Tuesday, November 09, 2021

PeopleTools 8.59 new feature: Independent "AddTo" Security

Imagine having a PeopleSoft Favorites feature and no way to add Favorites. After 8.54, many customers found themselves in this situation. Fluid introduced "Add to Homepage" and "Add to Navbar" as fantastic personalization options. Our users love them. For example, I can "pin" my favorite classic components to my homepage for quick and easy access. For power users, this is terrific! And for self-service users? Every component a self-service user visits should already be represented through a Fluid homepage tile. For the casual self-service user, offering an "Add to Homepage" feature often causes more problems than it solves. With that in mind, customers often disable the "AddTo*" feature for self-service users. My friend Simon Chiu explains how in Section Four of his post PeopleTools 8.55 Features: How to Deploy Homepages, Tiles and Branding. From 8.54 to 8.58, disabling Add to Homepage also disables Add to Favorites, which is unfortunate. Favorites are the domain of the user. Nobody questions a user's favorites. Our friend Sasank Vemana shared a solution to "decouple" the AddTo options so we could disable these features independently. Likewise, My Oracle Support published Doc ID 2143709.1, showing how to customize the AddTo* features so customers can remove Add to Homepage while keeping Add to Favorites. Unfortunately, through 8.58, retaining Add to Favorites requires a customization.

What about PeopleTools 8.59? Oracle basically applied this customization to the base PeopleTools code. This feature is now built into PeopleTools. With PeopleTools 8.59, PeopleSoft added the following new roles:

  • DisableAddToFavorites
  • DisableAddToHomepage
  • DisableAddToNavBar

To remove access to Add to Homepage, assign the role DisableAddToHomepage.

Here are a couple of interesting observations of this new feature. First, access seems logically inverted. To remove access, you must assign a role. Normally, we assign roles to grant access. In this case, we assign a role to remove access. Second, we noticed user PS has these roles in the latest HCM PUM, which means out of the box, user PS can no longer add to favorites, homepages, or Navbar.

What are your observations of this new feature? Share your thoughts in the comments. We would love to hear!

Are you interested in learning more about PeopleSoft security or fluid? Check out our latest course offerings at https://www.jsmpros.com/courses/ and events at https://www.jsmpros.com/events/.