1. Table of Contents  
  2. Revision History  
  3. Overview  
    1. Security & New Features  
    2. Give Us Feedback  
  4. Upgrade/Update Tasks  
  5. Release Feature Summary  
  6. Oracle Service Cloud  
  7. Web Customer Service  
    1. Co-Browse Enhancements  
    2. Live Chat – Sneak Preview  
  8. Community Self-Service Enhancements  
    1. Graphical Rating Count  
    2. Best Answer Visibility Control  
    3. Avatar Library  
  9. Cross Channel Contact Center  
    1. Analytics Enhancements  
  10. Agent Browser User Interface  
    1. Performance and Single Version  
    2. Enhanced Analytics  
    3. UI Theme and Live Chat  
    4. Knowledge Authoring  
  11. Knowledge Management  
    1. Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced  
      1. Create Answer Links from the Authoring Editor  
      2. Modernize and Modularize Insurance & Finance Industry Dictionaries  
      3. Interactive Spell Checking  
      4. Email Answer Link  
  12. Policy Automation  
    1. Enhanced Documents  
    2. Inferred Entities  
    3. Access Control  
    4. Next Generation Interviews  
      1. Dynamic Behavior  
      2. Enhanced Navigation  
      3. New Control Types  
      4. Location Services  
  13. Oracle Service Cloud Platform  
    1. Platform Supported Changes  
  14. Oracle Service Cloud Integration  
    1. Intergation with Marketing Cloud  
    2. Internet of Things Accelerator  

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates are logged below, with the most recent updates at the top.

Date

What's Changed

Notes

18 NOV 2016

Initial Document Creation

Overview

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in Oracle Service Cloud Release November 2016 and describes any tasks you might need to perform for the update. Each section includes a brief description of the feature, the steps you need to take to enable to begin using the feature, any tips or considerations that you should keep in mind, and the resources available to help you.

For a listing of hardware and software requirements for Oracle products, log in to our support site and access Answer ID 31.

Security & New Features

We would like to remind you if your system has modified security structures you may need to advise your security administrator of new features.

Give Us Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content. Please send us your feedback at http://documentation.custhelp.com/ci/documents/detail/5/4/12.

Upgrade/Update Tasks

For information about upgrading from earlier versions, click the link for your specific upgrade path on the Upgrade Guides page.

Release Feature Summary

Some of the new features are automatically available to users after the upgrade and some require action from the user, the company administrator, or Oracle.

The table below offers a quick view of the actions required to enable each of the features.

Action Required to Enable Feature

Feature

Automatically Available

End User Action Required

Administrator Action Required

Oracle Service Request Required

Web Customer Service

Co-Browse Enhancements

Live Chat – Sneak Preview

Community Self-Service Enhancements

Graphical Rating Count

Best Answer Visibility Control

Avatar Library

Cross Channel Contact Center

Analytics Enhancements

Agent Browser User Interface

Performance and Single Version

Enhanced Analytics

UI Theme and Live Chat

Knowledge Authoring

Knowledge Management

Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced

Create Answer Links from the Authoring Editor

Modernize and Modularize Insurance & Finance Industry Dictionaries

Interactive Spell Checking

Email Answer Link

Policy Automation

Enhanced Documents

Inferred Entities

Access Control

Next Generation Interviews

Dynamic Behavior

Enhanced Navigation

New Control Types

Location Services

Oracle Service Cloud Platform

Platform Supported Changes

Oracle Service Cloud Integration

Integration with Marketing Cloud

Internet of Things Accelerator

Oracle Service Cloud

Oracle continues to invest in integration to other Oracle applications. The November 2016 release introduces two new integrations for the Marketing Cloud using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS).

In addition, an Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator will allow internet enabled devices connectivity to Oracle Service Cloud. Accelerators are a collection of sample code, sample workflows, and best practices, documentation, and design guidance to assist customers with seamless updates or integrations with Oracle Service Cloud.

Web Customer Service

Customers today are turning to the Web when they have a question, need to find information, or want to purchase a product or service. Organizations are using this opportunity to connect with their online and mobile customers, and they are enhancing those interactions with technologies like Co-browse. They are also providing a platform for their customers to connect with each other by embedding customer communities within the cross-channel experience as a key component of delivering modern customer service.

Co-Browse Enhancements

This release adds two new features for Co-browse administrators. First is the ability for a customers’ account administrator to grant user privileges for their organization. Account administrators are able to configure users without the need of involving Oracle. This will help to speed up the turnaround time for the organizations by enabling Co-browse customers to configure Co-browse with no need to involve Oracle.

The second feature is a new notification on the welcome screen. This enables Oracle to provide notifications to the LiveLOOK Admin Console users. Admin Console users can see messages on the Admin Console Welcome screen so they can be notified of upcoming events or product announcements. This is a generic message and they are not customer specific.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Key Resources

Live Chat – Sneak Preview

Sneak preview allows chat agents to see what a customer is typing before they hit submit. Sneak Preview is designed to enhance agent productivity and bring value to the contact center by decreasing handle times. By allowing the agent to see what the customer is typing ahead of time they can begin to formulate an answer faster, which results in faster responses, and faster conversations.

Steps to Enable

Through configuration settings for individual interfaces, you can enable Sneak Preview and specify the time interval sneak preview data is sent to the agent. In Configuration Settings, enable Sneak Preview by setting SNEAK_PREVIEW_ENABLED to Yes. Set SNEAK_PREVIEW_INTERVAL_MS to specify the interval in milliseconds that the chat session sends sneak preview data to the agent. The default value is 3000 milliseconds (3 seconds).

Tips and Considerations

Sneak Preview should only be enabled in accordance with your company’s privacy and security requirements. It is a best practice for the agent to wait to respond until the customer has sent the message.

Key Resources

Community Self-Service Enhancements

Graphical Rating Count

This enhancement allows for answer ratings to be presented graphically. Administrators can now choose to display ratings in numerical or graphical formats and as averages or total ratings. Ratings are essential in harnessing the wisdom of the collective community and also improving answer effectiveness.

Steps to Enable

  1. Activate the SocialContentRating widget.
  2. On the question detail or comment detail page and within the QuestionDetail and QuestionComment widgets, set the rating_count_format to "graphical".

Key Resources

Best Answer Visibility Control

Since the primary use case of Community Self Service is for a customer to post their question, and for other customers to respond with answers; our solution is geared towards question and answer pairs. Control over Best Answer Selections easily allows the option for authors and moderators to mark a comment as a Best Answer. This allows increased flexibility and gives administrators more control over their sites and their community use cases.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Key Resources

Avatar Library

Currently users have two avatar choices; a default picture generated from their display name, or their avatar (if they have one). This new feature offers a third option, which allows users to browse a set of images called the "avatar library" and select the one they want to convey their community presence. This feature helps build a more personal community; giving users more ways to reflect their online presence. Users can select up to 18 avatars. Avatars can be branded to best match the customer community.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Key Resources

Cross Channel Contact Center

Oracle Service Cloud Cross Channel Customer Service enables organizations to provide quick, consistent, proactive, and reactive assisted service across multiple channels. Oracle Service Cloud Cross-Channel Contact Center can help organizations increase efficiency and reduce operational costs by enabling customers to resolve simple issues using self-service, while directing the more complex issues to contact center agents.

Analytics Enhancements

The November 2016 release includes analytics performance enhancements with caching for frequent reporting and better notifications for report authors.

As well with this release, modern LED-, horizontal-, and circular-gauges are added to create much more intuitive and modern reports, allowing users to interpret data quicker, as well as new rendering options, to remove unnecessary components in reports, crisper rendering of charts, and a new modern layout theme.

November also brings us a radically new dashboard concept—specifically designed for that 5-second-glance overview for busy customer service leaders. These infolets are available out-of-the-box and contain a number of single metric charts with real-time key performance indicators like open incidents by severity, SLA, FCR, new incidents by channel, and so forth. You can also schedule and send the infolet dashboard by email to key stakeholders at regular intervals.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Key Resources

Agent Browser User Interface

The November 2016 release is a big release for the Agent Browser User Interface.

Tips and Considerations

The Agent Browser UI feature must be enabled for your site. Contact your Oracle account manager.

Key Resources

Performance and Single Version

The Agent Browser UI has gone through a significant performance enhancement to support high interactivity and now supports a much broader range of analytics capabilities. The Agent Browser User Interface has gone through an architectural change and is now single version, meaning it is compatible with versions of Oracle Service Cloud all the way back to May 2015 and upgrades will now happen with zero downtime.

Enhanced Analytics

With the November 2016 release, the agent browser UI supports a much broader range of analytics capabilities, including rollups and slicing, more formatting options, calculations, sorting and hiding and new charts and inline gauges.

UI Theme and Live Chat

The UI theme has been updated for consistency across all Oracle Cloud portfolio applications.

Live Chat is now a fully supported channel; contacts are automatically matched and the contact and chat workspaces are integrated.

Knowledge Authoring

Knowledge authors can now use the Agent Browser User Interface to author and edit knowledge articles with a new HTML editor with HTML5 support.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences and increasing customer loyalty. In the contact center, empowered, efficient agents must have access to timely information when they need it. Customers expect to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, when and where they ask them. Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Management provides a fully integrated knowledge management solution that delivers a seamless, consistent experience across all channels, from self-service to contact centers to communities and social sites.

Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced

With the November 2016 release, Oracle continues to add new capabilities to the Knowledge Advanced edition, with new functionality in Knowledge Advanced for Customer Portal and Advanced Knowledge for Agent Desktop.

Create Answer Links from the Authoring Editor

With the new Create Answer Link, knowledge authors can now easily link to other documents (answers) from within a Knowledge Advanced article. This feature adds an easy to use Answer Link button on the rich text editor.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Modernize and Modularize Insurance & Finance Industry Dictionaries

In the November release, the knowledge dictionary has been updated to include new Finance terms and abbreviations and a new Insurance industry dictionary. These industry dictionary enhancements provide better search results, more insightful analytics, and improved findability across languages via multi-lingual search. The updated and new industry dictionaries are immediately available in 25 languages to simplify implementation for global organizations.

Steps to Enable

Administrators can select either of the new industry dictionaries from the Industry dropdown menu on the Knowledge Advanced search configuration tab.

Tips and Considerations

Changing the Industry Dictionary can significantly affect the content and quality of search results. If you change the Industry Dictionary after you complete the initial implementation process, Oracle strongly recommends that you thoroughly validate this change in a test environment before applying the new dictionary in a production environment.

Key Resources

See the section Configuring the Industry Dictionary in the Knowledge Advanced Implementation Guide for complete information.

Interactive Spell Checking

Interactive spell checking prompts customers to interactively correct misspelled search terms by supplying did you mean suggestions when processing search queries. This feature helps to improve the customer search experience.

Steps to Enable

Administrators can select either interactive or automatic spell checking using the radio buttons on the Knowledge Advanced search configuration tab.

Key Resources

See the section Configuring Spell Checking in the Knowledge Advanced Implementation Guide for complete information.

Email Answer Link

Email Answer Link allows customers to email a link to the current answer they are viewing. This feature makes it easier for customers to share valuable information found within the knowledge base.

Steps to Enable

There are no steps needed to enable this feature.

Key Resources

See the section Sending a Link to an Article by Email in the Knowledge Advanced User Guide for complete information.

Policy Automation

Policy Automation enables the automation of an organization’s business rules, processes, policies, or regulations. With Policy Automation, organizations can easily provide intelligent service to complex service requests.

Enhanced Documents

The built in form generation now has capabilities to support both font embedding and barcodes.

Font embedding allows any embeddable font to be included with generated PDF documents, ensuring that customers will see documents as they were intended to appear, and that stored documents will always be presented correctly when they are retrieved at a later time.

Barcode support allows UPC, Code128 or Code39 barcodes to be placed anywhere in a generated PDF document, ensuring the codes can be tracked to the overarching business process to which they belong, regardless of where and when they are printed and used.

Steps to Enable

  1. To embed selected True Type fonts:
  2. Use TrueType fonts in the BI Publisher form template.
  3. In Policy Modeling, select which of the used fonts to embed.
  4. To insert a barcode into a form:
  5. In the form template, insert a field for the attribute whose value is to be translated into the barcode.
  6. Modify the Code for the field (on the Advanced tab) to be: <?format-barcode:attribute_name_value;'algorithm'?>.
  7. Format the field to use an otherwise unused font.
  8. In Policy Modeling, choose the barcode font to substitute for the font used in the form template.

Tips and Considerations

Policy Modeling will only allow you to select embeddable fonts. Supported barcode types are UPC, Code 128 and Code 39.

Key Resources

Inferred Entities

New Extended capabilities on the Next Generation Interview allow data to be collected dynamically for inferred entities.

Steps to Enable

  1. In Policy Modeling, create the necessary entities with rules using the InferInstanceFor function – for example, for relevant tax years or matching products.
  2. In the interview, collect data for the inferred entities – for example, taxable income, or product options they choose.

Tips and Considerations

This functionality alleviates the need to create blank objects in the connected application just so that OPA interview users could populate them with answers. Now, rules can be used to define which objects are needed, and then they can be filled in by the interview user.

Key Resources

Access Control

A Policy Automation Hub can now be securely shared across multiple project teams and mobile users. Access is managed by:

Steps to Enable

  1. Log in to the Policy Automation Hub web interface as a Hub Administrator.
  2. On the Permissions tab:
  3. On the Connections tab:

Tips and Considerations

All existing permissions in Policy Automation Hub are retained on upgrade to November 2016. All repository projects and deployments are placed into a Default Collection, and users are given their existing roles for the Default Collection. The Default Collection is given access to every connection. The Default Collection can be renamed and edited as required.

Key Resources

Next Generation Interviews

The November release changes the capabilities, appearance and navigation of omni-channel interviews to provide differentiated customer service, referred to as Next Generation Interviews. These Next Generation Interviews provide modern, dynamic and consistent user experiences across all channels. Features include enhanced navigation, new web and mobile-style controls and location services.

Steps to Enable

To enable Next Generation interviews:

  1. In Policy Modeling on the Interview tab, click the Styles button.
  2. In the Styles dialog box, in the Version drop-down list, select Latest Version.

Tips and Considerations

Upgraded projects will continue to use the August 2016 interview behavior and appearance.

Key Resources

Dynamic Behavior

Next Generation interviews deliver engaging experiences using dynamic behavior. The real-time updates occur as the user types in or leaves an interview input field. Examples include live calculations, showing additional fields, automatic formatting for currency, dates and numbers, and dynamic validation.

Steps to Enable

  1. For dynamic display of controls:
  2. In Policy Modeling, write a rule that use values provided on the same interview screen.
  3. Use the calculated value as the visibility attribute for a control on the same screen.
  4. Dynamic formatting and validation will automatically occur with no steps needed to enable this feature.

Tips and Considerations

The use of dynamic calculations and display of information is perfect for what-if type scenarios where the user can try out different situations on a single screen with no navigation required. The Loan Advisor example project that is installed with Policy Modeling has a screen that dynamically calculates the loan amount based on the purchase price and down payment entered on the same screen.

Key Resources

Enhanced Navigation

New intuitive navigation styles are now available on any device. These include single-line ribbon, train-stops, screen list and cleaner left hand menu. Colors and icons are completely configurable. Navigation behavior has also been improved such that now when the user navigates away from a partially complete interview screen; all valid information on the current screen is automatically saved.

Steps to Enable

  1. To change the navigation styling options:
  2. In Policy Modeling on the Interview tab, click the Styles button.
  3. In the Styles dialog box in the Show section, select the Navigation strip checkbox, and the screen list checkbox if required.
  4. In the Navigation strip section, choose the styles. If using a screen list, in the Screen list section, choose the styles.

Automatic data saving will automatically occur with no steps needed to enable this feature.

Tips and Considerations

Being able to move between screens, without being warned about unsubmitted data, makes free navigation interviews, in particular, much easier to use. The Next and Back buttons in free navigation interviews can even be removed if required.

Key Resources

New Control Types

Key new input control types include:

Steps to Enable

To specify the input type:

  1. In Policy Modeling on the Interview tab, select the input on the screen.
  2. Click the input type button and select an option from the drop-down list. The options available in the drop-down list depend on the attribute type.

Tips and Considerations

The same set of options applies to both web and mobile app interviews enabling the same look and feel across all devices. Touch-friendly controls such as toggles, button groups, switches and sliders are particularly suitable to mobile app interviews.

Key Resources

Location Services

With the November release, the Next Generation Interview can now capture the user’s location (latitude and longitude) as attributes and use it for location-specific logic (e.g. automatically select the closest location based on distance.)

Steps to Enable

  1. In Policy Modeling, create number attributes to collect the user's latitude and longitude.
  2. On the Interview tab, select the screen where you want to obtain the location and click the Location button.
  3. In the drop-down window, select the attributes for the user's latitude and longitude.

Tips and Considerations

Capturing the user's location in an interview is demonstrated in the My Store App example policy model that is installed with Policy Modeling. In that example it is used to determine the nearest branch to the user.

You can test location-specific behavior in the Policy Modeling Debugger by clicking the location button on the Data tab, and setting the latitude and longitude coordinates manually.

Key Resources

Oracle Service Cloud Platform

The Oracle Service Cloud Platform includes App Builder products, the Experience Platform, and the Virtual Configuration Interface Object (CIO) Cloud Service.

Platform Supported Changes

The November release adds support for:

Oracle Service Cloud Integration

Oracle continues to invest in integration to other Oracle applications; the November release introduces two new integrations for the Marketing Cloud using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS).

In addition, an Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator will enable internet enabled devices connectivity to Oracle Service Cloud. Accelerators are a collection of sample code, sample workflows and best practices, documentation and design guidance to assist customers with seamless updates or integrations with Oracle Service Cloud.

Intergation with Marketing Cloud

The Oracle Integration Cloud Service has two new connectors between Oracle Service cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud (Responsys & Eloqua). These pre-built and certified integrations provide a two-way synchronization that ensures data consistency. The configurable framework allows extension to other objects such as incidents.

Steps to Enable

  1. Enable the integrations in Oracle Service Cloud.
  2. Install the integration package on Oracle Integration Cloud Service.
  3. Activate the subscription on Oracle Integration Cloud Service.

Tips and Considerations

You must have an active subscription to Oracle Integration Cloud Service to use the integrations.

Key Resources

For more information, see Integrating Oracle Service Cloud with Oracle Marketing Cloud (Doc ID 2194429.1) on My Oracle Support.

Internet of Things Accelerator

The November 2016 release, delivers a new Internet of Things (IoT) Accelerator which provides a bi-directional integration with Oracle IoT. This Accelerator allows customers to enhance CX to interface with Internet of Things (IoT) so that events and alerts received from smart devices can be consumed and appropriate remedial action taken by agents within the Oracle Service Cloud desktop. The integration is using the ICS framework, thereby ensuring configurability, reliability and fault tolerance.

Steps to Enable

  1. Configure Oracle Service Cloud for the integration.
  2. Configure Oracle Integration Cloud Service for the integration.
  3. Configure Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service for the integration.

Tips and Considerations

You must have working instances of all three applications to use the integration.

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