As Oracle customers, staying current with Oracle application maintenance means customers are now regularly given the opportunity to also leverage new application features. As you may have heard, Oracle now delivers new application features along with routine application maintenance in which they fix bugs, resolve issues and deliver legislative updates. Oracle has done a nice job of consolidating some of this information in the PeopleSoft Portal (http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/utilities/054275.html).
For a quick glance at some of the possibilities given the new user interface features start here: http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/applications/uxd/assets/sites/peoplesoft/index.html. You will find brief overviews of WorkCenters, Dashboards, Pivot Grids, Related Content and Guided Processes. All of these features are designed to improve the end-user experience of PeopleSoft applications. As Oracle’s site says, their goal is to provide guidance on using new PeopleSoft features to create applications that increase end-user productivity, increase user satisfaction and reduce errors.
We all know that it can be challenging to keep track of how the products you use line up with Oracle’s support policy and difficult to find the right time to begin leverage some of these newer features. Many wonder where Oracle’s support policy is published and how it applies across the broad number of Oracle products including applications, middleware and the rest of the tech stack that many of us own and use. A place to start is the Oracle Application Support Policy documented here: http://www.oracle.com/us/support/lifetime-support/index.html. You will find details including specifics about required PeopleTools releases associated with each application in the “Lifetime Support Summary for PeopleSoft Releases on MyOracleSupport (Doc ID 1348959.1): https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1348959.1.
Lastly, for those of you with Campus Solutions or one of the other applications that work within the Continuous Delivery Model, you should know that for these applications “the support dates are evaluated yearly for extension.” You can find details about these application releases in the same My Oracle Support document listed above. The HEUG Board and Technical Advisory Group continue to collaborate with Oracle to promote implementation of new PeopleTools functionality within Campus Solutions at a more rapid pace for those customers who would like to move forward more quickly.