Oracle Service Cloud 18A release now available

The 18A release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now generally available and it brings some great new features and enhancements.

Browser UI – Multi-Edit Workspaces

Multi-Edit Workspaces is a really basic but very useful functionality that was available in the Dynamic Agent Desktop (.NET Console) but still missing on the Browser User Interface (BUI). This release adds BUI support for Multi-Edit Workspaces for standard objects (Contacts, Organisations, Tasks, Answers, Assets) as well as custom objects.

This means that you are now able to update more than one record in a single operation instead of doing it on each individual record, saving you time when you need to make the same change to more than one record (e.g. updating Incident Status).

Knowledge Advanced – Product/Category Landing Pages

Customer Portal (CP) developers are now able to create product/category-specific pages. This will allow customers to select a product or a category and navigate their hierarchies using breadcrumbs and images. Additionally, any searches attempted from those pages will automatically use the selected product or category, and answers displayed will be specific to that product or category.

Knowledge Foundation – CKEditor for Answers

The Aug 17 release of OSvC announced a CKEditor for Community Self-Service. “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 (…) 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”.

The CKEditor was only available in the BUI, but 18A release enabled it across both BUI and the Dynamic Agent Desktop (.NET Console), also for Answers.

Knowledge Foundation – Answers Versioning

Answer Versioning is a functionality that many users of OSvC, namely the knowledge managers, were (desperately!) requesting for a while. Almost 3,5 years ago I published a blog post to present Ideqa’s VersionCX – an add-in that allowed storing of historical versions of Answers.

18A release of OSvC finally includes this feature – even though it is only available in the the Dynamic Agent Desktop (.NET Console). Answer versioning will allow knowledge managers and authors to draft and publish versions of answers, compare versions and view historical, as well as live, versions of answers.

Platform – Bulk Delete API for Organisations

The Bulk Delete API was announced back in Feb 17 and Aug 17 releases, but was still not fully available. In the 18A release the Bulk Delete API supports Organisations and Accounts allowing you to purge accounts and organisations in bulk, using the API. Additionally, it allows the flexibility to delete selective data based on custom ROQL queries.

Platform – MySQL and PHP Upgrades

With the 18A release, OSvC will be upgraded to MySQL 5.7 from MySQL 5.1.

Additionally, a PHP upgrade has been performed for security compliance, from 5.6.18 to 5.6.31.