Blogs

Featured Topics Education Series: WorkCenter of My Universe - Part 2

By Chris Lopac posted 07-27-2020 07:17 AM

  

Title: WorkCenter of My Universe – Part 2
Author: Chris Lopac, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Blog Series Overview:
The Featured Topics Education Blog Series is sponsored and hosted by the HEUG Campus Community Advisory Group, with the intention to assist and educate the user community about featured topics of interest to the community.  To view other articles in the series, please go to the Article Index for the Featured Topics Blog Series.

Article Overview:
If you’ve read in any of my blogs or watched any of my HEUG/MidHEUG presentations, you may have picked up that I don’t often use PeopleSoft lingo when describing how to build out PeopleSoft functionality. Today, I continue that trend…with lasagna!

My mom passed away three years ago today and my family always celebrates my mom’s legacy by making her famous lasagna recipe on this date; it’s a way to fill our home with the great smells that were always present when stepping into her home. It brings back some of those memories of family sitting down together, smiling, and eating so much that you just want to lay on the couch the rest of the night. Today will be no different!

We will get out the lasagna pan (often two), as mom’s pan seemed large enough to feed a village.  Additionally, we will set aside the noodles, the spaghetti sauce, the Italian sausage, the numerous cheeses, as well as the cottage cheese, and all of the seasonings.

My goal is to show you that creating a WorkCenter is no different than whipping up mom’s famous lasagna (stick with me, please)!

Article:
The Pan
When you make a lasagna, you need a strong solid pan to bake the lasagna. Don’t even think about getting one of those throw away tin foil pans; the pan will collapse under the weight of the massive deliciousness.

When building a WorkCenter, you need to have a strong base/pan to support it; that’s accomplished within the Manage WorkCenter Dashboards page (PeopleTools > Portal > WorkCenter > Manage WorkCenter Dashboards – Create new WorkCenter dashboard page link). The Dashboard is the lasagna pan; it holds the WorkCenter and all of its goodness! Here is where you tell PeopleSoft where you want it to “hold” the WorkCenter.

WC1.PNG

 

WC2.PNG

Key Fields:

  • Dashboard Label: This is what appears within the Search Menu/Navigator
  • Parent Folder: Where do you want your WorkCenter to reside? We have a folder within our custom navigation that houses all of our WorkCenters, U_FA_WORKCENTERS
  • Security Type: You can either leave the WorkCenter wide open (public) or lock it down with a particular permission list.

The Prep Work
Lasagna is a process. The prep work often gets overlooked by the final product. Mom’s recipe calls for the Italian sausage to be browned, an onion to be chopped, cloves of garlic to be added, and cheeses to be mixed. Building a WorkCenter has the same type of “prep work”. Similarly, there are configuration steps behind the scene that need to take place before everything comes together.

Once you save your WorkCenter dashboard, you are taken back to the Manage WorkCenter Dashboard Pages. From here, you can add different Pagelets to the WorkCenter, but I almost always skip this step. Pagelets added here show up on the larger part of a WorkCenter and I prefer to have my pagelets housed in the left pane. Side note, don’t skip steps when following one of your mom’s recipes!

As part of the prep work for the WorkCenter, I’m able to add pagelets via the Manage WorkCenter Pages (PeopleTools > Portal > WorkCenter > Manage WorkCenter Pages – Create new WorkCenter page link).

Once you click the Create new WorkCenter page link, you are provided a page to connect back to the Dashboard page. This is why you need to create the Dashboard page first!

WC3.PNG


The Pagelets section is where I plug in the pagelets that I want to appear within the WorkCenter. My “Go To” pagelets all begin with EOFSPC, they are delivered pagelets that allow us to pull in queries, reports, links, etc.

Once you complete this configuration, you are done with the prep work of the lasagna!

Layering the Lasagna
All of the prep work is done, now you get to layer the lasagna. You are so close to being done; with each ingredient added, and each layer completed, you can start to see the finished product (and may even sneak a bite).

The Layering of my WorkCenter Lasagna is where everything comes together. All of the prep work was done as a prerequisite to this important step! When you are ready to start “layering” your WorkCenter and see it fill up the pan, navigate to Enterprise Components > WorkCenter/Dashboards > Configure Pagelets.

Just like the first two pages, once you navigate to the page, you will need to click the link at the bottom to create a new page (Add a New Value) link. Make sure you provide a unique Configuration ID, that best fits your WorkCenter. From here, this is where we will build our beautiful, delicious lasagna.

As much as I’d love to put this WorkCenter in the oven; I don’t want to speed over the different configuration pages within the Configure Pagelets section and I actually need to go make a lasagna for dinner, so I’ll cover the Configure Pagelets in detail in the next blog for our series.

WC4.PNG

0 comments
71 views

Permalink