The usual quarterly releases have brought many great improvements to Oracle Service Cloud, in terms of functionality enhancements or new features. But there is still more to come in the next releases. The Oracle roadmap for Oracle Service Cloud has a lot of new stuff for the coming 12-18 months, of which I highlight:

Virtual Assistant

• Enhancements to the VA will improve the conversation. More than being able to chat with the customer, the VA will suggest questions & answers based on the web visit.
• A tighter integration between both products – Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Virtual Assistant (formerly known as Intent Guide) – will make it easier to integrate and will allow shared admin (currently, to configure VA admins have to use different UI / login).
• VA will be available to be used in any web page, by the use of a Syndicated widget. Currently it can only be used in Oracle Service Cloud Customer Portal pages.

Community

• A tighter integration between both products – Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud Community – will allow shared admin (currently, to configure Communities admins have to use different UI / login).
• Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud Community will use the same structure (taxonomy), which means that answers in the Knowledge Base and in the Community forums will have same categorisation. This will improve search results.
• The communities (Support and Innovation) will be available not only in the Oracle Service Cloud web Customer Portal but also for mobile devices.

Syndicated Widgets

• To add to the current Chat (re and proactive), Knowledge and Surveys widgets, more syndication widgets will be made available for social, incident management, polling, etc.
• These new widgets will also bring more power to the developers and admins, offering more control in terms of when and how widgets display.
• Last but not least, developers will have the possibility to create Custom Syndicated Widgets, in order to create business-specific / requirement-specific widgets to be used outside the Oracle Service Cloud Customer Portal.

Skills Based Assignment

• The May 2014 release of Oracle Service Cloud brought this great new feature, that applied to the incidents coming from the Chat channel, making it possible to route incoming chats to agents based on their specific language, product skills and workload. In the roadmap Oracle states the intention to expand this feature to other channels.

Oracle Social Network

• The August  2014 release introduced internal collaboration by integrating Oracle Social Network (OSN) with Oracle Service Cloud. In the roadmap is enhances functionality that will allow prioritised incident collaboration, and expert locator (based in categorisation), as well as make this available on mobile devices.

Dynamic Agent Desktop

• The greatest and more pressing (in my opinion) thing is also in the roadmap and everyone is looking forward to have it. It is the new browser UI (i.e. the Dynamic Agent Desktop thin client). According to Oracle it will work in any platform and browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari).