Make PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Mobile

Based on our experiences with higher education clients over the past four years, one by one, colleges and universities are turning their attention towards technologies that can transform the way students, faculty and staff engage with the enterprise systems they access on a regular basis. For PeopleSoft customers this has never been more important.

Our latest release of our PeopleSoft Mobile solution is fully configurable and built for the mobile web.

As we all know, today’s prospective college student has grown up with the internet. They inherently possess strong online skills, which is great. Problem is, as they enter college they will demand that your institution’s systems be as intuitive and easy to use as Facebook and Amazon. Students are savvy and they expect easy access to the information, tools, resources, and commentary that accompany their academic experience and they want it all neatly presented and accessible from a single campus portal.

As a result, in order to grow net tuition revenue, your institution’s online strategy needs to go beyond learning activities. If you’re using SharePoint, InFlight can help. InFlight makes both your both portal and mobile strategies possible while enabling you to avoid the cost and complexity of either attempting to develop a solution internally or by piecing together a series of solutions through the use of multiple vendors.

Boise State University has just over 22,000 students. They recently launched their campus-wide SharePoint portal with InFlight integrated content from PeopleSoft and the level of user adoption has been overwhelming. In fact, they received 132,799 total visitors within the first five days.

In addition, nearly 6.5% of the total traffic came from mobile devices, a trend almost certain to continue. As recently noted by The Economist, and illustrated in the chart below, 2013 is forecast as the year where the number of mobile devices in use will exceed that of laptops and PCs for the first time (source).

What’s really startling however, is the progression of the trend. By 2015 the number of mobile devices in use will far outstrip that of conventional PCs and laptops. In fact it will be nearly twice that of PCs. Students, being inherent early adopters of technology will be at the forefront of this shift. Only by starting now will higher education institutions be capable of positioning themselves to cope with this major change in user behavior. For PeopleSoft customers running SharePoint, InFlight offers a tremendous amount of value and a unique opportunity.

We Integrate the UI

First, InFlight fully integrates the PeopleSoft UI into SharePoint out-of-the-box and can be used to dramatically streamline the user experience. In the process, InFlight preserves not only the investments you’ve already made in PeopleSoft but the investments that Oracle will make in the future. Because InFlight lets you publish pieces of the PeopleSoft UI into SharePoint, when you upgrade to new versions of PeopleSoft the improvements that Oracle has made to the UI will inherently be extended to your SharePoint environment.

Making PeopleSoft Mobile for tablets and phones

But things really start to get exciting if you want to extend your SharePoint portal to mobile devices. InFlight DataCapture technology, which is part of the InFlight product, gives clients complete control over the presentation of PeopleSoft data and this includes making it easy to access from mobile devices, especially tablets.

The image below shows PeopleSoft data and functionality embedded into SharePoint and being accessed from a tablet. The PeopleSoft mobile content you see here is responsive to mobile devices so it reorients itself in response to a user flipping the tablet horizontally or vertically.

The data you see here is read/write, but we’ve found that most students don’t necessarily want or need to enroll in classes or pay their tuition bills with their tablets or mobile devices. They’ll sit down at a desk and use their laptops to complete transactional processes.

What they do want to be able to do is access more of the read-only components in PeopleSoft and Blackboard such as their course schedules, or the location and room number of where a specific class is being held, and of course they want access to their grades on recent assignments and individual exams.

The above screen shot shows how the Student Personal Information Summary components from PeopleSoft Campus Solutions appear when extended to tablet devices.

PeopleSoft on Mobile Phones:

The below screen shots illustrate how information from PeopleSoft Campus Solutions can be displayed on an iPhone when delivered using InFlight.

Information from PeopleSoft Campus Solutions components like Course Schedules, Financial Aid, My Accounts, etc can be extend from SharePoint and displayed on mobile phones using InFlight.

Building a unified campus portal that integrates multiple line-of-business systems into SharePoint can, on its own, be a daunting enough task for any institution. The prospect of then making PeopleSoft mobile adds another layer of complexity. Other than InFlight, there’s no single product on the market that can enable a college or university to completely integrate PeopleSoft and Blackboard into SharePoint and then enable them to make it mobile. Interested in more information about how your institution can make PeopleSoft mobile or build its own PeopleSoft mobile apps using InFlight and SharePoint?

Want to learn more? Get in touch with our team to learn how InFlight is helping colleges and universities make PeopleSoft mobile.