PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
Chapters in this PeopleBook are grouped into the following parts. See the associated references for more information about the chapters and general content included in each part.
Part 1: Introduction.
This part provides an overview of getting started with PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and an introduction to PeopleSoft Community Portal.
See Introduction.
Part 2: Navigation
This part provides an overview of how to get around in PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and describes navigation features such as My Links.
See Navigation.
Part 3: Collaborative Features
This part describes the collaborative features of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal such as action items, blogs, calendars, discussion forums, feeds and alerts, and tagging.
Part 4: Other Portal Features
This part describes other portal features such as polls, surveys, integration with third-party email and calendar systems, and menu item requests.
Part 5: Performing Searches
This part describes how to perform searches and how to save and reuse searches.
See Performing Searches.
Part 6: Context Manager
This part describes how to set up and use Context Manager and iTracker.
See Context Manager.
Part 7: Related Content Services
This part describes the setup and use of three delivered related content services: Related Discussion service, Related Links service, Related Tags service.
This section discusses the rich text editor.
About the Rich Text Editor
Many PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal features—including blogs, discussion forums, text/HTML content, wiki content, and others—employ the rich text editor.
The rich text editor provides editing and formatting capabilities for long edit boxes. It allows for the rich formatting of text content, including structural elements such as HTML tags and lists, formatting treatments such as bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images among other features. Moreover, the rich text editor tool bar is extensible by using a custom settings configuration file.
See Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: Using PeopleSoft Applications, “Working With Pages,” Working With Rich Text-Enabled Fields.
This section discusses:
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal PeopleBooks.
PeopleTools PeopleBooks.
The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal PeopleBook library includes:
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Branding
This PeopleBook covers the branding feature, which enables you to apply various branding themes to the portal, portal sites, and collaborative workspaces to present multiple visual designs and deliver appropriate links for specific user audiences.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Collaborative Workspaces
This PeopleBook covers setup, administration, and use of collaborative workspaces, which are virtual team rooms that facilitate collaboration on a variety collaborative projects and processes.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Collaborative Workspaces.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Content Management System
This PeopleBook describes the content management system, which includes features to help you manage, create, and organize content. The resulting content is ready and available for placement in various portal pagelets and news publications; reuse in workspaces, calendars, and other portal features; or available just for browsing.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Content Management System.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Portal and Site Administration
This PeopleBook covers tasks for administering portals and sites including product configuration, system-wide setup and administration, integration with third-party systems, and so on.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Portal and Site Administration.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Resource Finder
This PeopleBook describes how to setup and use Resource Finder, a highly flexible repository that describes any organizational resource, along with links that relate these resources to each other.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Resource Finder.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Using Portal Features
The PeopleBook you are reading, this book covers setup and usage of items such as blogs, calendars, discussion forums, feeds, tagging, searching, related content services, and other features of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal.
See PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1 PeopleBook: Using Portal Features.
The PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook library contains the complete set of books covering PeopleTools 8.50. In particular, several of these books are useful to the setup, administration, and use of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal including:
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: Feed Publishing Framework
The PeopleTools Feed Publishing Framework supports the publication of PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal data as feeds. In addition, the framework can be used to develop custom feed types.
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: Integration Broker Administration
Integration Broker facilitates the exposure of PeopleSoft business logic as services and the consumption of external web services. Integration Broker also supports synchronous and asynchronous messaging between PeopleSoft applications and with third-party systems.
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: PeopleTools Portal Technology
PeopleTools portal technology is the foundation of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal product. This book covers critical portal technologies such as portal implementation, PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture, Pagelet Wizard, the Related Content Framework, and others.
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: Security Administration
This book covers important security-related topics including PeopleTools user profiles, roles, permission lists, single sign-on (SSO), and others.
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: Using PeopleSoft Applications
This PeopleBook provides general information about PeopleSoft applications useful to all users of PeopleSoft systems. Topics include an introduction to the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture, explanation of how to navigate through the system, how to perform searches, elements of application pages, and so on.
Note. These and other PeopleBooks in the PeopleTools library are referenced as needed.
See Also
PeopleBooks and the PeopleSoft Online Library
A companion PeopleBook called PeopleBooks and the Online PeopleSoft Library contains general information, including:
Understanding the PeopleSoft online library and related documentation.
How to send PeopleSoft documentation comments and suggestions to Oracle.
How to access hosted PeopleBooks, downloadable HTML PeopleBooks, and downloadable PDF PeopleBooks as well as documentation updates.
Understanding PeopleBook structure.
Typographical conventions and visual cues used in PeopleBooks.
ISO country codes and currency codes.
PeopleBooks that are common across multiple applications.
Common elements used in PeopleBooks.
Navigating the PeopleBooks interface and searching the PeopleSoft online library.
Displaying and printing screen shots and graphics in PeopleBooks.
How to manage the PeopleSoft online library including full-text searching and configuring a reverse proxy server.
Understanding documentation integration and how to integrate customized documentation into the library.
Glossary of useful PeopleSoft terms that are used in PeopleBooks.
See Also
PeopleBooks and the PeopleSoft Online Library Preface
Accessing PeopleBooks and the PeopleSoft Online Library
Managing the PeopleSoft Online Library and PeopleBooks
Customizing the PeopleSoft Online Library
Glossary of PeopleSoft Enterprise Terms