Salisbury, Central Washington, Florida State Deploy Oracle Apps

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/02/08

A number of campuses have gone public about upgrades of their PeopleSoft and Oracle applications.

Salisbury University, located on the eastern shore of Maryland and part of the University System of Maryland, recently upgraded to Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0. The school has also adopted PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management 9.0 and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management 8.9.

The university plans to leverage new self-service human resources tools to allow employees to monitor benefits and pay records, update personal information and record professional development experiences.

"Oracle's Web-based PeopleSoft Enterprise applications have changed our culture. More members of the campus community are using the applications and asking for advanced self-service functionality," said Jerome F. Waldron, CIO. "We completed the implementation without interruption to our constituents, providing new functionality without the pain typically associated with an IT upgrade."

The new self-service software lets students find course schedules, billing and financial aid information and degree progress reports more quickly, said the vendor in a statement. Faculty can view teaching schedules and drill down to class rosters, the learning management system and advisee lists. Salisbury plans to continue to leverage the application's new features to improve advising and billing processes.

Central Washington University also recently upgraded its PeopleSoft applications, though to an earlier version: Campus Solutions 8.9 and Enterprise Human Capital Management 8.9.

With the latest upgrades to the HR program, the school said it provides employees with more granular data, particularly helpful for managing employee workload balance. The campus also leverages PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management to provide real-time expenditure controls.

"We continue to choose Oracle because of the applications' strong Web-based product functionality, which enables us to improve efficiency and constituent service university- wide," said Carmen Rahm, assistant VP for IT.

Florida State University, with 40,000 students, recently implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to optimize access to data stored in various PeopleSoft applications. The university hopes to extend reporting and analytics to users within individual departments and allow self-service reporting within its primary user base through the BI initiative.

"We chose PeopleSoft Enterprise applications for their robust reporting capabilities, as well as high quality grants management tools," said Michael Barrett, assistant VP for enterprise resource planning at the school. "Now we are taking our systems to the next level, building out our reporting and analytics capabilities to provide users with advanced insight to make more informed financial management decisions, improve contract and grant tracking, as well as enhance visibility into our workforce assignments and trends."