People Tools 8.50 – First Look

It has been a long time! I was looking for something big to come my way to resume blogging about PeopleSoft. And this evening it just happened… yes, got a glimpse of People Tools 8.50. It simply is amazing.

Here are a few things I noticed at the first glance.
For those of you who can’t wait to see it, scroll down and there is a link to the flash presentation that shows PeopleTools 8.50 live in action.

PeopleTools 8.50 Highlights

• It looks great, really great. You would agree with me when you see it finally from the link below.
• The PeopleSoft home page has full pagelet capabilities. These pageletes can be dragged and dropped to customize the page layout.
• Heavy use of AJAX has highly improved the UI.
• You can search and sort the new cascading menus – without refreshing the pages.
• Within the favorites, you have a recently used set of pages – handy when working only on a couple of pages a day.
• Partial page refresh save a lot of user wait time.
• Look-ups are now shown in a pop-up enabling us still to see the data on the underlying page. Thanks to AJAX again.
• Pop-ups are provided while hovering the mouse over key business objects like Vendor – handy information without leaving the page.
• Search fields have type ahead functionality just like the one in Google – shows possible words while you type.
• Grids have horizontal + vertical scroll bars, allows columns to be dragged and dropped to new positions.
• Related Information frame configurable by business users to show more content related to a specific page; say vendor info on a PO page.
• Seamless Web 2.0 in PeopleSoft workspace – wikis, discussions, documents and more. RSS support.

That’s it from the first look.

Now, it’s time to experience it for yourself.
Have a look at the flash presentation from Oracle on People Tools 5.0 here.