Oracle releases the application updates documentation on new features and fixed issues from the Applications Release Readiness site. From there, you will be able to check the update for Customer Experience, Human Capital Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Performance Management.
For PBCS, Enterprise Planning Cloud (EPBCS) and FCCS, usually, the latest update will be installed on the first Friday of each month to test environment, and third Friday of each month to production environment. The update will be applied during the normal daily maintenance window.
For the October update, it will apply the latest updates to test environment on Friday, October 6th, 2017 and to production environment on Friday, October 20th, 2017.
In this patch, these are the major updates:
1.Simplified Audit Card
The Audit card is back. Service Administrators can now use the Simplified Audit feature to view data tasks performed by users. Once auditing is enabled for data tasks, we can filter tasks by date range (for example, Yesterday, Last 60 Days, or Custom, where we specify the start and end dates) and user name. We can also export all of the records that match the filter criteria to a Microsoft Excel file.
2.New EPM Automate Utility Version
As usual, the EPM Automate gets updated during the monthly update. This version includes updates to the login command, which now accepts internet proxy server domain, user name, and password as optional parameters. This enhancement enables us to use the EPM Automate utility in corporate network environments with internet proxy server configurations that require users to authenticate with the proxy server before establishing communication with resources outside the corporate network.
3.Ability to Set All Dimensions for a Point of View at One Time
In Financial Reporting Web Studio, we can now set all the dimensions for a point of view at one time without having to open and close multiple windows.
4.Dashboards Updates
Custom Colors
We can use a standard set of colors in charts to denote different types of data. For example, dark blue might represent actual data versus light blue for budget data. When we customize dashboard colors, we select colors in the order of rows on the form. Series 1 represents the first row of data, and so on. We can assign each row in the form a color that represents its data in the chart.
We can customize dashboard colors in Bar, Line, Area, Bubble, Column, Combination, Doughnut, Pie, Radar, and Scatter chart types.
Control Line width
In the dashboard designer, a new Line Weight counter lets us set how thin or thick lines display in Line and Combination chart types.
5.New Custom Dimension in Projects
In the Projects business process in Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud, we can now add an additional custom dimension. This feature is available for new applications. We must add new dimensions when we first enable Projects. When we add a custom dimension, calculations, forms, and other artifacts include the additional dimension.
6.Groovy Rules Support for Planning ASO Cubes
We can now create business rules written in the Groovy scripting language for Planning aggregate storage cubes.
7.Simplified Dimension Editor is available for FCCS
Simplified dimension editor is available for PBCS/EPBCS application since the 17.05 update (May 2017). Starting from this October update, it will be available for FCCS as well. The new Simplified Dimension Editor displays dimensions and members in a grid format. With the grid format, dimensions and members are editable on a single page. We can edit and validate member properties directly on the grid and we can perform ad hoc operations such as zooming in, zooming out, keep selected, remove selected, and freeze.
The following is a sample screenshot from the PBCS simplified dimension editor.
8.Limits on Dimension Members
For optimal performance, Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud will begin providing limits on the maximum number of dimension members allowed in each dimension. Starting in a future update, Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud will stop us from saving non-compliant metadata with error messages explaining that we have exceeded the acceptable number of dimension members.
The October update is not a major update for EPM Cloud. I will keep my eyes on the monthly updates, and will share more ideas going forward. See you next time.