Peoplesoft 9.1 - Release Value Proposition for Time and Labor

Oracle's coming out with some welcome enhancements to Time and Labor in the 9.1 release. The release value proposition (RVP) document which highlights the major feature additions to the various modules talk about the following enhancements to T&L:

• Integration with Oracle Workforce Scheduler: I had mentioned this in a previous post and it will be a major product enhancement and offering from Oracle. I am raring to see how this integration works in 9.1 and I am sure a number of customers would love to have this feature in their enterprise application suites for workforce management.
• Adoption of Approval Workflow Engine for T&L approvals: A number of HRMS modules like Absence Management has been using AWE from version 8.9, while the T&L application development team stuck to the traditional row security and time and labor groups driven approval. It is good to bring T&L to the fold of modules using AWE as organisations will be able to maintain the approval rules under a single framework. It will be interesting to see though how customers who are using custom T&L Dynamic group driven approval routings will migrate to AWE - I see some retrofit work there.
• Adoption of Delegation Framework in T&L: Oracle started offering the delegation framework in version 9.0 and it is a welcome move that even T&L has moved over to that fold.

I also read about a very interesting and welcome enhancement is a bi-party integration with Microsoft Outlook 2007 (they have not mentioned whether they will be supporting older versions of MS Outlook) - I had mulled about this possibility while piloting the one way integration with MS Outlook from Peoplesoft. It is exciting to note that in 9.1, the Outlook Calendar and events can be read from Peoplesoft - it's high time that enterprise products integrate with desktop applications and this is a move in the right direction.