This latest release of PeopleSoft PeopleTools provides a new level of usability and productivity within PeopleSoft applications and enables PeopleSoft customers to manage their total cost of ownership for PeopleSoft applications. While PeopleTools 8.53 is the enablement platform for the next planned release of PeopleSoft applications (release 9.2) it also delivers value to customers with existing PeopleSoft deployments. This release fundamentally improves our applications at many levels. The user experience is on par with or better than other applications on the market today. We've also introduced important improvements in how customers deploy, scale, and update our applications with features like virtualization and the PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM).

Here are some of the major improvements in this release:

• Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search – Provides secure, free-text search within PeopleSoft applications across multiple objects and multiple applications for a more streamlined search-driven navigation approach.
• Related Actions – Enables end users to take relevant actions on objects within the context of transactions rather than using lengthy traditional menu paths.
• Activity Guides – Provides for the deployment of guided business processes, which facilitate a variety of activities from self-service to administration.
• Pivot Grids – Offers self-service, real-time, multi-dimensional analytics embedded into PeopleSoft applications providing end users with the actionable information needed to make decisions.
• WorkCenters – Consolidates user tasks, exceptions, alerts, links, reports, and queries into a single, secure, role based “command center” that can be personalized and configured by end users for increased productivity.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Improves use and support of CSS and enables customers to easily configure their PeopleSoft system to reflect organizational branding (e.g. color, graphics, etc.).
• Oracle Private Cloud Deployments of PeopleSoft – Enables multiple PeopleSoft application instances to be consolidated on Oracle Exalogic, providing high capacity and performance, dynamic scaling and provisioning using Oracle Virtualization.  This also dramatically improves system management, patching, and maintenance.  All of this reduces total cost of ownership.
• Secure by Default - As part of Oracle Secure by Default initiative, PeopleTools 8.53 will request passwords for delivered accounts necessary for system initialization and disabling other sample accounts. We will also be delivering a salted SHA-1 hash for PeopleSoft passwords. The salted SHA-1 hash enhancement will not affect upgrades.

Early testing with this release has already generated enthusiastic reviews, and we have had positive feedback from customers at conferences and corporate visits.  We look forward to similar favorable responses as more customers upgrade.

There is much more in this important release.  Please see the PeopleTools 8.53 Release Notes, available on My Oracle Support.

Documentation and training is also available here:

PeopleTools 8.53 Documentation Home page

PeopleTools 8.53 Installation Guides

PeopleTools 8.53 Upgrade Home page