Oracle has announced the general availability of its PeopleTools 8.48, the latest version of the PeopleSoft Enterprise development tool that enables PeopleSoft customers to develop, deploy and maintain their PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Additionally, Oracle continues to invest in the PeopleSoft products by certifying PeopleTools with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle's family of middleware products, to help customers extend the business value of their current investments and facilitate an upgrade to Oracle Fusion Applications, if a customer chooses to do so.
PeopleTools 8.48 provides customers with an expanded ability to adopt a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and also allows customers to create and natively support Web services and integrate legacy or custom applications with PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. New Web services functionality, including PeopleTools Service Designer, coupled with PeopleTools Integration Broker, will help lower costs, make it easier to integrate with PeopleSoft applications and simplify the creation and deployment of Web services. For example, by offering wizard driven configuration and deployment, PeopleSoft customers can rapidly develop and deploy Web services for use within a SOA. Services published from PeopleTools Service Designer and Integration Broker can be consumed by Oracle Fusion Middleware BPEL Process Manager for Enterprise Web Services Orchestration and Business Process Automation. Further, Pagelets and Services published from PeopleTools can also be integrated into Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Portal to provide a single point of access to all enterprise applications.
Also new in PeopleTools 8.48 is PeopleSoft Change Impact Analyzer, an analysis workbench that allows users to interactively explore and understand impacts before taking patches or making changes to their applications. This tool helps significantly reduce the amount of time spent on identifying and understanding the impact of a particular change will have to an application. PeopleSoft Change Impact Analyzer can be leveraged in conjunction with PeopleSoft Change Assistant, the standard set of tools for applying system updates and easing upgrades.
By expanding on existing integration of PeopleTools with Oracle Fusion Middleware, PeopleSoft customers can leverage new functionality such as Oracle XML Publisher. Now embedded in PeopleTools, Oracle XML Publisher augments PeopleSoft reporting technologies and offers end users more options for customized reports. Oracle XML Publisher enables end users to create reports, letters, invoices, checks and fill out government forms through standard desktop tools such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, generating multiple output formats such as PDF, HTML, RTF, EFT and EDI.
With the latest release of PeopleTools, customers can also extend the value of their PeopleSoft investments with improved visual compare and merge and increased platform support. Visual merge offers the ability to see where you have applied customizations, and with this additional functionality, users are able to merge changes automatically as they choose to upgrade. Oracle is committed to supporting a broad range of platforms for PeopleSoft customers. PeopleTools 8.48 has expanded support for SQL Server 2005, Linux on IBM zSeries for PeopleTools Application Engine and PeopleTools Process Scheduler and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.
