May 2015 release is now available

Customer Content on the Login Screen

So far, the only thing we could do on the login screen was perhaps change the “welcome” message or replace the Oracle Service Cloud logo on the right-hand side by the logo of the company. The May 2015 release give us the ability to include links so we can enrich this entry point with some actionable messages (see image below).

Enhanced Incident Thread Masking

This functionality was introduced in the Nov 2013 release enabling organisations to better comply with internal governance and data privacy issues. Sensitive data, like credit card numbers is automatically masked with the use of patterns/regular expressions matching. These masks are applied to thread data, either entered by the customer or the agent. The data is modified in the database and the UI.

May 2015 release brings additional checks for 13-digit (Visa) and 14-digit (Diners Club) masking logic for credit card number patterns. This way the possibility of false matches is even more reduced.

New Social Monitor Results Report Column

A new column – named “Appended Incidents” – is now available in several Social Monitor reports. This column will have a “Click to View” link to allow the agent to drill down and see the incident(s) to which that particular tweet/post has been manually or automatically appended to. Then, the agent will also have the ability to double-click and open the incident straight away. This will make the navigation and association between social results and incidents much easier.

New Social Monitor Configuration Setting

The May 2015 brings the SOCIAL_MONITOR_CONVERSATION_TRACKING_DEADLINE configuration setting, that specifies the number of days that Oracle Service Cloud will track a conversation after an agent responds to a Social Monitor incident. Once the time period is exceeded, the incident will be removed from the conversation tracking, and any subsequent posts in the conversation will not be auto-appended as threads in the incident.

Service Collaboration

The May 2015 release brings a new collaboration functionality that, as far as I understand it, is somewhat replacing “Forward & Track”. The new service collaboration capability will allow agents to get help and support from third parties or external people that are not users of Oracle Service Cloud.

Those people can be set as users in Oracle Service Cloud, and associated with a Profile that has “External User” setting checked (see image above). Then, those users can collaborate in conversations with agents without being charged for licenses. They won’t be able to use the Dynamic Agent Desktop, but they can access the incident’s detail and message thread, by logging in to the collaboration service directly via a web browser or mobile device.

Advanced Knowledge

Limited to a number of Oracle Service Cloud customers, and still in a “trial” mode, the Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced capability was made available from this release, integrating in Oracle Service Cloud, some of the capabilities of the Oracle Knowledge product (aka InQuira). Some of those capabilities are related to authoring and intelligent search features like flexible templates, versioning, relationships between articles in multiple languages, search results from documents and other content sources. It also offers highly specialised NLP with pre-packaged industry specific terminology.

Single Sign-On (SSO) Support for External Identity Providers (IdP)

With May 2015 release, external identity providers (IdP) can now be used to log in to Oracle Service Cloud and other service provider (SP) applications, allowing agents to log in once and be authenticated across several SP applications. Similarly, single logout is also supported, for agents to log out of any SP application.

If organisations are using an external IdP, the IdP login page can be embedded in Oracle Service Cloud Login window (see image above). This way, agents can log in without having to do it via a separate login page. After successfully logging in to the IdP, it will generate a SAML token and pass it to Oracle Service Cloud, increasing security, since usernames and passwords are not sent between applications.

Connect REST API

The May 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud introduces the new Connect REST API, enhancing even more the capability of integration of Oracle Service Cloud with other applications and systems. Representational State Transfer (REST) API is complementary to the other set of APIs already in place, like Connect SOAP API.

For those who are not familiar with it REST is – somewhat like SOAP – an architecture for creating web services. It is, in some cases, an alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based web services. RESTful systems typically communicate over the HTTP, and may be simpler to create and maintain (if you want to know the difference between REST and SOAP, here is a good and short post).

Oracle Service Cloud Connect REST API is a public API that leverages the CCOM version 1.3. It follows the Oracle REST standard and supports CRUD operations.

Connect Common Object Model v1.3

May 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud introduces version 1.3 of the Connect Common Object Model (CCOM). You can take advantage of this new CCOM version using Connect Web Services for SOAP (Connect Web Services), Connect PHP API, ROQL, and Connect REST API.

The new version of CCOM provides synchronized metadata among Connect PHP API, ROQL, and Connect Web Services, and provides operation-specific metadata in Connect Web Services. Also in CCOM version 1.3, ROQL blacklisting behaviour has been changed so that candidate blacklist queries are allowed to run by default and are subject to further analysis. Fifteen new operations and properties have also been added to CCOM.

Widget Changes on the Customer Portal (CP)

As always, various changes were done to a few widgets in the CP. To review those in more detail access the Framework change log in your CP by navigating to Framework > Framework versions or https://<your_site>/ci/admin/versions/manage/#tab=1&framework=3.2

Some of the changes were applied to the following widgets:

• utils/CobrowsePremium
• input/BasicProductCategoryInput
• knowledgebase/GuidedAssistant
• notifications/ProdCatNotificationManager
• output/FileListDisplay
• input/ProductCategoryInput
• input/SmartAssistantDialog
• search/ProductCategorySearchFilter