Tech
- 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.
Outcome-Focused Ops: How to Lead When Things Go Wrong
Successful incident management focuses on collaborative problem-solving, clear goals, and accountability over blame, turning challenges into opportunities for improvement.
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.
Don't Overlook the Gray-Haired Engineer
I’ve seen a trend I don’t love:
✅ A solid resume
✅ 20+ years of experience
✅ Deep infrastructure and system knowledge
❌ Passed over—because of a birthdate.
Here’s the truth: age doesn’t make you irrelevant in the IT industry. It makes you danger-tested. The professionals who’ve been in the field for 20 or 30 years have lived through outages, migrations, security incidents, and leadership changes. They’ve seen what breaks, what lasts, and what actually matters. They don’t panic when something goes down at 2 a.m., and they don’t chase every shiny new tool without understanding the long-term cost. Their experience is hard-won, and it brings a kind of judgment and steadiness that can’t be rushed.
Older IT professionals:
▪️ Have seen five kinds of outages
▪️ Don’t panic under pressure
▪️ Understand trade-offs in ways textbooks never teach
▪️ Mentor others by default
If you’re hiring for a tech role and skipping over someone because they’re 50 or older, you’re not reducing risk; you’re passing on a strategic advantage. Experience doesn’t slow a team down; it anchors it. Seasoned professionals bring steady hands, clear judgment, and the ability to mentor others through complexity. They’ve seen enough to know what matters and how to keep systems running when it counts. Hiring experience isn’t a compromise. It’s an investment in resilience and long-term success.
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.
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
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: The Autonomous Database
When you look up the word autonomous in the dictionary the key definition that relates to the use of the word in this context reads something like this, “not subject to control from outside; independent.” The OCI Autonomous Database handles many of the tasks that you currently rely on a database administrator for, without any outside intervention. Right from the creation of the database, the autonomous database begins taking care of itself. Along with the actual creation of the database it also backs itself up, administers patches, applies upgrades, and performs database tuning – all hands off.
Along with all of these automated features, the OCI Autonomous Database comes in two different configurations. First is the Autonomous Transaction Processing configuration which can be used for normal transactional database processing type operations. This configuration is well suited to high volumes of transactions with random data access. The second OCI Autonomous Database configuration is the Autonomous Data Warehouse which is, you guessed it, tuned for decision support or data warehouse type workloads.
Within the Always Free tier of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, users have access to two free instances of Autonomous Database. In the free tier these databases have a fixed 8 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage, 1 OCPU, and are available in either the Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse workload configurations. If you are interested in more information on Oracle’s Always Free Tier – give my recent blog post a read HERE.
Obviously, there is a lot more to know about the OCI Autonomous Database than what I’ve covered in this brief primer. I will be digging in a bit deeper on some of the more detailed functionality and processes including how to Provision Autonomous Transaction Processing, how to connect SQL developer to an OCI Autonomous Database, along with a few other bits and pieces.
Keep your head up and keep learning new stuff!
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!