What Is A WorkCenter In PeopleSoft And What Can It Do For You?
Authors:
Stephen Brawn – Systems Analyst/Programmer Senior – Northwestern University
Leslie Gardner – PeopleSoft Developer – University of Wisconsin, Madison
Kim Alling – Business Automation Specialist – University of Wisconsin, Madison
Stu Churchill-Hoyer – Business Analyst & Project Manager - University of Wisconsin, Madison
What Is A PeopleSoft WorkCenter
While the ability to create a WorkCenter in PeopleSoft has been around since PeopleTools version 8.51, it is still a feature that is new or unknown to many PeopleSoft schools and institutions. WorkCenters are portal tools that are delivered in PeopleSoft and allow you to utilize some great delivered functionality in a relatively simple fashion using mostly setup pages.
Very simply put, a WorkCenter is a portal page that is accessed by clicking a link in the PIA menu. A WorkCenter allows you to display navigation collections, charts, graphs, tables, reports, and HTML objects to collect functionality, information, and external links all in one place.
How Are WorkCenters Organized
A WorkCenter is separated into two major pieces. The two major pieces are a pagelet area and target content area. The two areas of the WorkCenter interact with each other using an event-driven model and actions in the pagelet area will change the content visible in the target content area.
The pagelet area allows you do add custom pagelets, which are portal pages that can contain data sources such as Activity Guides, HTML, Navigation Collections, PS Query, Pivot Grids, Rowsets, and Search Records. Pagelets are relatively easy to create using the delivered Pagelet Wizard, which can be found at the following path: Main Menu -> PeopleTools -> Portal -> Pagelet Wizard -> Pagelet Wizard.
Two Simple, Yet Powerful Data Sources
Two simple and powerful data sources that can be easily created and added to a WorkCenter and give you major benefit with little work are Navigation Collections and PS Query.
A Navigation Collection is a selection of PeopleSoft menu items. Navigation Collections can be added to a pagelet and the menu items within those Navigation Collections are only visible to users that have the security to see them through their regular menu structure. Furthermore, creating a Navigation Collection is a relatively simple task and you are able to choose complete folders or individual menu items. The path to create a Navigation Collection can be found here: Main Menu -> PeopleTools -> Portal -> Portal Utilities -> Navigation Collections.
Displaying the results of a PS Query in the form of a chart, graph, or table within a pagelet to be added to a WorkCenter is a relatively straight-forward process and can be done through the use of the Pagelet Wizard. This is a powerful and simple option to display data from PS Queries in a portal setting using setup.
A Case Study From Northwestern University
One of the WorkCenters that we built at Northwestern University was for our Student Accounts Office. The Student Accounts WorkCenter is a very simple example of a WorkCenter, but still gives the Student Accounts Administrators a portal containing the major PS functionality and external links used on a day-to-day basis; all accessible by one-click in PeopleSoft.
When designing the WorkCenter, the supervisors from both Student Accounts offices met and discussed what navigation was used most across all functions and staff levels. We decided to make this WorkCenter a very simple portal page to include only the most used functionality and external links. We separated out the PeopleSoft navigation links and the external links and created a Navigation Collection for all the PeopleSoft navigation and put the Navigation Collection in a Pagelet and attached that pagelet to the Pagelet area of the WorkCenter. For the external links, we added those to a custom PeopleSoft page and assigned the custom component containing that page as the WorkCenter homepage for the target content area.
This WorkCenter was a very simple design that allowed us to create one place for staff of all levels within one department to go and have all their most used functionality. Using a Navigation Collection made it easy to have one portal page for staff of all levels because the PeopleSoft menu item links are only visible to the user if they have the proper security.
A Case Study From University of Wisconsin – Madison
The University of Wisconsin-Madison utilized WorkCenters to streamline the tasks of Student Employees working in the Office of the Registrar. We learned about WorkCenters by attending several sessions at the Alliance 2015 conference. Within a month, we were able to put together a simple WorkCenter demonstrating the various available features (Dashboard, Navigation Collections, Activity Guides, etc.). After showing our WorkCenter in an office staff meeting and brainstorming some potential uses, we quickly learned the potential benefits it could provide for our Student Employees.
With the very nature of student employment being short-term, we needed a way to quickly onboard and train our new Student Employees. We also recognized that these employees were only in the system for limited times each week and were spending unnecessary time trying to find and navigate to pages in what were often time-sensitive situations such as helping students troubleshoot enrollment issues over the phone. The Navigation Collections were especially useful in resolving these issues because it gave us a way to centralize and group pages according to task (i.e. Document requests, assignment of student enrollment appointments, course/class and student data for troubleshooting enrollment issues, etc.). To do this we created a number of Navigation Collections by category with folders inside for each task. We also created a Navigation Collection of external links for the various websites they accessed as part of their daily work.
The WorkCenter was technically very simple to create once understanding how all the configuration pieces were layered. A Navigation Collection goes into a Pagelet. A Pagelet goes into a WorkCenter. A starting page is added to the WorkCenter configuration. One hurdle we had to figure out was how to use external links. Our Navigation Collections had a fair number of external links and their resulting page did not display within the realm of the WorkCenter target area. As a workaround, we created an IScript function that opened the external links in a new window as well as an additional Content Reference to call the IScript. One of the unexpected positive outcomes of building the WorkCenter was learning about the Data Migration Workbench. We used this delivered utility to migrate both the Pagelets and the WorkCenter configuration. It was easy to configure and allowed us to easily migrate the configuration data to different environments without having to use DMS scripts. The Navigation Collections, Content References and custom landing page still needed to be moved via an Application Designer project.
Since realizing the benefits of our Student Employee WorkCenter we are already working on another WorkCenter for the Curricular and Enrollment representatives in our other campus departments.
References
YouTube step by step video created by the HEUG CC PAG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvC6IZCRYMc
PeopleBooks
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E58500_01/pt854pbh1/eng/pt/tprt/concept_UnderstandingWorkCenterPages-937795.html#topofpage
MIDHEUG 2015 Presentation entitled Use WorkCenters to Be More Efficient
https://www.heug.org/p/es/sx/esid=10254