Bringing PeopleSoft Content into Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams integrations and connectors

As Microsoft Teams becomes a fixture of more and more organizations around the world, many are wondering how they can better integrate PeopleSoft with the virtual communication platform. A daily destination for 145 million active users, Teams’ popularity has grown dramatically in recent years thanks to its role in remote collaboration, productivity, and more.

It’s already the place where employees spend much of their work day. But it has the potential to become an even stickier digital property for organizations that can deliver content and functionality from other employee-facing applications, such as PeopleSoft, directly in Teams.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how you can maximize the value of your digital investments and create a frictionless employee experience by bringing PeopleSoft into Microsoft Teams with InFlight.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what we’ll discuss:

1. Why Teams plays an important role in the employee experience
2. Where friction exists in the Teams experience for PeopleSoft customers
3. How InFlight can help you easily eliminate that friction by bringing PeopleSoft content directly into Teams

1. The role of Microsoft Teams in the employee experience

While Teams officially launched in 2017 as, first and foremost, a video conferencing platform, in recent years the service has proven its value as a centralized virtual meeting place where employees can easily communicate, collaborate, manage tasks, and access information.

The sudden uptick in demand caused by the pandemic encouraged Microsoft to invest in new and improved features, while simultaneously increasing its worth in the eyes of organizations operating on a remote and hybrid basis.

At the start of the pandemic, the platform had approximately 32 million daily active users. That number more than quadrupled in just over a year as organizations made strategic moves toward digital transformation, upgrading their capacity to stay connected, productive, and competitive from anywhere.

The value of Teams as an employee destination

While the decision to invest in Teams was certainly, for many organizations, spurred by the pandemic, for others it represents digital transformation that was years in the making.

The increasing reliance on Teams as a foundational part of day-to-day productivity has led to a dynamic that organizations—and, of course, Microsoft—are capitalizing on as part of their employee experience strategy; that is, using Teams to create a central gravitational pull that brings the digital workplace into one virtual space. More and more, Teams is an “always-on” application where employees spend a significant portion of each day.

Beyond video conferencing and chat, Teams has the capacity to connect tasks and information from applications inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft is planning to take these integrations even further through its forthcoming Viva employee experience platform. Viva promises to pull the full Microsoft productivity suite into an integrated employee experience inside Teams that combines communication, insights, learning and knowledge.

The new platform represents Microsoft’s recognition that organizations can increase productivity, efficiency, and results by streamlining the way they work. By integrating as much of the ecosystem into one central location, Teams (and soon Viva) can elevate the digital employee experience, ensuring commonly used Microsoft tools and information are available right where users already spend the majority of their day.

For employees working from home, in the office, on the road, and everywhere in between, Teams and Viva aim to deliver a leveled up employee experience featuring virtual connectivity, enhanced productivity, and streamlined workflows — similar to an employee portal. That kind of consumer-grade experience is what 56% of employees have come to expect from their employers, according to a recent Gartner survey. After all, why should the tools and systems employees use at work be any less user-friendly, connected, and intelligent than those they use in their day-to-day lives as consumers?

The better the digital experience is for employees, the more equipped they are to deliver excellent results for organizations — and, ultimately, customers. By making it easier for employees to be productive, connected, and satisfied, companies are more efficient, deliver better customer service, and drive better results.

Where the experience falls short

So what’s the catch? When it comes to Teams’ potential as an employee experience platform, the missing piece of the story is integration with the non-Microsoft employee-facing tools that organizations rely on every day, including ERP, HCM, and financial applications.

If you’re a PeopleSoft customer, you know there’s a significant gap in the Teams employee experience when it comes to bringing content and functionality from PeopleSoft into the platform. Let’s explore how this situation creates friction, why you need to integrate PeopleSoft with MicrosoftTeams — and how InFlight can help.

Watch this as a video to see how you can create powerful employee “portals” of the future with Microsoft Teams and PeopleSoft

2. The disconnect between Teams and PeopleSoft

Teams works best to improve the employee experience when it can function as a unified destination for everything employees need. Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t fully deliver on that promise for PeopleSoft customers.

Certainly the platform’s popularity is a testament to Microsoft’s capacity to deliver a consumer-grade employee experience, however, it falls short when it comes to integrating live content into Teams from PeopleSoft. That’s a big gap, since for many global enterprises, PeopleSoft is the core application for everyday employee information and self-service transactions, including requesting vacation time, managing benefits, and viewing paychecks.

Friction in the Teams employee experience

Considering PeopleSoft’s position as a critical enterprise application for thousands of employees and Teams’ central role as a productivity tool they use every day, the fact that the two applications aren’t integrated is a major source of friction and wasted time.

Accessing self-service content, functionality, and transactions from PeopleSoft requires users to navigate away from Teams and log in to PeopleSoft. Only then can employees manage content and complete common tasks, such as requesting vacation time, completing timesheets, processing approvals, managing benefits coverage, or viewing paychecks.

Rather than providing the seamless, centralized experience today’s employees expect, this workflow results in wasted time spent looking for siloed information and completing common transactions across multiple applications. Having to switch between tools, search for information, and learn multiple systems adds complexity back into the process — the very pain points that a strong employee experience aims to eliminate.

For employers, the disconnect between PeopleSoft and Teams is bad for productivity, and could mean that employees aren’t taking full advantage of PeopleSoft content, tools, and functionality that are designed to make their experience easier.

As employees spend more and more of their workday in Teams, companies need to be thinking about how they can leverage its potential as an employee experience platform. Many are missing the opportunity to bring downstream content that’s frequently used or difficult to navigate front-and-center into the platform. Let’s take a look at how InFlight makes that improvement to the employee experience not only possible, but easy.

3. Bringing PeopleSoft content into Teams with InFlight

InFlight provides a Microsoft Teams connector that integrates with PeopleSoft to help you remove friction and improve the digital employee experience across both applications.

Using InFlight with PeopleSoft and Teams enables you to pull content and functionality from deep within PeopleSoft applications and surface it directly in a tab within Teams, augmenting the valuable content and functionality that’s already there. You can bring a variety of transactions from PeopleSoft into Teams, with content left in its native Fluid or Classic state, or fully reimagined and transformed by InFlight.

By integrating PeopleSoft and Microsoft Teams, your enterprise can unlock these benefits and more:

• Increase ROI by better leveraging and boosting the capabilities of all your digital properties
• Save time by eliminating silos between PeopleSoft and Teams, and streamlining workflows in the application where employees already spend time
• Improve the employee experience by delivering modernized, consumer-grade PeopleSoft interactions, and content that’s mobile-optimized and responsive
• Build more mass into your organization’s center of gravity and create stickier digital properties that enhance employee satisfaction and productivity

Streamlining the Teams employee experience

Bringing PeopleSoft application content right into Teams helps you fill gaps in the workflow using the approach that works best for your enterprise. Whether it’s: extracting information from PeopleSoft and visualizing it in Teams using easy, out-of-the-box widgets; taking PeopleSoft Fluid components and making the native experience visible and transactable in Teams; and fully modernizing transactions by making totally reimagined, consumer-grade PeopleSoft components available in Teams.

With InFlight, employees access a personalized HR dashboard in Teams where they can see frequently needed information and actions from PeopleSoft bubbled up to the top of a personalized dashboard landing page. Organizations have the flexibility to tailor the user experience and content to their employee needs, choosing which PeopleSoft information and transactions are available through Teams, all of which appear as tabs along the top of the HR dashboard.

For employees, the experience is frictionless. Everything they need is available at a glance and they can quickly complete PeopleSoft tasks in one convenient place without navigating away from Teams, including viewing paychecks, tracking vacation days and sick days, managing timesheets, updating personal information, and more. Single sign-on capabilities mean there’s no need to log into PeopleSoft to complete transactions or find information.

By bringing frequently accessed employee-facing content and transactions from PeopleSoft into Teams, you can:

• Easily display up-to-date PeopleSoft information directly in a personalized HR dashboard within Teams
• Enable users to complete PeopleSoft transactions and make real-time changes to information directly within Teams with updates automatically written back to the system of record
• Integrate content and transactions from any PeopleSoft application, including PeopleSoft HCM, Financials, CRM, or Supply Chain
• Deliver a fully reimagined, user-friendly, mobile-optimized UX with InFlight-enhanced PeopleSoft components in Teams
• Manage and customize the HR dashboard through App Studio in Teams, creating tabs and selecting which PeopleSoft content and functionality are available to users

Managing your HR dashboard through App Studio

Because every organization’s needs are different, InFlight gives you the flexibility to create a tailored HR application that suits your user populations. You can choose the content and functionality you need pulled into your Microsoft Teams app based on tabs you choose yourself.

Everything is easily managed through the App Studio in Teams, with prebuilt templates provided by InFlight, along with dedicated support to help you build your own HR tools application that integrates PeopleSoft content and transactions.

Delivering a consumer-grade PeopleSoft user experience

In addition to integrating PeopleSoft content and transactions in Teams, InFlight removes friction from the PeopleSoft experience. Through an enhanced consumer-grade UI, you can completely reimagine the user experience of PeopleSoft transactions within Teams.

InFlight modernizes PeopleSoft Fluid and Classic pages to provide enhanced usability that makes it as easy and enjoyable to use as a consumer smartphone app. All PeopleSoft components get a brand-new, responsive, and mobile-optimized UI complete with a beautiful, modern design.

With such a dramatic improvement to the PeopleSoft employee experience in Teams, you’ll see increases in adoption, lower support costs, and better returns on your digital investments.

Make Teams a true employee experience platform

Ready to transform Teams into the centralized platform your organization needs? By bringing PeopleSoft into Teams, you can integrate frequently needed employee-facing content and transactions into a single destination, deliver a truly seamless, consumer-grade workplace experience, and make the most of all your digital properties.

Discover how InFlight can help