Yet more blue sky outside, it's warm and we're all stuck in an air conditioned conference centre. I hope you're feeling suitably sorry for me. Today I've attended a number of conference sessions. Here's some highlights.
PeopleSoft PeopleTools Platform and Infrastructure Overview - Mark Hoernemann doing a most excellent job juggling a million and one platform version number combinations. Microsoft Windows Server 2016 hasjust been certified on 8.55 and 8.56. Me thinks the myriad of ever increasing layers of software each with the version dependencies in just the kind of thing that drives people to the cloud.
Getting the Most Out of PeopleSoft PeopleTools: Tips and Techniques - The legendary Jim Marion accompanied by Sarah (book co-author, editor and Jim's wife) gave a brilliant masterclass in Fluid development and Event Mapping. I love Jim's style and I always learn something new when I attend his sessions and I leave inspired to learn more. Check out Jim and Sarah's training courses here .... http://www.jsmpros.comSorry Jim.... as exciting as Fluid development and Event Mapping is .... I want to focus today on the exciting news about Classic Plus announced in session CON6948- PeopleSoft User Experience: Improving Classic Pages with Classic Plus.
At OpenWorld 2016 we first heard about Classic Plus in Paco's keynote - a new style sheet coming in PeopleTools 856 that will make Classic pages look like Fluid pages.
What we didn't realise until Dave Bain's session today is that the Applications teams are working towards converting all Classic Pages to Classic Plus. Here's what I know and what I read from Dave's session:
- To enable Classic Plus you need to be on PeopleTools 8.56.
- It's enabled at a Global level in PeopleTools > Portal > Branding System Options
- Once globally enabled each Classic component needs to have the "Apply Fluid like theme for Classic" property set ON if you want the component pages to appear with Classic Plus styling.
- In making Classic pages "look" like Fluid the Classic Plus stylesheet changes certain cosmetic characteristics of the page. Fundamentally, the changes relate to creating more space between page objects. Inevitably, this results in some cosmetic tweaking on the page itself using Application Designer.
- What the Applications teams (HCM, FSCM, ELM, Campus, CRM, etc) have been doing/done is to make every Component/Page work with Classic Plus and to fix any easy to make cosmetic page issues. Most pages work straight away and some have required just some minor tweaking to fix field alignment issues. We'll see the results of this work in the next round of PI releases (HCM024 and FSCM026)
- Whilst the intent is to make every page work with Classic Plus there are some pages that are just too complex and cannot easily be tweaked. These pages, for now at least, will remain on Classic.
All sounds simple right? Well, it get's a little more involved. Here's what's going to be delivered in the next PIs.
- If the PeopleSoft Apps team opened every Component and set the "Apply Fluid like theme for Classic" property ON to make it Classic Plus then that Component would have changed AND when you came to do a get current you'd be picking up lots of modified Component definitions. This is too big an issue for customers to deal with as it would involve a significant re-customisation effort plus the size of the change package would be considerable.
- To solve this problem PeopleSoft are delivering a Classic Plus Configuration page. The customer selects the Components they want to enable for Classic Plus and a batch process (AE) then does a bulk update of the "Apply Fluid like theme for Classic" flag on each of these.
- This will provide customers the choice of enabling Classic Plus on all pages, some or none.
So, why Classic Plus? Here's a good summary slide.
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