PeopleSoft
- Cloud maturity: You’re likely already running workloads in GCP, AWS, or OCI. Treating PeopleSoft as a platform enables you to align it with the same patterns you’re using elsewhere, including IaC, CI/CD, observability, and more.
- Automation pressure: Manual patching and environment cloning are time-consuming. Platform teams automate everything. That saves time and increases consistency.
- Integration demands: Your enterprise isn’t siloed. HR, Finance, and Student Systems must connect to dozens of other applications. Platforms expose clean APIs, enable secure messaging, and build integration into the architecture, not as an afterthought. What You Gain: Speed, Visibility, Resilience
- 🔄 Developer velocity: Faster, safer customization using extension patterns (Drop Zones, Event Framework, Configurable Search)
- 🔍 Observability: Built-in monitoring, tracing, and alerting pipelines using tools like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
- ⚙️ Automation: Terraform, Chef, and GitLab pipelines handling patches, refreshes, and even entire environment builds
- 📦 Scalability: Repeatable platform tooling that works across apps and environments, not just in Prod
- 🔧 Part 2: From Maintenance to Enablement
- What changes in your team’s responsibilities, mindset, and skill sets when you adopt platform thinking?
- 🧱 Part 3: Customization Without Chaos
- How to safely extend PeopleSoft using modern tools and patterns without setting yourself up for upgrade nightmares.
- 🗺️ Part 4: Building Your Platform Roadmap
- A practical blueprint for turning your team’s vision into an actionable transformation plan.
- 🎯 Part 5: Sustaining the Shift
- How to keep the momentum going, measure success, and build a platform culture that lasts.
Rethinking PeopleSoft: What Actually Changes When PeopleSoft Becomes a Platform?
Shifting from a reactive support model to a proactive platform approach in PeopleSoft enhances team operations, ownership, and strategic value across the organization.
Oracle Linux 10 is Here: What You Need to Know
Oracle has launched Oracle Linux 10, a performance-optimized and secure enterprise Linux release compatible with both x86_64 and ARM architectures, featuring enhancements in security, developer tools, and installation processes.
Stop Supporting. Start Enabling: Why It's Time to Rethink PeopleSoft as a Platform
Part 1 of the “Rethinking PeopleSoft” Series
For years, PeopleSoft has been treated like a classic enterprise application; something you patch, maintain, and try not to break. It sits on its servers (or maybe VMs), it runs business-critical processes, and support means keeping it stable and compliant.
That mindset made sense 10 years ago. But in 2025? It’s time to rethink it. As cloud-native architectures, automation-first strategies, and integrated digital experiences become the norm, the old way of running PeopleSoft is holding teams back. The solution isn’t to rip and replace. It’s to reframe how we think about PeopleSoft, not as an application to support, but as a platform to build on.
From Application to Platform: What’s the Difference?
An application is built to perform a specific task. It has a specific set of features. It’s tightly scoped and user-facing. You maintain it. You support it. You don’t usually build with it.
A platform, on the other hand, is built to enable other things. It’s a foundation. It offers tools, APIs, frameworks, and services that developers and teams use to build, extend, and scale solutions. A platform isn’t just consumed, it’s leveraged.
When you treat PeopleSoft like an application, your mindset is:
“Keep it up. Don’t break it. Patch it when needed.”
When you treat PeopleSoft like a platform, your mindset shifts to:
“How do we enable developers? How do we deliver services that others can build on? How do we make this system part of our enterprise fabric?”
That shift changes everything from your automation strategy to your support model to how you approach customizations.
Why This Shift Matters Now
The world around PeopleSoft has evolved. Most orgs are now running hybrid workloads, building cloud-native apps, and pushing for faster, more flexible delivery models. Yet PeopleSoft often gets stuck in legacy mode, not because it has to, but because of how teams think about it.
In 2025, platform thinking becomes essential for a few key reasons:
Reframing PeopleSoft as a platform isn’t just a technical change; it’s a strategic unlock.
You gain:
This mindset doesn’t just make PeopleSoft better, it makes your team more strategic.
What’s Coming in This Series
This post is just the start. Here’s what’s ahead in the Rethinking PeopleSoft series:
If you’ve been treating PeopleSoft like a legacy app, this is your call to stop supporting and start enabling.
It’s time to build the platform your enterprise needs.
PeopleTools 8.62: Finally, Centralized Control Over Search Behavior
PeopleTools 8.62 introduces the Configurable Search Options page, enabling centralized management of search configurations for improved user experience, efficiency, and consistency across all components.
PeopleTools 8.62 + WebLogic Remote Console: The Middleware Upgrade You Didn't Know You Needed
PeopleTools 8.62 introduces official support for the WebLogic Remote Console, enhancing security, performance, and usability for PeopleSoft administrators.
📦 PeopleSoft was never designed to be SaaS—but with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it’s getting awfully close.
Over the past few months, I’ve talked a lot about how to transform the PeopleSoft experience—making it lighter, faster, and more flexible without giving up the customization that makes it valuable.
From one-click lifecycle management to predictive autoscaling, continuous updates, and built-in analytics, PeopleSoft on OCI isn’t just ERP—it’s a modern, cloud-smart platform.
I put together a quick carousel to show exactly how PeopleSoft delivers SaaS-like value while keeping its enterprise backbone.
👉 Swipe through to see how we’re turning PeopleSoft into something that feels effortless, but still packs all the power.
Let me know what’s resonating—or what you think comes next.
Over eight features, we’ve shown how PeopleSoft sheds its “legacy” label to deliver the simplicity, agility, and innovation enterprises expect from SaaS—without sacrificing its enterprise-grade power.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Series Wrap-Up
SaaS platforms often come with analytics baked-in. PeopleSoft pulls off this trick with PeopleSoft Insights and Real-Time Indexing (RTI) on OCI, turning raw data into actionable intelligence with a SaaS-like flair.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #8
SaaS platforms build trust by incorporating strong security and compliance measures. PeopleSoft on OCI, enhances security with enterprise-grade protections in a similar fashion.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #7
SaaS wins wallets with its predictable, usage-based pricing. On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), PeopleSoft emulates this with a cost-efficient model.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #6
SaaS platforms shine by collaborating with other systems. PeopleSoft pulls off this trick with PeopleTools' Integration Broker and OCI’s platform services, turning it into a hub of seamless connectivity and innovation—SaaS-style.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #5
Fluid UI offers a sleek, responsive interface that works just like popular SaaS applications, letting employees approve requests or update records from any device.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #4
PeopleSoft brings SaaS-like functionality to the game with the advent of PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM), a game-changer that drops fresh update images every 10 weeks or so.
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #3
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #2
This second post in my series shows how PeopleSoft on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers a more SaaS-like experience with dynamic elasticity and predictive autoscaling. You can easily handle enrollment spikes or payroll surges since OCI’s real-time resource adjustments scale up when needed and trim costs when demand dips. Please read on for more details…
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience: Feature #2
Transforming PeopleSoft into a SaaS-Like Experience
Oracle PeopleSoft has long been a recognized powerhouse for enterprise resource planning. It offers robust capabilities to handle complex business processes, yet many users, administrators, and IT managers believe it feels dated. They see it as a legacy system that stalls innovation instead of driving it forward.
This raises a pivotal question: can PeopleSoft evolve into a modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering? While it isn’t a native SaaS product, PeopleSoft, in combination with PeopleSoft Cloud Manager and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), has the potential to deliver the scalability, simplicity, and constant innovation that enterprises crave in their cloud solutions.
This blog series spotlights nine features that close the gap and position PeopleSoft as a compelling cloud contender. We start with a significant boost to efficiency and convenience: automated lifecycle management. 💥
Unlocking the Power of AI in PeopleSoft
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we use PeopleSoft—unlocking more intelligent workflows, predictive insights, and seamless integrations. In my latest blog post, I explore how AI, Hybrid ERP, and vendor partnerships can supercharge PeopleSoft’s native capabilities, helping organizations modernize without starting from scratch. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!
Drop Zones in PeopleTools 8.58
While Drop Zones were released as new functionality in PeopleTools 8.57, PeopleTools 8.58 extends the included functionality by allowing drop zone to be included in Classic and Classic Plus pages, sub-pages at any nesting level, and secondary pages. Further, Oracle also now offers support for drop zones on unregistered components.
Previously, in the PeopleTools 8.57 release, the functionality was only available on Fluid pages. If you are not yet familiar with Drop Zones, they allow developers the ability to add new fields which are displayed and processed on pages without customizing either the component to the page itself.
Keep in mind, Drop Zones are delivered functionality from Oracle that allow you to add custom fields to delivered pages, sub-pages and components. Per Oracle’s documentation, PeopleSoft application teams are responsible for determining which delivered pages can be extended by customers and have already added one (or more) configurable drop zones on those pages, sub-pages, and secondary pages. If, you, as a customer, added the drop zone component to a delivered page yourself (say where one didn’t exist but you wanted one), that would be considered a customization. Make sense? If Oracle does it, it’s ok, if you do it, not so much. However, if you read through the linked resource I’ve included below, Oracle has provided detailed instructions on how to insert your own configurable drop zone. They want you to do it - they just don’t support it.
Much like the Application Engine Action Plug-ins, Drop Zones are another effort by Oracle to decrease customer customization while allowing for and encouraging customers to make PeopleSoft meet their specific business needs.
Linked Resource: Configuring Drop Zones
PeopleTools 8.58: Application Engine Action Plug-in
There are many, many new features to be found in the most recent PeopleTools release from Oracle. One such improvement/addition to the development toolset within PeopleTools is the Application Engine Action Plug-in. This functionality allows you to change the SQL or PeopleCode actions of any Application Engine without directly customizing or changing the Application Engine itself. The code in the configured and defined plug-in for the Application Engine being run is executed in place of the delivered code at runtime
There are a few things the development team should know prior to starting down the path of utilizing this functionality. One really nice feature of the AE Plug-in functionality is that developers are able to re-use the same SQL and PeopleCode multiple times for different Application Engine programs. Along with this, actions belonging to the same step of the same section of the App Engine can have multiple plug-in actions defined. On the flip-side, once an App Engine is configured to use a plug-in, it cannot be used as a plug-in for a different App Engine. Further, you cannot define a plug-in for an Application Engine action that has already been used by a different Application Engine as a plug-in. Bottom-line, no stacking plug-ins on top of plug-ins.
Clearly, this functionality is a further effort by Oracle to keep the core of PeopleSoft untouched while providing options and opportunities to allow development teams to provide the business with the specific functionality needed. These types of updates and improvements in the PeopleSoft architecture will allow for smoother upgrades and simpler retrofitting when required.
Linked Resource: Configuring Application Engine Action Plug-ins
Introducing PeopleSoft & OCI Tidbits on AaronEngelsrud.com
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to blog a bit more and to, hopefully, provide a service to the Peoplesoft community I have been a part of for the past 20 years. In thinking about how best to accomplish this, I’ve come up with the idea of Peoplesoft and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Tidbits. These will be short and simple blog posts covering a variety of PeopleSoft and OCI topics. Topics will be wide reaching and include information about new PeopleTools enhancements, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager, new features in the OCI, and useful topics for Oracle System Administrators and Developers. My goal in doing this is that these posts take less than 2 minutes to read and you (the reader) leave with some useful information and a link or resource to start doing some digging on your own. These are not meant to be all inclusive or detailed explanations of functionality, but rather short and concise overviews of what may be possible coupled with the resources to find more information.
Tomorrow (Thursday February 20th) will be my first official PeopleSoft Tidbit. I’m going to do a tidbit a day for as long as I can find relevant, useful PeopleSoft and OCI information to write about. Upgrades, new functionality, bugs, best practices, it’s all fair game. If you are part of the Oracle or PeopleSoft community and know others that might be interested in the content I’m posting - send them my way. I’ll be cross-posting this on my blog - aaronengelsrud.com - as well as to LinkedIn. Hopefully someone will find a useful tidbit!