Asia Presentations

From 2012 to 2016, prospective students of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel applied for admission at the university using an admissions application website developed in PHP. This website used PeopleSoft Campus Solutions’ Admission Applications Web Services (AAWS) to create a user account within PeopleSoft, create an admissions application, and submit it for review by the university’s student administration. Coinciding with major changes to the web service API of the Flemish government’s department for higher education, the decision was made to develop a new admissions application component within PeopleSoft. Though the new component shares some of the architectural properties of the old website, including its use of AAWS, the component is designed to be more easily maintainable than the old PHP website, and is intended to be leveraged for further improvements to the university’s admissions process.

This session will present the motivation for the project, its overall design, and its implementation. Attendees may be interested in such topics as: (1) use of the New User Registration and Admission Applications Web Services for creating a user account and submitting an admissions application, (2) support for submitting an application for renting a student room, possibly before the applicant has submitted an admissions application, (3) integrating Google’s reCaptcha technology for prevention of unauthorized use of the component (which is publicly available on the Internet), (4) integrating an external API for identification using a Belgian electronic identity card, and (5) attempting to apply the university’s style guide to PeopleSoft pages.

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is currently running PeopleTools 8.53, which may have made some of the above topics (some of which required custom JavaScript or CSS code, or HTTP redirects to and from external websites) more challenging than newer versions of PeopleTools which introduce Fluid. The university is currently in the process of migrating to PeopleTools 8.55, and considers the new admissions application component as a step toward further improvement of the customer experience of (prospective) students, which may include adopting Fluid in the admissions application component.