What Is an Activity Guide?

Activity guides are a PeopleTools feature that allow you to define guided procedures for a user or group of users to complete. Users are presented with a list of tasks, or steps, that need to be completed to finish the procedure. Activity guides can be useful in a number of procedural scenarios. For example:

• The on-boarding of a new employee.

• Benefits enrollment.

• A life change event, such as a marriage or the birth of a child.

• Period end closing.

• System or feature configuration.

An activity guide lists the tasks (referred to as action items) that need to be completed by a user or group of users. These action items are linked to specific local or remote transactions or external URLs. The action items can be assigned to a specific user by user ID or to a group of users by PeopleTools role. Activity guides provide a hierarchical organization of sequential or non-sequential tasks.

Typically, activity guides are generated from reusable definitions known as activity guide templates. These activity guide templates and action items are defined and managed through pages available under the PeopleTools menu. At run time, an activity guide instance can be instantiated from a template by providing context data. The state of the entire procedure as well as that of individual tasks is maintained between sessions, allowing a user to return later to complete the activity.

Important:

PeopleTools activity guides are very different from workflow activity guides that are created from workflow activities within PeopleSoft Application Designer. See Workflow Technology: Understanding Workflow Activity Guides for more information on workflow activity guides.