About this edition
Welcome to the first newsletter from the 2010-2011 Student Records Product Advisory Group (PAG).
The PAG is a small group of representatives from various institutions who serve to educate and advocate for the Student Records community.
We plan to send newsletters periodically to share information from Oracle and the HEUG organization. The focus of this edition is to inform you about new resources available on HEUG.online and My Oracle Support. Both websites have been enhanced recently and provide great information, if you know where to look!
We hope you find the articles in this edition useful, and please leave us some feedback on this blog. Thanks!
Lisa Emery, 2010-2011 Communications Chair
PeopleTools 8.5 Upgrade Date Extended
If you attended the Alliance Conference this year, you probably heard about the requirement to upgrade to PeopleTools 8.5 by January 2010. Many Oracle customers expressed their concern about this requirement, due to limited budgets and a packed schedule for ongoing application maintenance and upgrades. In a HEUG survey that came out shortly after the conference, more than 70% of the responders said that a 6-month extension would be beneficial. In April, Oracle announced that they would move the PeopleTools 8.50 requirement for Campus Solutions 9.0 out 6 months. The new date by which Oracle is requiring Campus Solutions 9.0 customers to be at PeopleTools 8.50 or greater is 30 July, 2011. As a reminder, the next release of PeopleTools - PeopleTools 8.51 - is targeted to be available for customers by the end of the 2010 calendar year. Each institution should consider this in their overall maintenance and upgrade strategy.
More information about the extension can be found on Tina Thorstenson, Vice President of Technology’s blog: http://www.heug.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=306
There is also an upcoming Webinar sponsored by the HEUG Education Series (see more on Page 3 about the Education Series) on planning for the PeopleTools 8.5 Upgrade.
"PeopleTools 8.50 At the University of Michigan - An Implementation/Upgrade Case Study" will take place on July 22nd at 1PM EST (17:00 GMT). More information can be found at http://www.heug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=176&eid=52.
One Stop Shopping at the Document Home Page
Logging into My Oracle Support can be an overwhelming experience. There are announcements, news articles, and links everywhere. Don’t you wish you could find everything you want all in one place? Try using the Document Home Page! The Document Home Page is a place where you can find Release Notes, PeopleBooks, Value Propositions, White Papers, and more. The trick is getting to it. According to the friendly folks at Oracle Global Customer Support, the best way to get to this page is to type it into the search box in the upper right section. Depending on your current version, type in one of the following phrases:
Campus Solutions 9.0 Document Home Page or Campus Solutions 8.9 Document Home Page
In both cases, you’ll receive a list of results and the top link should be the page you want. When you click on it, you’ll be taken to a page with more links to a plethora of information on the product. Scroll down and you’ll see all the bundle documentation in one convenient place. The consultants at Global Support acknowledged that this page isn’t very easy to find, and hope to have a better way to access it in the future. In the meantime, be sure to check it out, and be on the lookout for the next Statement of Direction, expected in July 2010. The Statement of Direction will list the new functionality we will see in upcoming Feature Packs.
Updated Versions of PeopleBooks Now Available
Oracle released updated versions of PeopleBooks in March. The updates include information on Feature Packs 1 and 2, as well as all bundle information through January 2010. Oracle staff are working hard to provide us with better descriptions about software features and more in-depth information. For example, check out the entry “Setting Up Repeat Checking” (Home > PeopleBooks > PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Records 9.0 PeopleBooks > Setting Up Repeat Checking). It now includes a diagram explaining the logic in the Repeat Engine. Oracle expects to release updated versions of PeopleBooks annually.
To access the HTML for hosted Campus Solutions 9 PeopleBooks: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17221_01/cs9pbr2/eng/psbooks/index.htm
To access the (non-hosted) HTML through the Campus Solutions 9 PeopleBooks Library: http://peoplebooks.peoplesoft.com:8700/PSOL/cs9pbr2/eng/psbooks/index.htm
To access the PDFs: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17137_01/psft/html/docset.html
Business Process Maps & Entity Relationship Diagrams Did you know that Oracle provides Business Process Maps and Entity Relationship Diagrams for many of the PeopleSoft products? Earlier this year, Oracle released both resources on My Oracle Support. The Business Process Maps are a wonderful resource for learning about the product from a functional perspective. They are great for sharing with some of the non-technical people on campus, such as user groups or student services staff. They are also helpful to demonstrate best practices around a task, such as Scheduling Classes.
The Entity Relationship Diagrams may be helpful for the people on your campus that are trying to do reporting out of your Campus Solutions system.
Links to these resources:
Business Process Maps
Entity Relationship Diagrams
The Business Process Maps are available as .pdfs from My Oracle Support. In order to access the ER Diagrams, they must be loaded into your Demo database.
View Presentations from Alliance 2010
Presentations from the Alliance 2010 conference are now available to all members on the HEUG website. Along with the slide presentations, many were recorded, allowing you to hear the presentation in its entirety. To access the presentations, log into the HEUG website and select Files > Alliance 2010 Presentations. From there, you can select Student Records or any of your other favorite topics and view presentations from the conference. Thinking about using the XML Publisher? There were several presentations from institutions who are using it. Want to find out what Oracle is planning for future Feature Packs? Check out the presentation “Campus Solutions Enrollment Services: Current Updates and a Look Forward”. There are also several presentations on PeopleTools 8.5 under the Technical track.
HEUG Education Series
The HEUG has stepped up their effort this year to provide use with more webinars as part of the HEUG Education Series. These webinars are free to you and all of your staff as long as your institution has paid its membership fees to the HEUG. Their goal is to provide at least two sessions per month. In recognition that some members were unable to travel to the Alliance conference this year, some of the webinars will be repeats of popular Alliance sessions, where the presenter will be asked to give the presentation again. There will also be new, timely presentations offered on new functionality or innovative solutions.
Highlights of upcoming presentations:
Making our Faculty Happy with new Self-Service - July 15th, 1PM EST (17:00 GMT)
PeopleTools 8.5 at the University of Michigan: An Implementation/Upgrade Case Study - July 22nd, 1PM EST (17:00 GMT)
Wrangling Your Checklists: Using Delivered 3C triggers with a Custom Process - August 26th, 2PM EST (18:00 GMT)
The full schedule is available at: http://www.heug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=133
All webinars are archived, so if the time doesn’t work for you, you’ll be able to view it later at your convenience. Be sure to check out the archive to see other webinars that you may have missed.
HEUG Online Undergoes a Makeover
The HEUG website was upgraded recently and now brings together all the valuable information with better organization.
From the Home page, there are some new features you may want to investigate:
New Member Welcome - provides information on what the HEUG is and what it does
Buyers Guide - a quick reference guide of vendors
Job Listings - a secure forum for listing your institutions vacancies or seeking out new opportunities
Activity on the blogs has picked up over the past year. In particular, the VP of Products and the VP of Communications blogs are updated frequently and provide up-to-date information from Oracle and the HEUG.
For Student Records users, the Issues list and the File Library remain two of the most important places for logging your enhancement ideas and sharing modifications. You can also access the Forums to search for past discussions on listservs.
SR PAG Initiatives Since returning from the PAG Summit and Alliance conference, the SR PAG has been focused on two main tasks. The first task is to clean up the Issue Tracker. The Student Records issue tracker had over 70 active issues, and some had been around for many years. The PAG members split up the issues and reviewed each one to determine if it was still a problem in the current version. Then the group categorized the issues as strategic, quick wins, or bug fixes and tried to give Oracle a sense of priority. This was based on the number of votes from the user community, magnitude of the issue, and number of institutions that could benefit from the issue’s resolution. As a reminder, everyone is encouraged to review the issue list on a regular basis and vote or leave comments on the issues you care about. Go to Issues > Student Records, and select ’Vote on All Issues’ under the Actions box in the upper right corner.
The second major task for the Student Records PAG is to define a list of strategic initiatives for Oracle. Strategic initiatives are themes or new areas of direction for the product. Some initial ideas include: tools for early warning of at-risk students, student life transcripts, predictive course demand analysis, and retention tools. The PAG is currently collecting ideas from the issues list and from the PAG members and plans to have a survey out to the community by the end of the year. The survey will be your opportunity to give feedback on the current list of issues and add additional suggestions. Then we will work with Oracle to communicate priorities and determine the feasibility of the ideas.
In addition to these two tasks, the PAG has started planning for the 2011 Alliance conference. Look for the call for presentations in July.