Aug 17 Release now available (Part III)

The August 2017 (17.8) release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now generally available and it brings so many exciting new features and enhancements that, this time, I am braking my thoughts down in various posts. You can read the first one here, and the second one here.

Community Self-Service – CKEditor

The CKEditor is an open source text editor, written in JavaScript, designed to standardise text editors and features in web pages. And is widely used.

The 17.8 release of OSvC adds CKEditor to the Community Self-Service, giving customers a much better and improved text editor, when submitting questions or comments.

Customers will have a WYSIWYG bar to edit text, ability to paste text from MS Word, and do custom HTML formatting. CKEditor also supports accessibility with WCAG 2.0 standards – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Community Self-Service – File Attachments

The new release also brings the ability for customers to attach files to questions and comments. This is a great enhancement as it allows users to provide extra (and most times extremely useful) information or pictures to their questions or comments.

Notice that, similar to the file attachments functionality of assisted service, as an admin you can control file size limits and also valid file extensions.

Community Self-Service – Widgets

In terms of widget functionality, the 17.8 release brings a couple of new things. You can now select or pin a forum to the ForumList Widget on the home page, as well as set different sorting options – including sort by, last activity, questions, comments or Product ID.

Additional sorting options are now also available in the QuestionList Widget, from last activity to a relevant time period – including sort by year, month, day, week or any date range.

Lastly, customers will now also be able to quote other people’s comments when replying to them.

Platform – Custom Process Logging

The 17.8 release of OSvC adds a new feature that enables you (as a developer) to log errors and custom messages through scripts. You can access and review data logs, as well as enable or disable logging without code modification.

This allows you to debug runtime problems, with custom process scripts, during development and testing. Notice that two entities are used in custom process logging:

• Terminals – The Terminal class provides the logging function. You define terminals in PHP scripts that you import into the Process Designer. The Terminal class is provided with Connect Common Object Model (CCOM) version 1.3 and later.
• Probes – Probes control which terminals are used for logging. You create probes in the Browser UI using the Probe Designer.

Please notice that the Probe Designer is only available in the BUI, even though you develop the custom process models in the Console.

This capability must be enabled, via the ENABLE_CPM_LOGGING configuration setting, as it is not enabled by default. You should not be able to see this configuration setting, thus need to submit SR with Oracle support to request it.

You can find more information about this, how to use and setup in this section of the guide.

Platform – Connect v1.4

Connect v1.4 also brings some new features like consistency across Connect APIs. Included are metadata improvements, support for bulk APIs for delete and extract operations, and unified metadata for Marketing and Mail APIs.

Additionally it seems to also bring a correction to a bug that we found not long ago (and reported to Oracle Support) when we were extracting data from a custom object using the REST API, and found discrepancies on date fields (e.g. Start Date, End Date).

In the console/BUI workspace) we could see Start Date: 01/05/2017 and End Date: 30/04/1018. But in the response back from the API it was Start Date: 30/04/2017, End Date: 29/04/1018.

Platform – OpenID Protocol Support

OpenID-based single sign-on (SSO) is now supported, and will allow your agents to log in to multiple OpenID Connect (OIDC) providers such as Google, etc.

If you are not familiar with it, OIDC is widely used as an authorisation protocol based on REST, JSON, and OAUTH 2.0 standards.

It will be very useful for you be able to define and manage OIDC providers in the Browser UI, allowing your agents to SSO.

Among the various benefits of OIDC are the fact that it can be used for both web SSO and APIs, and unlike SAML, it can be used on mobile platforms.

To enable this capability you should ask Oracle support to enable the configuration setting SSO_ENABLE_EXTERNAL_IDP.

Platform – Bulk Delete API

This will give you the ability to delete large amounts of data (incidents and related data) using ROQL. In order to use it you will need to go to the Profile permissions (Admin area) and enable the “Bulk Delete” permission. Please notice that the 1,000 is the maximum number of records that can be deleted at a time.