November 2015 release review

Browser UI Enhancements

Oracle continues to improve the OSrvC Browser UI and the Nov 2015 release comes many new capabilities for the web-based agent desktop. Apart from the new features, the other good news is that the Browser UI is compatible with any OSrvC, since Nov 2014 release, meaning that there is no need to upgrade to the latest releases to use the Browser UI.

• Workspace Rules are now supported, allowing the trigger of certain actions based on specific conditions.

• The Survey by Proxy control is also available in Incidents, Contacts and Custom Objects workspaces, allowing agents to complete surveys on behalf of customers.

• A new API was created to allow the extensibility of the Browser UI. The Browser UI Extensibility Framework allows the writing of JavaScript code to read and write data (Contacts, Incidents and Organisations) as well as create UI mashups.

• Cc, Bcc, attachments and responses to social  media (Twitter, Facebook) messages are now supported.

• Live Chat is now available, even though it is limited to 10 agents per site (Oracle wants to make sure it works well before rolling out fully)

• Alongside Live Chat, the Co-Browse is also available on the Browser UI, but only on a limited level as well (view or point).

• The Knowledgebase (Advanced) is also available for agents working from the Browser UI.

• And super-users can also use the Browser UI now to manage knowledgebase content, editing questions and answers.

• OSN (Oracle Social Network) or Collaboration was also included in this release and can now be used from the Browser UI.

Dynamic Agent Desktop

The Dynamic Agent Desktop (DAD) also continues to be improved, giving the normal contact centre or back-office agent more options and flexibility. In this release, the improvements are all related to the look & feel of the DAD. There is an option to enable a web theme that follows web UI patterns. New elements like toolbars, icons, navigation menus and tabs will make the DAD consistent with other Oracle Cloud products and closet to the Browser UI.

Single Sign On

The ability to log in to Oracle Service Cloud using external identity providers (IdP) was introduced in the May 2015 release. In this new Nov 2015 release OSrvC supports authentication via multiple IdPs, and it is also possible to configure SAML tokens to supports different subject types for different IdPs.

REST API

The REST API was also introduced in the May 2015 release of OSrvC. At the time it was limited to CRUD operations. Later in the Aug 2015 release it was improved to support ROQL for object queries. And now in the new Nov 2015 release it has even more capabilities for non-CRUD operations. It allows the:

• Upload and download of attachments.
• Execution of reports.
• Pagination and sorting of large amounts of data.

Co-Browse

The co-browse functionality has been part of OSrvC for a long time. Recently it was enhanced to support not only co-browsing on web and mobile browsers but also in native iOS apps.

The Nov 2015 release extends even more this capability, allowing the addition of co-browse to native Android apps.

Accelerators

Oracle keeps on enhancing the Accelerators that help with the integration of OSrvC and other Oracle products. One of the accelerators out there is for the integrations with Sales Cloud, but it was very limited. This new version comes with:

• Full contact and organisation synchronization.
• Ability to create and update opportunities in OSrvC, and save to Sales Cloud.
• Ability to create and update incidents in Sales Cloud, and save to OSrvC.

The other great feature that comes with the Nov 2015 release is the Read/Write Report Add-in. This can be used, for example, in the integration with Siebel or eBusiness Suite, and allows the surfacing and editing of data in those system’s database from within the OSrvC agent desktop.

These reports can be easily built from within OSrvC Analytics module. In the data dictionary of the Reports Explorer, admins will be able to see virtual 3rd party tables (created by the add-in) and just drag-drop fields into the report.

Advanced Knowledge

The new OSrvC Advanced Knowledge capability (recap: this is the Oracle Knowledge product but converted into a cloud product) continues to be improved and the Nov 2015 release introduces:

• Search in multiple sources
• Sophisticated authoring and workflow
• Ability to support many languages and geographies
• REST API to support integration and extension
• Ability to subscribe to content articles
• Wizard to manage intent based responses
• Updated Industry dictionaries
• Ability to search within MS Office 2013 documents (e.g. Word and Excel)