Understanding Desktop Integration

Desktop Integration provides seamless integration between Microsoft Office and your PeopleSoft applications, enabling your organization to schedule and track appointments, meetings, tasks, and corresponding documentation. This is accomplished through a framework to the Microsoft Office suite that enables PeopleSoft applications to extend functionality into the office suite through layers. A two-way communication is established between the PeopleSoft application and Microsoft Outlook and Word, with Outlook receiving the information from and sending updates to the PeopleSoft application.

The framework consists of the following components:

Microsoft Outlook and Word Add-In

Add-ins are supplemental programs that extend the functionality of Office applications, adding custom commands and custom features that plug into the application through well-known entry points. The Microsoft Outlook and Word Add-ins contain all of the pieces necessary for sending information to and receiving information from the PeopleSoft applications. Microsoft Office Add-ins invoke functions in this layer for user authentication, launching web services to receive and send data from the PeopleSoft application. On the PeopleSoft side, services and application classes exist that accept the requests from Microsoft Outlook and Word and perform the necessary actions and data retrieval. The Microsoft Outlook and Word Add-ins use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to connect to the PeopleSoft applications for secure and synchronous messaging.

See Understanding the PeopleSoft and Outlook Integration.

Integration Broker/Web Services Layer

Oracle uses the Integration Broker to connect Microsoft Outlook and Word to the PeopleSoft applications. Oracle delivers predefined interfaces and security classes. Desktop Integration does not require a dedicated server nor any additional hardware. To connect Microsoft Outlook and Word to PeopleSoft applications and ensure security, SSL is required.

Desktop Integration Layer

The Desktop Integration application classes are responsible for receiving the messages sent through Integration Broker from the Microsoft Office applications. The Desktop Integration layer creates, updates, and moves the data in and out of the PeopleSoft system and is responsible for responding to all events. As events are processed, control is optionally passed on to the PeopleSoft Application Layer for handling.

PeopleSoft Application Layer—for the PeopleSoft Applications to Use

Any application-specific functions are contained within the PeopleSoft Application Layer. When you are creating new integrations or customizing existing ones, all application-specific code is contained within the application layer.

These are the prerequisites for using Desktop Integration:

  • Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher.

    You must license and install Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher. Oracle does not provide this software, you must purchase and license it separately.

  • Microsoft Word 2007 or higher.

    You must license and install Microsoft Word 2007 or higher. Oracle does not provide this software, you must purchase and license it separately.

  • Integration Broker.

    You do not need a dedicated server. Oracle delivers the interface predefined. Your Integration Broker must be configured and started.

  • Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

    This is used to connect to Microsoft Outlook. This is in the form of an https URL. Desktop Integration requires a secure connection for all communication.

  • Unique System IDs.

    System IDs must be unique across your organization to allow use against multiple databases.