The Undergraduate Admission Office at UW-Platteville has been using activity guides for nearly four months. The activity guide we use consists of a single task: an enrollment agreement. Applicants must sign into their self-service in PeopleSoft and complete the UW-Platteville Enrollment Agreement (the name of our activity guide task). This agreement pairs with the enrollment deposit, which can also be paid online via self-service.
In the spring semester we hope to use activity guides for program registration; a place where activity guides will greatly reduce the complexity and confusion when accepting the agreements and removing the necessary holds in order to register for classes. In our current business process, we have five different holds for a registering student that must be removed before he/she is able to register. The student must navigate several custom pages in our PeopleSoft system in order to complete the agreements or update the necessary information.
Using an activity guide will allow us to put all these into one step-by-step process and remove three customizations. Where we had five holds we now only have one hold, which can be removed upon completion of the tasks in the activity guide, and the student can accomplish this in one place.
We are on Bundle 39 and PeopleTools patch 8.54.16. When we went live with Activity Guides we were on version 8.54.10 and there were a few issues in the Task Management WorkCenter. A few to name would be the due dates do not work as expected—if you put a date of 12/01/2015 for the end date of a task, one would think it would no longer be displayed on the To-Do list after then; however it still shows up after that date. Another issue we’ve come across is that the Manage Instance page cannot handle several thousand instances at once. It attempts to fetch all 10,000+ instances at once instead of just the first few hundred rows and displaying a message like “First 300 results being displayed.” Another problem was the print agreement button and next button would not “un-gray” unless you refreshed the webpage—these two problems were addressed in the new tools patch and are no longer issues.
In conclusion, we are pleased to be able to use activity guides as they have shown to be very easy to navigate and complete at the customer level. The delivered templates that have the contact information and emergency contacts will be very useful in our program registration activity guide and will greatly reduce the complexity and confusion to our current business process.
Case Study Authors: Adam Hess, Admissions Functional Analyst and Luke Korzeniewski, PeopleSoft Security Administrator/Development Tech Lead
References used:
Student Activity Guides: An Introduction
Alliance 2014
https://www.heug.org/p/do/sd/topic=2365&sid=16563
Peoplebooks:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26239_01/pt851h3/eng/psbooks/twfl/chapter.htm?File=twfl/htm/twfl12.htm
Oracle TOI on Activity Guides
Transfer of Information Sessions Available for Campus Solutions New Features (Doc ID 1565375.1)
YouTube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FIKtyOF49w