PeopleSoft Selective Adoption
Deliver new features to your business faster. Selective Adoption delivers ease and agility.
Quickly and easily adopt new features and apply maintenance. Adapt your strategy, schedules, and budgets to update applications and PeopleTools frequently. Choose only the updates you want, only when you want them.
A new mindset
In a world without upgrades, business systems are agile. Quickly and easily to adopt new features and apply maintenance to your PeopleSoft Applications.
Updates are frequent—new features and maintenance are easy to apply. The work that used to go into planning an upgrade now happens throughout the year as a normal part of updating and maintaining the system.
You're in control—you decide what to apply and when to apply them.
Stay current in PeopleTools
To facilitate easy updates for new application features and fixes, stay on a supported version of PeopleTools. (With the current PeopleTools support policy, a PeopleTools version is no longer supported 24 months after the next PeopleTools release.)
PeopleTools update guidelines
Regularly update to the most current PeopleTools patch level (for example, at least once a year).
Every 12-24 months, upgrade to the current PeopleTools release.
In rare cases, bug fixes might require a certain PeopleTools patch level. Oracle makes every effort to ensure that required patches have been generally available for 9-12 months.
Stay informed
Keep business leaders and IT up-to-date on new features and changes. Business and technical analysts both need to know about what PeopleSoft is working on, when new Update Images will be available, and what has already been delivered in the Update Images.
Analysts benefit from regularly reviewing the following resources:
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PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) homepage
Before downloading an Update Image, visit the PUM homepage to find important information about the contents of the image.
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Cumulative Feature Overview (CFO)
The CFO tool shows deltas between releases and delivered PeopleSoft update images. Business analysts use this tool to track changes that have already been applied and set priorities for features that haven't been applied. Technical analysts use it to determine the minimum PeopleTools requirements for each feature.
The CFO tool is also a great resource for learning about features. It often contains links to video feature overviews, PeopleSoft Talks, and documentation about specific features.
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Planned Features and Enhancements (PFE)
New features and enhancements are delivered throughout the year in PeopleSoft update images. The PFE information center provides a high-level view of planned new features and enhancements to all applications and technology. All items listed on the site are planned to be delivered through PeopleSoft update images within the next 12 to 18 months. Every time an image is released, the site is updated to reflect the latest plans.
Business analysts track the planned features and enhancements to determine whether a feature is important to the organization or impacts current customizations and to identify product areas that are being enhanced.
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PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) dashboard
The PUM dashboard is available for images based on PeopleTools 8.55 and higher. The dashboard uses pivot grids to give you insight into the status of your maintenance and adoption of new features.
Define your strategy
Define your strategy, adjust your schedule, and set your budget for frequent feature and maintenance adoption. These tasks are interrelated—when scheduling and budgeting for new feature adoption, also consider your maintenance strategy (and vice versa).
Application update guidelines
Immediately apply critical (P1) tax, regulatory, and security updates using the latest Update Image.
Regularly apply scheduled, low-cost, high impact features and fixes. These are small, targeted efforts that require little development time and have a low impact on users.
Every 12-16 months, update your products to current maintenance levels and take advantage of all the latest new features. When your products are up-to-date, applications run better and future features and maintenance are easier to apply. Choose scheduling that works best for your organization--stagger updates to occur at different times or do them all at once.
For additional details to consider in your strategy, see the following additional details:
Customization guidelines
PeopleSoft enables you to tailor the applications to meet your needs, such as customizing business processes, pages, business rules, workflows, data structures and more. Your Selective Adoption strategy should consider how these customizations impact the ease with which you apply new features and maintenance.
Follow these guidelines:
- Prioritize configuration over customization. Configurations are stored with application data instead of PeopleTools data. New features, such as related actions, related content, pivot grids, dashboards, and WorkCenters can all be configured.
- Focus on high-value, low-cost customizations, like new records, components, and pages.
- Avoid customizing existing PeopleTools objects, which could make applying maintenance to the objects more costly and time consuming. Instead of customizing existing objects, add new PeopleCode, components, pages, and other PeopleTools objects.
- Replace customizations when similar functionality becomes available with new delivered features from PeopleSoft.
- Track all customizations and import them into new PeopleSoft update images to identify impacts on new features and maintenance.
Regression testing guidelines
Regression testing is critical to ensure that new features and fixes don't impact the system in unexpected areas. Because Selective Adoption encourages you to apply new features and maintenance more frequently than in the past, automated regression test scripts are essential.
Creating regression tests can be time-consuming. Start with simple tests in areas of the system that are relatively static. Gradually work up to areas that are more complex and dynamic.
You can use any regression testing tools, but PeopleSoft Test Framework is specifically designed to work with PeopleTools. With PeopleSoft Test Framework, testers can:
- Record and play back online use of PeopleSoft systems.
- Manipulate tests, identify expected results, and report on any test failures.
See PeopleSoft Test Framework for more information.
Scheduling guidelines
With Selective Adoption, you'll be scheduling a variety of small, targeted projects and larger projects that require more time and resources. You might be running multiple projects at the same time.
You have flexibility in how you schedule projects. For example, you might apply maintenance and new features at the same time or at different times. You might stagger products to get current at different times.
Follow these guidelines:
- Build in time for regression testing.
- Don't apply maintenance to products you don't use.
- Schedule projects based on the availability of resources, rather than on the availability of Update Images. (In some cases this is not possible, such as when tax maintenance availability is directly tied to the image.)
- Begin each project with the latest Update Image and continue using the same Update Image until the project is completed.
- When running multiple projects concurrently, follow appropriate rules for selecting and applying change packages.
Measure your progress
Make sure your feature adoption and maintenance strategies are being followed. Create processes to monitor:
- Are you adopting high-value features?
- Are your strategies being followed?
- How up-to-date is your maintenance?
The PUM dashboard provides useful analytics that help you understand the maintenance level of your system.
See what customers are doing With Selective Adoption
Read customer stories from PeopleSoft Innovators