Who: Global Media Company
Where: Atlanta
What: Enterprise Portal 9.0 configuration "Auto-Scrolling News with AJAX drilldown"; no customizations, maximized use of delivered portal functionality and utilities.
Why: The customer wanted their company news pagelet work and look like the top Internet sites news publications. Also, clicking on an article should keep the user on the home page and render the article details in a lightbox.

Presentation featured by Oracle at Open World 2007: OOW2007_Portal.pdf

Who: Global Media Company
Where: Atlanta
What: Enterprise Portal 9.0 configuration "AJAX Enabled Global Calendar"; no customizations, maximized use of delivered portal functionality and utilities.
Why: The customer wanted the calendar functionality delivered in portal 9.0 to be extended via AJAX to keep the user on the home page and render the calendar component in a lightbox.

Presentation featured by Oracle at Open World 2007: OOW2007_Portal.pdf

Who: Global Media Company
Where: Atlanta
What: PeopleSoft configuration "AJAX calls to remote PeopleSoft pagelets"; no customizations, fully integrates into any PeopleSoft environment.
Why: The customer wanted HRMS self-service pagelets to be rendered on the portal via an AJAX call, thus ensuring super fast home page load times, while also delivering non-cached data.

Presentation featured by Oracle at Open World 2007: OOW2007_Portal.pdf

Who: Large Communications Company
Where: Virginia
What: Enterprise Portal 9.0 bolt-on application "Page Assembly Wizard"; no customizations, maximized use of delivered portal functionality and APIs.
Why: The customer wanted their HRMS functional power users to be able to build a complete manager self-service web site via a friendly wizard interface. The site should contain every process a manager may undertake and should intelligently guide the manager through each step of the process. The web site should then be editable by the business users without any need to modify code, and should be fully integrated with PeopleSoft content management.

Who: Large Communications Company
Where: Virginia
What: PeopleSoft bolt-on application "AJAX-Enabled Global Worklist"; no customizations, fully integrates into any PeopleSoft environment.
Why: The customer wanted a pagelet that rendered a to-do list of items that managers should be working on. This worklist also had to be real-time enabled using AJAX technology and should also be exposed as a web service that multiple 3rd party systems at the customer could feed to-do items into.

Who: Large Communications Company
Where: Virginia
What: PeopleSoft bolt-on application "Act As Someone Else"; no customizations, fully integrates into any PeopleSoft environment.
Why: The customer wanted their HR help desk support staff to be able to "act as" a user having difficulty using applications integrated into their portal, and therefore be able to guide them through the process. The solution would allow a help desk user to select - via an AJAX-enabled pagelet - users that their security gave them access to, and then automatically log them in temporarily as that user - while also logging their activity in an audit trail.

Who: Manufacturing
Where: Maryland
What: Stock quote display in Portal footer using AJAX
Why: Created a stock quote display in the footer of the Portal by making a request of a server via a web service. AJAX was utilized to prevent any delays of the Portal homepage load due to the response speed of the remote stock quote server. The asynchronous JavaScript also allowed the stock quote in the footer to be refreshed without forcing the cache of the webserver to be cleared.

Who: Manufacturing
Where: Maryland
What: Location based security (Internet vs. Intranet)
Why: The customer wanted to make sure that users were prevented from accessing sensitive HCM and Portal content from outside of the firewall. A strategy was developed that changed user security upon login to the Portal. Users were informed of their current security level by a message displayed in the Portal header. In addition to the Sign On PeopleCode, online administration pages and dynamic role processes were created to make sure that users maintained the correct roles.

Who: Manufacturing
Where: Maryland
What: Pagelets with Refresh-Free Content Changes
Why: The customer wanted a more dynamic pagelet experience for their users. One in which top stories in news publications would change each time the user loaded the homepage or when they clicked a top story. Additionally, the user wanted to have pagelets that could switch the highlighted brand information when a user clicked on any of the links in the pagelet. In both these scenarios, the desire was for the user to stay on the homepage in the pagelet. Utilizing delivered Navigation Collections and News Publications fed through XSL Templates allowed us to deliver several different types of reusable dynamic pagelets.

Who: Higher Education
Where: California
What: Configurable multi-feed RSS reader
Why: The customer wanted to use their RSS feed functionality as a news source, however, the delivered RSS reader in Portal 8.9 only allowed for one RSS feed with very few user configurations available. The final design of this RSS pagelet allowed an administrator to create a list of acceptable feeds, and the end user could configure the number of feeds displayed, number of links in each feed as well as several other features that improved the user experience over what was delivered out of the box.

Who: Higher Education
Where: California
What: HCM/SA 8.9 integrated with Portal 8.9
Why: Many of the most useful HCM/SA Student Center features are not built to be displayed as homepage pagelets. In order to display this information to the users when they first log into the Portal, the subpages of the Student Center component had to be broken out into individual pagelets. This allowed for increased usability and flexibility of the data displayed. To allow for the best possible user experience, the functional users such as students and faculty were included in the design decisions including what information displayed would be most useful, and which functionality was critical to be exposed on a homepage.

Who: Higher Education
Where: California
What: Portal Replacement Strategy
Why: The customer was implementing multiple PeopleSoft applications and already had two existing portals already in place that it wished to decommission and replace with the PeopleSoft portal. This would save many dollars in license fees and maintenance contracts. The customer also had multiple collaboration applications spread across multiple schools that also needed consolidating as there was no consistent use across the schools. The challenge was to replace the existing functionality from two portals, integrate with the new PeopleSoft applications, while also enhancing the functionality being rolled out to the students and faculty members. All the applications were to be accessible from the Internet so extremely tight security rules were to be put in place. Paul and Andrew worked with the customer to devise a strategy using the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 8.9 that would accomplish all these things using a collaborative workshop approach. From this a clear, concise, and structured scope document was created that allowed the customer to get agreement internally on all the steps required for success, and a project plan was drawn up to document all the tasks required to implement the solution.
Paul and Andrew then created all the technical design documents for every aspect of the development phase of the project, and placed an IntraSee lead portal developer on the project. The IntraSee portal developer then worked with the customers developers to train them in Enterprise Portal 8.9 development, while also developing the portal solution.
Paul and Andrew kept in touch with the development team via bi-weekly conference calls where they resolved any issues that occurred, assisted with development questions, and built mini-POC's (Proof of Concepts) that they sent to the development team - thus ensuring a smooth development cycle.

Sample Deliverable:Portal Findings.pdf

Who: Health Care Company
Where: San Francisco
What: Performance Testing/Tuning for Self-Service Go Live
Why: This customer was going live in a hosted environment and needed to support 4,000 users. The complexities with customizations, shared hardware in a hosted environment and unknown user behavior all contributed to a large amount of risk in the area of performance. To mitigate this risk, IntraSee lead a series of over two dozen load tests which monitored transaction response time, load balancing capabilities, fail over techniques, hard utilization and network utilization. The end result was a tuned system that could handle more than the estimated concurrency with newly built fail over and load balancing features.

Sample Deliverable:Performance Assessment.pdf

Who: Promotional Products Company
Where: Indianapolis
What: Custom Internet Portal Store Front
Why: The customer had the requirement to allow their distributors to create thousands of store fronts on the Internet selling their goods via PeopleSoft CRM. Also, the stores needed to be created by the distributors using a wizard that allowed point and click dynamic store creation. Paul designed this solution in a matter of weeks and led a team that created the solution in a few months.

Who: Corporate and Commercial Real Estate Company
Where: New York & Cleveland
What: Enterprise Portal
Why: The customer needed a portal to act as the gateway to both PeopleSoft Enterprise applications as well as PeopleSoft Enterprise One applications. The solution also had to automate role based security synchronization between all Enterprise and Enterprise One systems, plus also publish all reports into one repository. It was also critical for the PeopleSoft search engine to be fully integrated with the MS SharePoint search engine. The goal of all this was to provide a unified portal dashboard for users of the system that looked like one system. Paul designed the solution and led the project which was implemented in six weeks.

Who: Large Retail Company
Where: Minnesota
What: Enterprise Portal
Why: The customer had a very complicated set of requirements for integrating a PeopleSoft portal with another vendors portal - a federated portal solution. Also, content management with yet another vendor, as well as search integration needed implementing too. Three two day workshops was all that was needed to plan and design the complete solution.

Who: Large Consulting Company
Where: Chicago
What: eRecruit 8.8 integrated with HRMS 8.3
Why: The customer wanted to implement the latest version of eRecruit but didn't want to upgrade their HRMS environment at the same time. Also, the customer wanted to implement eRecruit on a different database platform. Paul and Andrew designed and implemented a solution in a few months that allowed the two separate systems to be fully integrated via an automated integration suite.

Who: Large Hospital
Where: Chicago
What: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal Implementation
Why: This hospital needed a one stop shop for all of their web applications and client/server applications. In addition the customer had dozens of content repositories that were available to doctors and nurses. The key requirement was to bring all these applications and content pieces into one portal while preserving strict security rules. The hospitals portal needed to be as secure as possible and be available for all three shifts: 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Paul and Andrew worked with the hospital to deliver an Enterprise Portal with intelligent search capabilities, single sign-on, role-base security and dashboard views of critical content. In 15 weeks this portal was rolled out to all members of the hospital and made the front page of the employee newsletter!

Who: Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical Company
Where: Chicago
What: PeopleSoft eRecruit 8.3 to 7.5 Integration
Why: There was a strong need for the 8.3 version of PeopleSoft’s eRecruit product at this customer. They didn’t, however, have the money to perform a full HR upgrade. As pioneers in the cross-version integration area, Paul and Andrew proposed a plan to integrate a current PeopleSoft eRecruit instance to their core PeopleSoft HR system. The company loved the idea and proceeded to implement eRecruit 8.3 as a stand alone instance. This gave the customer an enhanced security model and released the dependency on core HR. It was architected with enhanced data privacy to ensure that the core HR system would never be compromised. The new system was up in 14 weeks to any Internet job seeker or internal employee.

Who: Fortune 500 Beverage Distribution Company
Where: Chicago
What: Performance Assessment
Why: After a successful go-live on CRM, this company started to experience slow performance in their call center based out of North Dakota. The slow performance directly affected the bottom line as it was decreasing the number of orders an agent could take in a day. After many failed attempts to reconfigure the architecture for performance gains, Andrew was brought in to assess the situation. Andrew took a top-down approach by reviewing the architecture at a high level for design flaws. He then executed a series of tests, eliminating certain factors in the architecture one at a time. At the end of the week’s exercise, Andrew discovered that a forward proxy server was causing latency issues to the call center. Once removed, performance reached expected levels.

Who: Fortune 500 Retail Company
Where: Chicago
What: Management of Off Shore Development
Why: Customer wanted to reduce cost in their upgrade by sending a portion of the upgrade to an off shore development center. They were concerned with quality and brought Andrew in to oversee the design, build and test phases. Andrew implemented a system that reduced rework from the off shore development center to 17%, down from their average of 33%. Andrew’s enhanced method for design specifications and detailed object tracking system during development assured lower levels of rework throughout the build phase of the project.

Who: Government Agency
Where: Washington, DC
What: Portal and Employee Self Service
Why: This customer became an early adopter of the PeopleSoft Portal 8.0 release. With the roll out of the portal, the customer also wanted web-based self service for their managers and employees, but their core HR system was on a non-web based release. Paul and Andrew built a portal framework with HR 8.0 Self Service integrating back to HR 7.5. The customer, who was previously only accustomed to a client/server architecture, achieved a full portal and web based self service solution in less than six months.

Who: Fortune 500 Insurance Company
Where: New York
What: Custom Recruiting Application
Why: The customer had a very complicated set of business requirements for implementing an Intranet deployable recruiting solution. The vanilla PeopleSoft Recruit Workforce 7.5 did not meet enough of their requirements, so they decided to implement a custom solution. Paul and Andrew created a web based recruiting solution that integrated with the PeopleSoft 7.5 HR system in real time. The project gave this company a quick win in three months with a web based interface and integration back to the core HR system.