It actually surprised me that an application button had a name, but that was the PeopleSoft style. Anyway, the poor dog did not last too much. In year 2000, with the introduction of PeopleSoft 8, our beloved Sparky was replaced by a boring Refresh button.
PeopleTools 8.54 has pushed this functionality to the next generation, making it potentially redundant. One of the new features in this release is the ability to show the status of the process within the same page were it is scheduled. This is a major usability improvement, as the users do not need to navigate to Process Monitor to check the status of the process instance. True, in previous PeopleTools versions there was also the possibility of running the process with output to Window, which using REN Server would achieve a similar result. The main drawback of REN Server is that it opened a new page/tab even before the process was finished, making the navigation more complicated.
The new functionality is called Dynamic Alert Sliding Windows, which is still more boring than Sparky, but what matters is the functionality, not the name. These notifications are enabled in the Process Scheduler System Settings page:
In this page, the administrator chooses which Status are going to be displayed to the user when running a process. As you see, the functionality is quite easy to setup and a significant step forward in usability of batch process scheduling.
Note (Feb 6th 2015): There is a great blog post by Srinivas Reddy demonstrating this functionality from an user perspective. Here is the link: http://srinivasreddy18.blogspot.it/2015/02/peopletools-854-dynamic-alert-sliding.html
