Aug 16 release now available

The August 2016 release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now available and many customers – mainly those that registered for the auto-upgrade programme – are already on their way to the upgrade.

This release brings new capabilities across many aspects of OSvC namely: Web Customer Service, Knowledge Management, Integration, and the platform itself.

The enhancements on the Web Customer Service side are around the community.

• Rating widgets: For customers to influence answers and make sure answers with the highest ratings feature at the top of a search. Thumbs-up/down rating functionality comes to complement the already existing up-vote and five-star ratings options. Community admins can remove ratings also. You should activate the SocialContentRating
• Roll set callouts: Allow users to highlight content written by author with certain roles (e.g. Moderators or employees of certain organisation). You should activate the QuestionDetail and QuestionComment widgets, and define the Role Set callouts.
• Banner accessibility: Thinking about users that need accessibility tools, this capability adds color-coding to the banner messages. For example, green = success, yellow = warning, red = error.

On the Knowledge Management area, the news is around advanced knowledge within the customer portal.

• Customer Portal – content recommendation: With a focus on helping companies (and their knowledge managers/teams) improve the content made available to web self-service, the Knowledge Advanced functionalities on the CP now allows customers to recommend new content or suggest changes to existing content.
• Customer Portal – related answers: The ability to have answers that were manually or automatically (self-learning) related was already available with the OSvC knowledge base, but are now also available with knowledge advanced.
• Analytics – New Dashboard & Reports: There are new reports and dashboards that will help knowledge managers/teams make sure content is always fresh, useful and up-to-date. A few examples are: Successful Intents Report and Most and Least Useful Articles Report.
• Analytics – Changes to Filter Names: For report terminology consistency and to allow reports to be grouped accurately within dashboards, this release brings some changes to report filter names. These changes affect custom code that calls the reports in question and uses these filters in those calls. Therefore it is recommended that those who have created custom code that calls any of these reports using the CWS API update the code to use the renamed filter names. Reports affected:
  • Answer Viewed by Category (filter “Date Range” renamed to “Date”)
  • Answer Viewed by Product (filter “Date Range” renamed to “Date”)
  • Article Incident Link Usage Date (filter “Usage Date” renamed to “Date” and “Answer_Id” renamed to “Answer ID”)
  • Keyword Search (filter “Date Range” renamed to “Date”)
  • Intent Frequency (filter “Date Range” renamed to “Date”)

Note: Please consult answer ID 8019: Enable Knowledge Advanced on Customer Portal.

On the Integration side of things, Oracle continues the investment on Accelerators to try and bring all applications together. This release introduces two as accelerator for the development of (multi-platform) mobile applications.

• Mobile accelerator: helps businesses clients or partners develop mobile applications that would allow users access to OsvC on mobile devices – contacts, incidents, tasks, reports and dashboards, etc. The Mobile Accelerator leverages Oracle’s Mobile Application Framework (MAF). Common development frameworks like Java, JavaScript and HTML5 will enable the developments of single code base applications that run on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Windows). Capabilities like Multi-window, S-Pen, Camera and Barcode scanner can also be made available. And offline and Device Management Capabilities can be provided by integrating MAF to Mobile Cloud Service (MCS).

Note: For those who are not familiar with the Accelerators, they are no more than sample code, sample workflows, best practices, documentation and design guidance, developed and shared by Oracle to guide clients and partners on the integration of Oracle Service Cloud.

From a Platform perspective, here the enhancements are the following.

• .NET 4.6.1 Framework: This release adds support for .NET 4.6.1 on the Dynamic Agent Desktop (Console)
• Browsers not supported: The following browsers are no longer supported (across the product):
  • Google Chrome version 48 and lower
  • Mozilla Firefox version 44 and lower
• Cryptography API expansion: Changes to the Cryptography API include support for additional encryption algorithms and hashing. You should consult the documentation for the Connect PHP API.
• PHP Upgrade: In order to improve security, performance, efficiency, and comply with industry standards, this new release includes an upgrade from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6. This means that developers need now to develop their custom code in PHP 5.6. See answer ID 8409: PHP 5.6.18 Upgrade, for more info.
• OAUTH: This new feature enables OSvC to validate OAUTH for secure data exchange with other applications. You should enable the SSO_ENABLE_EXTERNAL_IDP configuration setting and configure SSO. Also, consult the Connect REST API documentation for more info.
• Optlist framework for accounts setup: Enhancements have improved the scalability of the dropdown list for staff accounts, and developers or system admins can now add 100,000 staff accounts.

As always, there are also enhancements around Policy Automation, and Field Service, which are part of the Oracle Service Cloud offering, and you can consult here.