South African Presentations

In the not too distant past, every year, Univ of Pretoria staff from across the institution cobbled together MS-Word etc. documents that described the updated list of the institution's offerings in terms of Degrees, Programs, Plans, Courses, etc. All of the offerings of a specific Faculty were then aggregated into Faculty "Yearbooks" and the aggregation of all the Faculty Yearbooks resulted in the printing of the Institutional Yearbook that was about 12 cm thick! In a separate process, selected data about Plans and Courses was also stored and published on the institution's externally facing website. But there was often disparities of content between these sources of data.

With the phasing in of PS Campus Solutions, customisations were made to the delivered PS CS components to permit all data that was previously recorded in these MS-Word Yearbook documents to now be capture-able and editable in PeopleSoft in effective dated tables. Consequently, all of the "old" Yearbook information is now accessible directly in PeopleSoft. In addition, processes have now been developed that convert all of the relevant Degree, Program, Plan and Course data stored within PS CS into an XML format that automatically updates the institution's website - thereby eliminating the potential of inconsistent data in these different domains. This session will discuss the customisations made and the XML export process used to automatically update the UP website from PeopleSoft Campus.