Discontinuing classic navigation support with PeopleTools 8.58
Author: Jami Kong, Butler University
Blog Series Overview:
The Campus Solutions 9.2 Blog Series is sponsored and hosted by the HEUG Campus Community Advisory Group, with the intention to assist and educate the user community on features and functionality specific to Campus Solutions 9.2. To view other articles in the series, please go to the Article Index for the Campus Solutions 9.2 Blog Series.
Article Overview:
The intent of this article is to inform the Community that Classic Navigation Support is to be Discontinued. The Fluid user interface was first made available in PeopleTools 8.54 and a recent Oracle blog announced the retirement of Classic Navigation support is coming with PeopleTools 8.58.
Article:
How many of us have implemented Fluid features such as Fluid navigation? The Fluid user interface was first made available in PeopleTools 8.54 and a recent Oracle blog announced the retirement of Classic Navigation support is coming with PeopleTools 8.58. If you have waited to adopt Fluid navigation at your institution, here are some examples of a few implementations that may encourage you to take another look, especially as you plan your next PeopleTools upgrade and we all get closer to PeopleTools 8.58 or later.
You can read more about Oracle’s announcement here.
Butler University’s 9.2 upgrade and Fluid navigation implementation
In June 2017, Butler University went live with our 9.2 upgrade. Along with the 9.2 upgrade, we implemented PeopleTools 8.55 and Fluid navigation for Campus Solutions and HCM. Due to Butler’s many customizations to delivered functionality and because we were new to Fluid, we had many Classic pages then and do still. But our users are now navigating in a Fluid manner using Homepages, Tiles and the NavBar.
For our core Campus Solutions users, it had become apparent very early in testing that our administrative users very much missed the breadcrumbs. As a result, one of our early changes to the Fluid navigation was an update to stylesheets to include breadcrumbs. Also for our CS users, we built a collection of Homepages so that each user had a Homepage with pertinent Tiles to navigate to their most commonly used pages. These Tiles often tied together activities (for example, Grading for Registration and Records and Loans Processing for Financial Aid). After a thorough process of vetting out the Homepages to catch all of our different types of users, we ended up with a Financial Aid Homepage, a Registration and Records Homepage, a Student Accounts Homepage and a Homepage to catch all other administrative users along with the delivered Student Homepage.
To create the administrative Homepages and Tiles, we worked directly with functional analysts in each of our main offices to develop Navigation Collections that were placed on Tiles that became a collection of “actions” on their Homepage. For the “catch all” Homepage, used by all other users outside of students, Financial Aid, Registration and Records and Student Accounts, this Homepage displays pertinent tiles depending on the user’s security access. For example, this includes Tiles for Advisors, Instructors, Residence Life, the Police Department and Health Services.
Finally, for our veteran users that are very familiar with the Classic Menu and were not fully ready to see this go, we included a Tile on each of the administrative homepages that is a direct link to Classic Home, a page with the Classic Menu that they can use to navigate the system as they have always done. However, we found many of our users quickly adjusted to their Homepages and NavBar for navigation.
For our Student Homepage, we have only implemented a few of the delivered Tiles due to customizations we have to many of these delivered features. However we also included Tiles on the Student Homepage that are direct links to their Student Center and their Notifications Center.
With time spent vetting the Homepages for Butler’s various offices and users and providing some of the Classic components such as breadcrumbs and Classic Home in our Fluid implementation, we believe this was an easy transition for us. With Oracle’s recent announcement, it seems we will one day need to look at removing the Classic Home Tiles and perhaps the breadcrumbs. But as many of our users have adjusted to the new, improved and more modern Fluid user experience, perhaps that will be an easy transition as well.
Below is a sample of our Financial Aid Homepage. This Homepage was designed for the counselors in this office. So our systems analyst that deals with set up in PS that occurs less frequently, they would use the Nav Bar (or Classic Home for those users that can’t get away from it just yet) to get to pages for set up purposes.
