PeopleSoft Page and Field configurator is a powerful framework to reduce code customization and achieve business requirements thru easily manageable configurations. It has seen great adoption in a very short time since its release.
Page and Field Configuration Framework in a nutshell offers ability to,
Though this framework is primarily intended for reducing product customization, its capabilities provide great opportunities to improve your application and make it fit better to your usage. Discussed below are some avenues where this framework could be of good use.
Security
In recent times, GDPR has put an increased spotlight on privacy and data management, which is even more critical for an enterprise application like PeopleSoft that houses Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Page and Field Configuration Framework provides the capability to secure sensitive information with more precision than was possible before. Standard role based security allowed for application pages with sensitive data to be made accessible to selective audience.
Using this framework you can now go one step deeper and manage visibility of specific data fields on a page instead of the whole page. For instance, make Birth Date information on Personal Data page, visible only to a specific group of HR users who need it and hide it from others.
Usability
A familiar complaint across many PeopleSoft customers is how some of the commonly used administrative pages in the application can be overwhelming to their business users. Primarily due to the amount of information (data fields) in them, that may not be always applicable to their use.
Page and Field Configurator can be put to good use here to improve usability of such complex application pages and fit them to your custom usage by,
- Hiding or disable data fields that are not applicable
- Defaulting or mandating data fields that are critical
- Relabeling fields to make it specific to you organization lingo
Most importantly this level of personalization can be applied at varying degree to different user groups in your organization thru standard PeopleSoft security.
When security and usability of the application is improved another aspect that falls into place is the scalability. A familiar scenario with many PeopleSoft customers is that some functionalities are restricted in use to a small group of audience in the organization due to either usability or security reasons discussed above.
For instance,
- Only a group of administrators are allowed to create job requisitions because the pages are ‘complex’ for hiring managers to use.
- Only a group of administrators are allowed to create purchase requisitions because the pages are ‘complex’ for purchasing managers to use.
Dust off such use cases in your organization and evaluate them in light of the capabilities offered by this configurable framework to see if they can be improved without need for product customization.
Further references for those who are interested to explore this framework further,
There are some great ideas in PSFT Ideaspace to further enhance this framework, do review and vote up on items that are important to you.
Idea – Add ability to change prompt view for lookup fields via Page and Field Configurator
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