Listed below are some key considerations and helpful tips for designing and deploying PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface.
Homepages
Delivered homepages align to oracle’s published standards of either role based or function based design like Employee/Manager Self-service or Workforce Admin, Procurement Operations etc.
While there are many ways to skin this cat, a role based design with targeted homepages for key user groups that access the application, has been simple and effective. E.g. Employee Home, Manager Home, Admin Home.
While there is no technical limitation, keeping the number of homepages to a minimum required is effective for performance and usability. E.g. Consider 1 administrator home with module specific tiles such as HR, Payroll, Benefits etc. (vs) homepages specific to each module.
Use the ordering of homepages (content reference sequence#) effectively to default the most used page as the landing page for each user group. E.g. Descending order of Admin Home, Manager Home and Employee Home, would allow,
- Employee Home defaulted for users who are just employees
- Manager Home defaulted for users who are managers and employees themselves
- Admin Home defaulted for administrative users who are either employees or managers themselves
Personalization Options
Hot potato of a topic when it comes to Fluid deployment as opinions could significantly vary about the level of personalization to be allowed for end users.
Simply put, level of personalization to be allowed will significantly influence the training, change management and post-deployment support effort.
Majority of customers have adopted a model of ‘land and expand’ when it comes to Fluid deployment, so keeping the personalization options from minimum to nil when first introducing Fluid UI, will reduce overall implementation efforts.
Remember below options are available,
- Homepage Display order can be FIXED via configuration
- User’s ability to create new Homepages or have their own version of ‘My Homepage’ can be disabled using security
- “Personalize Homepage’ option in the ‘Action List’ on Fluid Home can be disabled using security
- Ability to remove or change order of Fluid Tiles on Homepages can be controlled via configuration
- Ability to Personalize ‘Navbar’ can be disabled via configuration
- Ability to add existing application pages (Fluid or Classic) to either the Homepage or Navbar using the option in the ‘Action List’ can be disabled thru a Peoplecode change
Navigation Collections
A powerful tool at your disposal to improve productivity, especially for administrative users, who perform majority of their day-to-day tasks in the application.
Few considerations while using Navigation Collections,
- No constraints in duplicating a single transaction across multiple Nav Collections, in fact when used right, duplicating can be very effective. E.g. When you have separate Nav Collection for Payroll and HR module, if payroll admin needs to access employee job data often, then adding it to Payroll Collection in addition to the HR collection would cut down the need for user to switch Nav Collections often.
- Same Nav collection can include Classic and Fluid Pages
- When adding pages that take up the entire screen like Work centers, Dashboards etc. ensure ‘Replace Window’ option is used so the users navigates away from Nav collection when accessing such links
- Certain pages don’t load on Nav collections like a Content Reference accessing a PS Query Report. Use ‘Open in New Window’ option to open such pages in a new browser window.
- Use the ‘Folder’ feature effectively to categorize and group large number of links in single Nav Collection. Tens of folders can be used bring hundreds of links into a single collection.
Tiles
- As homepages and tiles get refreshed every time a user reaches the Fluid Home, tiles displaying dynamic content needs to be fast and responsive. Analytic tiles are best placed on dashboard rather then homepages.
- Dynamic Tiles can be very powerful to provide visibility to frequently accessed data e.g. Display Employee Leave Balance
- Tiles like ‘Company Directory’ in HCM, though delivered as part of ‘Manager Self Service’ Homepage, can be made available for all employees thru ‘Employee Self Service’ by minor security changes. Remember to check the underlying transaction level security, rather than going only by tile level security settings.
- When creating custom tiles, utilize the target repository option of Homepage, NavBar and Dashboards effectively to keep these distinct repositories orderly and manageable. This also helps in users inadvertently adding performance intensive tiles to Navbar etc.
Classic Home Tile
Should the ‘Classic Home’ tile in the Navbar be enabled or disabled? Though this tile is available in the Navbar by default, it can be removed thru configuration. A useful option based on your change management approach,
- Have it disabled if Fluid UI has to be universally adopted by your user base
- Have it enabled if you prefer a progressive transition from Classic to Fluid, so users have an option to go back to classic home. This would be useful if you had an elaborate classic homepage setup with pagelets and navigation, rather than just the ‘drop-down’ menu navigation.
Extending Delivered Fluid Components
It is possible to extend the use of delivered Fluid components for one user group like employees to another user groups like managers/administrators with minimal development effort.
For instance, In HCM application ‘Talent Profile’ is available in Fluid for Employee Self Service.
This Fluid component can be extended for use by managers by adding a ‘Direct Report Select’ functionality as part of the accessing the component.
Such extensions require both development and configuration effort,
- Clone delivered Fluid component and create a copy
- Add custom PeopleCode to invoke ‘Direct Reports Build’ functionality – so that instead of using the employee id of the current user, allow user to search and select a team member for viewing the profile.
- Depending on the design of the target component, some additional code may be required to modify the behavior between the delivered usage and extended usage e.g. Employees may be allowed to update their profile, managers may or may not
- Setup ‘Direct Reports Configuration’ for the new cloned component under Setup HCM > Common Definitions > Direct Reports for Managers
PS: I have resisted from adding detailed technical information keeping in mind the brevity of this article, do contact me if any technical specifics are needed in relation to the items discussed above.
leanITdesigns 