Oracle has revealed the new features which will be available in the next release of Oracle Sales Cloud (OSC)...

Oracle has revealed the new features which will be available in the next release of Oracle Sales Cloud (OSC) in a webinar designated for key OSC implementation partners.

So, what is waiting for us in Release 8? The exciting new features were grouped into these categories:

User Interface

In Release 7, Oracle introduced the Simplified UI (in Oracle Product DEV jargon - FUSE) as an alternative to the more sophisticated Desktop UI. This gave customers the freedom to select a preferred interface to access their cloud CRM. For any of you curious about the Simplified UI, below is a screenshot of our festive Simplified UI homepage:

The Oracle Sales Cloud Simplified UI...with a festive theme!

With Release 8, Oracle has made it much easier to extend the Simplified UI. OSC will now allow us to create sub-tabs under Object (e.g. Customer, Contact, Opportunity) Detail pages in the Simplified UI. This means it will be possible to embed external content (e.g. Companies House, OneSource, D&B) within a sub-tab on Customer Detail pages to improve your 360° view, or to embed the Invoice/Order information (represented as custom objects) within a sub-tab on Opportunity Detail pages. OSC will also allow us to show/hide/reorder these sub-tabs once they are created.

On the Standard User Interface, Dynamic Layouts are finally here! Customers will now be able to define custom layouts based on user roles & advanced expressions (with Groovy Script).

Audit Trail

With Release 8, Oracle is introducing a powerful Audit Reporting tool which will allow the customers to audit on vanilla/custom objects and on vanilla/custom fields without any limitations. This will be especially interesting for companies in the Financial Services industry looking into adopting OSC, as Audit Reporting is and has always been a core requirement.

Outlook and Mobile

So what's new on Outlook and Mobile? Without a doubt, the most important feature on Outlook is the ability to customise Desktop CRM (Outlook Add-In for OSC) via Application Composer. These customisations will include;

1. Layout Customisation
2. Data Synchronisation Configuration
3. Record Level Event Validations
4. Installation Settings

With Release 8, it will be significantly easier to customise Desktop CRM based on business requirements.

On the Mobile front, we now have one native app, Oracle Sales Cloud Mobile, which is unified across platforms (iOS /Android OS/Blackberry OS) and devices (Smartphones/Tablets). Compared to the previous versions of mobile apps provided by Oracle on OSC, there are three key improvements in my opinion:

1. Disconnected Mode (Ability to save records locally)
2. Out-of-the-box Oracle Social Network (OSN) Integration
3. Out-of-the-box “AroundMe” Functionality (Ability to see nearby Customers, Contact, Leads & Opportunities on a map on the go)

Reporting

Oracle takes pride in bringing certain functionalities of enterprise grade Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) to the Cloud with OSC. Release 8, introduces the “Historical Snapshot” feature on Reporting which will take OSC one step ahead of its competitors on the Cloud arena. Historical Snapshot functionality will be very useful to:

1. Report on opportunity sales stage changes
2. Report on historical opportunity/revenue data against enterprise date, period and quarter
3. Compare historical trending across current product/resource/territory hierarchy
4. Filter based on historical values

We at Boxfusion were very excited to hear about these enhancements and new features during the webinar - we hope you feel the same after reading this blog post! We look forward to welcoming Oracle Sales Cloud Release 8, with the associated UX (User Experience) improvements, in the New Year.

If you would like to know more about Oracle Sales Cloud, please give us a call on +44 203 283 4315 or contact us here.