OOW 2014 Day 2 Activity Guides

Great session at the top of the day on Activity Guides from Matthew Haavisto (Product Strategy PeopleTools), Kristen Emery (Product Strategy, PeopleSoft HCM) and Mark Rosenberg (Product Strategy, PeopleSoft ESA/ALM),   (ESA = Enterprise Service Automation & ALM = Asset Lifecycle Management) .

left to right - Matthew, Kristen and Mark

For PeopleTools 8.53 this video is a good introduction.  In 8.54 there have been many improvements. See PeopleBooks 8.54 for more information and the Oracle's PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.54 Release Notes (Doc ID 1677055.1). 

Activity Guides provide a visual process for users to follow.  Each instance of a new process is tracked and available to users that have Role based permissions to the Activity Guide.  This means that if user A and B have the same roles and user A starts a new instance of an Activity Guide then user B can see it and execute steps in the same instance.

Activity Guides are built om the WorkCentre framework.  A build process is as straight forward as 
  1. Create the pagelet for navigating the steps
  2. Create the content for each step (content usually already exists in the form of existing components, queries, etc)
  3. Create the WorkCenter for hosting the Activity Guide
Other things I picked up....
  • Important to stress that Activity Guides are designed for simple process flows.  No logic branching is supported yet, no intelligent step completion verification and there even seemed to be a bit of uncertainty as to how these are upgraded from one environment to the next.
  • It does sound like a lot more investment is being planned for Activity Guides as they are being seen as a key productivity tool across the entire set of products.
  • Having said that - it seems in pretty good shape in current releases.
  • Expect to see HCM Activity Guides delivered with PUM Image in November (Life events (birth, mariage, divorce, etc) was one of the examples shown)
  • and  FSCM Activity Guides later in 2014. (Revenue Contract Setup was example shown)
Hierarchical structure of Activity Guide steps in 8.54
What's coming in future tools release.

Fluid Activity Guide in 8.55 (Safe Harbor warning)





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