Are you wondering how to isolate customizations in your PeopleSoft system? Lucky for you, Drop Zones have been introduced as a helpful tool for isolating customizations and applying changes to PeopleSoft easier.

As part of PeopleSoft Industry Day, Matthew Haavisto, part of the Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools team, spoke about how PeopleSoft users can use Drop Zones to isolate customizations in their systems.

Drop Zones, Event Mapping, and Page & Field Configurator are three tools that can help PeopleSoft users isolate customizations.

As you choose your organization’s preferred solution, consider how you can minimize the impact of change, make new image uptake easier, and continue to meet your unique requirements. If you opt for Drop Zones, you can choose between isolating customizations all at once or making changes over time. You will want to minimize the impact of change and make Image uptake easier, cheaper, and faster.

Big Bang vs. Incremental Change

When utilizing Drop Zones, users choose between two approaches:

• Big Bang
• Incremental

The first, called the “Big Bang,” involves a one-time effort to isolate as many customizations as possible. This option uses Drop Zones to the fullest extent possible.

The second approach is Incremental. This takes place over time as opposed to all at once. Users migrate customizations when they show as a conflict in a Change Assistant compare report. Over time, the product areas most often changed will be returned to generic. This approach allows you to plan time in each PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) apply cycle. It is often selected due to higher feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

Benefits of Drop Zones

Haavisto recommends Drop Zones to PeopleSoft users because of four main benefits:

• Customer added fields and other elements have no lifecycle impact
• Users can utilize the full power of PeopleTools within Drop Zones
• Users can reduce lifecycle management time for pages with custom fields
• The solution works on Fluid pages

Before implementing Drop Zones through your big bang or incremental change approach, you will want to consider the work that remains for your application designer. Due to Drop Zones’ failure to reduce implementation time and the limited nature of this tool, not all pages work with Drop Zones and there is no support for Classic Pages. However, the tool will likely be improved and expanded in the future.

What PeopleSoft Delivers

PeopleSoft provides areas on pages where customers can add custom content. The application teams are delivering pages with Drop Zones in PeopleTools 8.57. On each page, there is an average of two Drop Zones, but the number varies. As you consider using Drop Zones, remember that you are not able to add your own to pages. This would mean adding a customization.

Currently, the application Images with available Drop Zones include:

• HCM Image 30
• FSCM Image 31
• ELM Image 19
• CRM Image 17

How Implementation Works

Here’s how Drop Zone implementation works:

1. A customer-developer creates subpage definitions and inserts in place of the sub in a Drop Zone
   • Example: Simple fluid subpage consisting of static text and a display-only Employee ID field
2. Associate your Fluid subpage to a Drop Zone
3. Configure your subpage to the component
4. There may be more than one Drop Zone available – identify by a label on its group box
5. Add subpage to Drop Zone and save the configuration

The results include:

• Your subpage is dynamically inserted at runtime
• Records and fields defined on the subpage are loaded into the component buffer along with those of the main page
• The new subpage is displayed as if it were part of the main page definition

It’s important to note that Drop Zones will not be affected by a new Image uptake. This will not appear on a Compare Report.

How to Get Started

Follow these steps to begin utilizing Drop Zones in your PeopleSoft systems:

1. Analyze and catalog your page customizations
2. Consider candidates for moving to Drop Zones by comparing with the list of pages with available Drop Zones
3. Build subpages with those customizations

To learn more about how to isolate customizations by using Drop Zones, visit www.peoplesoftinfo.com or check out the additional resources attached below.

Additional Resources

To learn from the experiences of your peers within the Quest Oracle Community, check out the PeopleSoft Customer Stories page that houses 30+ PeopleSoft customer stories about Selective Adoption, user experience, PeopleSoft in the Cloud, PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning, and PeopleSoft tools and technology!