The August 2014 release of Oracle Service Cloud (formerly known RightNow CX) is now available. This time there’s nothing extremely exciting but it brings some considerable changes and very useful features.

First and foremost, the platform is no longer called “RightNow CX”. Oracle officially renamed it to “Oracle Service Cloud”. You might have noticed that I’ve been doing that for the last few weeks, and already change the labels in the blog.

Oracle Social Network – Collaboration
To increase (internal) collaboration Oracle has integrated Oracle Social Network (OSN) with Oracle Service Cloud. From within the Agent Desktop, in the Incidents workspace, agents will have a button on the ribbon that will open a window with a list of their peers. The conversation can take place in the “Collaboration” tab and include multiple agents.

Chat – Routing Rules
Chat routing rules was improved to make sure that chat requests are always routed to the agent that has the fewest number of active chat sessions. This will not only balance (even more) the agent’s workload but also decrease the customer waiting time.

Custom Objects – Limitations
Menu-only objects (created to populate menu options in menu-type fields in Custom Objects) will no longer be included in the limitations imposed by Oracle regarding the object designer. This includes not only the limitations in terms of the amount of custom objects in the system but also the limit of 200 objects when deploying and 25 objects when importing.

Surveys – Results by Agent
The new release allows companies to track survey results by agent. The agent assigned to the record at the point of shooting the survey (e.g. incident after chat) will be associated with the survey, which means that reporting can then be filtered by agent with accurate results, even if in the meantime that record was assigned to another agent.

Incident Thread Message – Rich Text
New rich text options are available in the Incident Thread control (used in the Incident workspace). These include a) always default to plain text and b) always use plain text.

Workspace – Wrap control
Workspaces will have a new “Wrap” tabs control option that will allow the consultant to determine if the workspace or script tab is going to be displayed across multiple lines or on a single scrollable line.

Cross-site Email Management
A new feature is available to send emails with incident information from one Oracle Service Cloud instance to another – which only makes sense if a company uses more than one instance of Oracle Service Cloud. The only limitation is that both need to be in August 2014 version.

Configuration Settings – IPv6
A considerable list of security-related configuration settings can now support IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. A few examples are the ones who define which hosts are allowed to access the interfaces: SEC_VALID_ADMIN_HOSTS, SEC_VALID_ENDUSER_HOSTS, SEC_VALID_CHAT_API_HOSTS

Customer Portal – Widgets and Custom Objects
Various updates were introduced in this release including increased support for Siebel integration (v. 8.1.1.7) and a new CP Framework version (3.2.3). Changes include updates to various widgets (e.g. ConditionalChatLink, DateInput, SelectionInput, TopicBrowse, FieldDisplay, ResultInfo, SimpleSearch) as well as allow custom objects menu attributes to be used with FormInput and DataDisplay widgets and the rn:field tags for Contact and Incident objects.

API – Connect PHP
The Connect PHP API was extended with the introduction of the public mail API. Using this new API it is possible to bypass internal SMTP mail server and associated whitelisting (legitimate email addresses and IPs) requirements.

Single Sign On – SAML tokens
The new release of Oracle Service Cloud now supports on SAML tokens, additional users information commonly requested by Service Providers.

ROQL – New objects
ROQL was also extended to improve the ability to leverage the Connect Common Object Model in external applications. With the introduction of the SystemInformation sub-object, API consumers can now return data sets up to 100,000 records. The introduction of the ArchiveInformation object (that exposes table delete_recs) will enable the extraction of delete records. DistributionEmailList and DistributionEmailAddress now expose mail_list, mail_addr and mail_list2addr tables, allowing access to information about distributions lists, prevent whitelisting and avoid direct SQL queries.