May Maintenance Pack for 21B

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Overview

HCM Cloud applications have two types of patches you can receive that are documented in this New Feature Summary:

• Release Updates (21A, 21B, 21C, and 21D)
• Optional Monthly Maintenance Packs to each update

It is important for you to know what Release Update your environment is on. You can find this in your Cloud Portal.

Oracle HCM Cloud release documents are delivered in five functional groupings:

Suggested Reading for all HCM Products:

• HCM Cloud Common Features (This document pertains to all HCM applications. It is the base human resource information for all products and HCM Tools.)
• Global Human Resources Cloud (Global Human Resources contains the base application in which other application use for common data such as workforce structures and person information. Regardless of what products you have implemented you may want to see the new features for Global Human Resources that could impact your products.)

NOTE: Not all Global Human Resource features are available for the base Talent and Compensation stand alone applications.

Optional Reading for HCM Products (Depending on what products are in your cloud service):

• Talent Management Cloud (All Talent applications)
• Workforce Rewards Cloud (Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and Global Payroll Interface)
• Workforce Management Cloud (Absence Management and Time and Labor)

Additional Optional Reading:

• Common Technologies and User Experience (This documents the common features across all Cloud applications and is not specific to HCM)

NOTE: All of these documents can be found in Release Readiness under Human Capital Management or via the Oracle Help Center under Cloud Applications > Human Capital Management.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

HCM Extract

HCM Extracts provide a method for extracting data from your HCM applications that can be used for interfacing data to another source or extracting data to integrate reporting across systems.

Limitations of Changes Only Property in Extract Definitions

Make a copy of your extract definition and import this definition with Changes Only set to Yes to run it as an incremental extract.You can no longer run an extract definition as an incremental extract with Changes Only set to No.

Update 21B

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Overview

HCM Cloud applications have two types of patches you can receive that are documented in this New Feature Summary:

• Release Updates (21A, 21B, 21C, and 21D)
• Optional Monthly Maintenance Packs to each update

It is important for you to know what Release Update your environment is on. You can find this in your Cloud Portal.

Oracle HCM Cloud release documents are delivered in five functional groupings:

Suggested Reading for all HCM Products:

• HCM Cloud Common Features (This document pertains to all HCM applications. It is the base human resource information for all products and HCM Tools.)
• Global Human Resources Cloud (Global Human Resources contains the base application in which other application use for common data such as workforce structures and person information. Regardless of what products you have implemented you may want to see the new features for Global Human Resources that could impact your products.)

NOTE: Not all Global Human Resource features are available for the base Talent and Compensation stand alone applications.

Optional Reading for HCM Products (Depending on what products are in your cloud service):

• Talent Management Cloud (All Talent applications)
• Workforce Rewards Cloud (Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and Global Payroll Interface)
• Workforce Management Cloud (Absence Management and Time and Labor)

Additional Optional Reading:

• Common Technologies and User Experience (This documents the common features across all Cloud applications and is not specific to HCM)

NOTE: All of these documents can be found in Release Readiness under Human Capital Management or via the Oracle Help Center under Cloud Applications > Human Capital Management.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

HCM Common Architecture

This section covers architecture features used across all HCM Applications.

Configure Atom Feeds to Enable or Disable Specific Feeds

Enable or disable Oracle HCM Cloud Atom feeds and specific attributes available for a feed based on your implementation requirements. Use the Manage HCM Atom Feeds task for this setup.

REST APIs for Questionnaire Setup Objects

Use the REST APIs to define questionnaires, questions and answers. You can also get the available list of active questionnaire templates for a given subscriber.

Enhancements to Remove Person Information Tool

Extend the data obfuscation process with the support of these features:

• Disposal of Cancelled Workers
• Obfuscation of Flex Field (DDF) information
• Staggered disposal of person data

HCM Common Features

This section covers features used across all HCM Applications.

Enhanced Look and Feel of the Sign In Page

You can now experience an enhanced look and feel of the Sign In page that aligns better with Redwood.

New Enhancements to Transaction Console

Leverage these enhancements to the Transaction Console:

• A new enhancement to help diagnose problems for failed transactions is available in Transaction Console. Approval rules details have been added to the Diagnostic Log to enable Administrators to review the specific conditions that may have caused failure. 

• A Transaction Console refresh schedule process ('Refresh Transaction Administrator Console Transaction Status') is now delivered with a default schedule to run every hour out of the box. Please note this will not have any impact on existing customers who have already scheduled this process. 

Areas of Responsibility Based Approval Routing Policies

Extend the current limit on the number of Areas of Responsibility (AOR) representatives with the new approval routing policy. Customers can now set a profile option-based value to extend the return of representatives to more than 500.

Transaction Design Studio for HCM Experience Design Studio Enhancements

Enhance the user experience with the new Configuration Report accessible from the Transaction Design Studio. The new report analyzes page behavior and provides a comprehensive report of the configuration done in Transaction Design Studio, or Page Composer, or both, across various pages.

HCM Experience Design Studio Access Enhancements

Access quickly the HCM Experience Design Studio directly from the quick actions on the My Client Groups tab. Clicking the quick action automatically creates a sandbox to personalize your application.

Autocomplete Rules for HCM Experience Design Studio Enhancements

Enhance the authoring experience in Autocomplete Rules for HCM Experience Design Studio with additional capabilities. These are the new features added to the tool.

• Predefined rules delivered out-of-the-box that cover most common use cases such as phone number validation and so on.

• Ability to change a field after duplicating a field modification or validation rule.

• Nullify value function to assign null value to a field or a variable.

• New standard functions to convert integer, long and decimal to a string variable. These 3 functions are mainly used to display numbers in messages.

• Added a new global function, Get today's date in custom time zone to reconcile the server time with the user time and convert the current date to a specific time zone. For example, your HR specialist is in India and the server is located in the US, and you have a rule that prevents future-dated transactions. Then, the rule will prevent the HR specialist from entering the transaction effective today (client time). Hence, using this function you need to reconcile the server time with the user time to enable the HR specialist to enter the transaction.

Enhanced Rich Text Editor

Enhance the user experience of adding text using the improved Rich Text Editor that has several new capabilities now. You can use the Rich Text Editor in HCM products such as Goals when you define the success criteria. You can now paste content from Microsoft Word and Google Docs while maintaining the original structure and formatting, and resize the editor window according to dimensions of your choice. You can see the word and character with HTML counts as you type. Also, the size of the editor window automatically expands and shrinks vertically depending on the content size, also known as Auto Grow.

Secure Access for Workers with Multiple Assignments

Secure user access for workers by using assignment-level security, if your organization allows them to have multiple concurrent assignments. The current out-of-the-box behavior supports person-based security access, which means a user having access to a person has access to all assignments and personal information for that person. Assignment-level security can now restrict a user’s access to a person’s assignment based on the user’s area of access. By enabling an assignment-level security profile option and regenerating your data grants and security profiles, your organization opts into this feature for your HCM Cloud implementation.

As stated in our initial release documentation for release 20D, this feature offers a multi-phased implementation for HCM Cloud customers. For this release, we have made reporting enhancements in multiple OTBI subject areas for the Absence Management and the Documents of Record OTBI subject areas.  We are further expanding assignment-level security to provide a broader and more consistent user experience across HCM. The users will be restricted to only those assignments to which they have access and not all assignments of the person just because they can access that person.

Performance Improvements for HCM BIP-Based Approval Notifications

Use the new XML Type column in your customer-modified reports from this release onwards. The DATA_CACHE column will no longer contain the transaction data. In 20C a new XMLType column was introduced that replaced the existing DATA_CACHE column to improve the rendering time and overall performance of BIP-based approval notifications.

HCM Common Replaced or Removed Features

From time to time, Oracle replaces existing features with new features, or removes existing features.

Replaced features may be put on a path of removal, the features below will let you know what update you will have to have moved to the newer feature. As a best practice, you should move to the newer feature as soon as possible for full support and to stay up with the latest updates that the product offers.

Any feature that is removed, will have an Update in which that feature is no longer available. Please make necessary plans to move off the feature by the Update indicated, as it will no longer be available.

HCM Data Loader Must Be Used For All Payroll Objects

Take note effective with the Update 21C, Oracle will discontinue the remaining Payroll Batch Loader objects, making Payroll Batch Loader fully decommissioned. HCM Data Loader (HDL) will then be the default tool for data loading and update tasks. If you are using Payroll Batch Loader, you need to immediately start moving loading tasks to HCM Data Loader.

Applications Security

Oracle Applications Security provides a single console where IT Security Managers and Administrators can perform various functions including user lifecycle management, role definition, security policy management(both functional and data), role hierarchy maintenance, username and password policy administration, and certificate management. The console also enables users to simulate the effect of security changes, to run security reports, and download a connector for integration with Microsoft Active Directory.

Enhanced UserAccounts REST API

Enable the process of autoprovisioning roles using the custom action, autoprovisionRoles. This is an enhancement to the userAccounts REST API.

HCM Data Loader

HCM Data Loader provides a flexible and efficient method of bulk loading business object data for data-migration and on-going incremental updates to Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud.

Business Object Enhancements

Extend your data loading capabilities with these new business objects:

Absence Management

• Contractual and Other Availability

Talent

• Feedback Request
• Succession Plan External Candidate

Learning

• Specialization

The Specialization object hierarchy replaces the existing object hierarchy of the same name.

Global Payroll

• Gross-Up Balance Exclusion

In addition, these object hierarchies have been enhanced:

Compensation

Salary Basis Compensation object:

• Salary Basis Simple Component

Recruiting

Candidate

• Candidate Preferred Organization

Job Requisition and Job Requisition Template:

• Background Check Configuration
• Background Check Screening Package

The Background Check Screening Package replaces a component of the same name.

Attribute of these objects have been changed:

Global HR

• Role Mapping
• Department Tree Node

Learning

• Course

Recruiting

• Candidate
• Candidate Job Application
• Job Requisition
• Job Requisition Template

Talent Management

• Performance Documents
• Succession Plan

Enhanced Reporting

Extend your OTBI reporting for HCM Data Loader using the new Processes folder and new attributes for the existing folders.

Enable Mandatory Descriptive Flexfield Segment Validation

Create your Descriptive Flexfield (DFF) data leaving mandatory segments blank.

A new parameter is introduced to switch on validation and error records where mandatory segments are created without a default value.